After the disastrously awful prequel, Alien: Covenant, did its best to destroy all goodwill I had for the Alien franchise, I eventually saw the trailer for Alien: Romulus. It was dark. It was loud. It focused on the horror as opposed to the god-complex nonsense we had to suffer through in the past two movies. It was promising, and yet, I didn’t really care. This is what has happened with so many other great film and TV franchises to many fans. Apathy has taken hold, and even if you were to market a good Alien film—which would mean the first good Alien film in nearly 40 years—I’m not sure I would get excited. It’s a franchise that had two stellar entries in the beginning and should have ended there instead of being dragged through the mud and destroyed at the behest of corporations that own the IP. As a result, the brand has been damaged so much that you couldn’t get me enthusiastic about a new Alien movie that looked promising. After all, I was excited about Prometheus due to its trailers, but that didn’t end well.

Alien: Romulus had a Herculean task ahead of it to get me excited. It didn’t just have to be a good Alien movie. It had to be an amazing Alien movie that was better than all the other films that came out after 1986 and on par with the first two films. It had to pull out all the stops and assert itself as the film for which we’ve been waiting for all these years. With Fede Alverez behind the camera, director of The Evil Dead from 2013—a film that I liked—I was willing to give it a shot…many months after it came out to watch it on streaming. During that wait, I lowered my expectations as much as possible.

Pros

A very good-looking film with a lot of well-shot scenes and detailed sets
Practical effects were used in many places instead of CGI to further add to the look of the film
Decent acting from some of the cast
The pacing keeps the plot moving at a reasonable speed

Cons

Rook and the ethically questionable choice about his appearance
A lot of suspension of disbelief and the decision to turn off your brain are required to accept the events that take place
So many unnecessary and clunky references to some of the best and worst moments of previous films make it feel like this was just fed through an AI to write a script
Arbitrary changes to the xenomorph lifecycle that fans would certainly notice
Retcons fans would notice
Some practical effects look pretty bad
Despite the trailer making the movie seem dark, it was not dark enough or scary
The Weyland-Yutani company’s intentions with the stupid black goo from Prometheus are stupid
Plot hinges on dumb decisions of characters and things that don’t make sense if you think about it
Dialogue contradictions
More plot armor than Godzilla: Minus One

Plot & Thoughts

At the end of Alien, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) blows up the Nostromo in an effort to kill the xenomorph, only to find that it had stowed away on the escape shuttle. She shoots it “out of the goddamn airlock” with a harpoon gun and blasts it into space with the shuttle’s engines. Alien: Romulus opens with a science vessel that, somehow, manages to sift through the wreckage of the Nostromo—which exploded in three massive thermo-nuclear blasts that would have vaporized everything—to find the xenomorph floating in the immense, endless, vacuum of space instead of hurtling through space at the continued momentum it had from the shuttle’s thrust. It’s brought aboard for reasons unknown, and the title sequence begins before we meet our main characters. It does the same iconic font title reveal method as the original movie, by the way.

Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is an employee of the all-powerful but incredibly inefficient, stupid, and evil Weyland-Yutani corporation, working on a mining planet that the company has terraformed and colonized. With her is Andy (David Jonsson), an “artificial person” that her father found in the trash—not joking—and reprogrammed to have the prime directive to “do what is best for Rain.” Since he’s a trash bot and not off the assembly line of other synthetics, he comes across as a mentally challenged android with a good heart who just wants to help Rain and tell bad ‘dad jokes.’ As for Rain, she is simply a bird in a cage, sick of her life on the planet and wanting to see the sun. Any sun will do.

After Weyland-Yutani denies her request to leave the planet and extends her years of indentured servitude, Rain joins the group of disposable, young meat-puppets who are destined to be the victims of our favorite xenomorphs. Their leader, Tyler (Archie Renaux), has a plan for all of them. They’ve discovered that a derelict and decommissioned spacecraft that belongs to Weiland-Yutani is coming into orbit above them. Strange that a group of misfits would notice this giant space station that is probably worth untold amounts of money casually drifting through space towards their planet before Weyland-Yutani or some scavengers would, but the movie needs to happen, so stop thinking about it. Tyler and his group of idiotic misfits believe—they have no way of knowing—that the ship might have cryosleep pods aboard that they could use to freeze themselves for the long journey it would take to get to the nearest inhabitable system with a sun. However, they have no method of getting onto the ship without Andy, so they need Rain’s help. Why is Andy essential? Apparently, all androids just happen to have a broad, arbitrary clearance level that grants them access to movie plots and space stations. Don’t think about it too much! Your brain might melt and drip out of your ears!

Rain is convinced to bring Andy with The Disposables, and they just fly into space using a mining loader vehicle without any signs that the company cares if a bunch of people take company property into orbit without permission. If the company doesn’t care about a massive space station that is floating aimlessly through space—which is also the station that is supposed to have the all-important xenomorph aboard—I suppose they wouldn’t care about a small loading vehicle with some rogue employees aboard. Regardless of whether any of that makes sense, the group of goofs manages to get onto the seemingly empty and lifeless space station that is destined to fall into the rings of the planet in less than 36 hours. At a little under the halfway point of the film, some 3D-printed facehuggers are arbitrarily released, someone gets impregnated by an alien, and the proverbial sh*t hits the fan.

Before I get to the criticisms I have about Romulus—of which there are many—I’ll start with the good. While this is not a Ridley Scott-directed film, Fede Alverez and his team of set and costume designers managed to evoke a similar level of quality in the film's overall look. I don’t think it looks anywhere as good as the original film or even Prometheus, but it still has some pretty sets and is shot in a way that is satisfying to look at. And while not all of the practical effects look good—like the facehuggers skittering around on the floor as though they’re being pulled by strings or tiny mot0rs—it’s still nice to see a xenomorph represented in something that is physically there, sometimes. The digital effects aren’t bad, either. In the big climactic finale involving the space station and the planet rings, it’s all very pretty to look at.

I’d also say that, despite the cast being made up of actors that I’ve never seen or heard of before, some of them do a pretty decent job with their performances. It’s not really fair to compare anyone to Sigourney Weaver and her iconic performances as Ripley, but I’ve already done that to the last two lead actresses in the franchise, so I’ll do it again. Cailee Spaeny does fine as the female protagonist (with incredible plot armor), however, she still is unable to match the range and charisma that Weaver gave in her first performance as Ripley of someone who is tough enough to survive but also completely terrified—watch the last 15 minutes of Alien to get what I mean in how Ripley is constantly fighting off her fight-or-flight response to do what she needs to do to survive. The one who does the most acting of all of this new cast is David Johnson, who essentially has to play two versions of the same character throughout the film when his directives are altered by the installation of a new chip in his head. I think a little more nuance could have been done for the character to demonstrate an internal conflict of directives, but it was still okay for what it was.

And that’s about where the praise ends, unfortunately. I’d say I liked the first half over the second half because it was mostly a world-building portion of the movie where we got to see more of human life on a Weiland-Yutani planet and how humanity exists in that environment. However, that only lasts for so long, and as I’ve already mentioned, if you pay attention to details or ask questions during this half, things don’t really make much sense. Unfortunately, the more the movie goes on, the less sense it makes.

I know that this movie had some success at the box office. I personally know people who enjoyed Alien: Romulus. Unfortunately, I am yet again an old fuddy-duddy with high standards for a movie that is associated with two of my favorite films of all time. The most that I could muster to say after the credits rolled was, “It didn’t enrage me like Alien: Covenant did.” I don’t mean to be particularly pedantic, but it is difficult for me not to be especially critical of an Alien movie when I enjoy the first two movies as much as I do. Nonetheless, I have many, many issues with this film that may sound rather nitpicky to some casual viewers, but they prevent me from just being able to accept and enjoy it because I see them as contrivances and conveniences to move the plot along fast enough for people not to notice. (Spoilers ahead)

For example, there’s the whole retcon about the lifecycle of the xenomorph involving the facehuggers, which is arbitrarily instrumental in creating a dire situation for the humans. In the original film, it’s suggested that it took hours or even days before the face-embracing creatures completed their deed and that the creatures would die almost immediately after their job was done. It also took a significant amount of time for the embryo within Kane’s (John Hurt) chest to hatch and for the creature to burst out of him. This incubation detail is further enforced in Alien 3 because Ripley has the alien in her for the entire movie, which takes place over several days. In Romulus, everything about this process is sped up exponentially in service of setting up the latter half of the film.

In Romulus, the individual of the crew of dopes who gets impregnated has the parasite on her face for mere minutes. Her friends manage to get the thing off her in a method that seems too convenient to work, and the facehugger then attempts to run away before they kill it. Then, the soon-to-be alien mother and her boyfriend run onto their stolen ship, abandoning Tyler, Rain, and Andy aboard the space station only for the baby xeno to begin bursting out of its host’s chest within minutes. This violent death causes the intrepid pilot to kick the flight stick of the ship, sending it careening into part of the space station, which activates one of the station’s thrusters, changing its trajectory towards the planet rings and rapidly reducing the time to impact.

Now, after the small loader bounced off the bottom of the space station with its thrusters still blasting away and the flight stick pointing in a very acute direction, you might expect a few things to happen. You might think the small loader ship to be damaged beyond repair, with a compromised hull, doomed to spiral out into space. Or maybe it will crash into the planet’s ring and be ripped apart by the countless pieces of rock spinning around the planet’s gravitational field at immeasurable speeds. Or maybe it will slam into another part of the space station and explode. Well, if you had assumed any of those options, you’d be WRONG! Despite all believable logic, it conveniently swings right back around—without anyone touching the flight controls—and gently cruises to a halt within the landing bay of the space station with no significant damage or hull breaches.

There were a lot of questionable things that happened in this movie, but this particular moment was so unbelievable to me—the zero-gravity acid scene was a close second—that I sat with my jaw open and heard the word “Huh?” fall out of my mouth; it was so stupid, my brain stopped working and I lost conscious control of my mouth. You don’t have to be an astronaut or a physics professor to know that space is dangerous and that it only takes a single, very small error to turn into a catastrophe. While the distant future of this universe has demonstrated that the ships can withstand far more than our current satellites and space shuttles can, they’re also not indestructible—Alien: Covenant opens with a scene that showcases how much damage the fart of a distant star can do to the space ships in their universe. I certainly wouldn’t expect a small terrestrial loader vehicle to be tough enough to come back from hitting the bottom of the space station and then autopilot correctly into a random loading bay without continuing on its high-speed trajectory.

I know I spent a lot of time on that one sequence, but it’s the big turning point of the movie in which everything goes wrong for the characters—it’s not even what I dislike the most about Romulus. It draws a lot of attention to the series of events that take place over a short amount of time and highlights a lot of the decisions being made to conveniently trap the characters on the ship with a means of escape while not using much logic or existing knowledge of the Alien universe to get there.

In addition, the scene with the facehugger is a problem for all the convenient reasons I mentioned already, but it also causes a dialogue contradiction later. Another character is found cocooned, and the group assumes they haven’t been impregnated because there is no dead parasite below them. This suggests that they know that the parasite immediately dies after completing its task, but none of the characters actually witnessed this behavior themselves. This is one of several instances in which characters know things they couldn’t know. It’s as though they’ve watched the previous movies or something…

That’s where my real issue with Romulus rears its head: reliance on previous films. It relies heavily on the good movies but also, surprisingly, on the bad ones. There are direct references to Alien: Resurrection and Prometheus in Romulus that I am sure most fans would prefer not to have returned to further solidify their blasphemy into the canon of this franchise. Of course, they couldn’t help themselves and had to include some of the franchise’s most recognizable lines of dialogue. I groaned every time I recognized a line from another movie and I nearly screamed, “No!” when I heard, “Get away from her, you bitch.”

The most egregious of references, however, is the character of Rook. Witnessing an AI representation of the late Ian Holm as the damaged android, Rook, made me sick to my stomach. Someone thought it was fine to use his face as well as his voice through some AI amalgamation in combination with the voice and face of Daniel Betts, who was credited for “Facial and vocal performance” on IMDB. There’s been plenty of uncanny valley CGI in movies that de-age actors over the years, but it’s a lot more unsettling when the actor is deceased. I didn’t like it when Disney/Lucasfilm did it with Peter Cushing in Rogue One, and I didn’t like it here—even if it looked a lot better—but this instance is even worse.

There are a couple of distinct reasons why Ian Holm’s appearance here is worse. Peter Cushing played a prominent character in the original Star Wars, and his digital likeness was briefly used in Rogue One to portray the same character. However, Rook is an entirely different character from the android Ash, whom Ian Holm portrayed in the original Alien. In other words: You didn’t have to use Ian Holm’s likeness! It could have been a completely different, unknown actor as Rook. It could have been other actors who played androids in the franchise who are still alive, like Michael Fassbender or Lance Henrikson—Henrikson would need de-aging, but still…The filmmakers made the deliberate choice to use Holm’s likeness for the same, shameless reason they used lines from other movies: nostalgia. It’s soulless, creatively bankrupt fan service with no real effort or meaning behind it, much like how every Predator sequel had to include either “You’re one ugly motherf*cker,” or “If it bleeds, we can kill it,” or both lines in the script.

Alien: Romulus relies on the various other films in the franchise to build its story. It expects you to have seen all of them, otherwise, it wouldn’t have included so many references, both visually and through sound or dialogue. However, it also expects you to just go with the various contrived changes it makes to how the aliens and technology work, which you would likely notice if you had seen all the other movies. It’s a strange, contradictory situation for a film to be in, but it only occurs when a movie cannot let go of its legacy. Alien is an incredible movie that has stood the test of time. Aliens is considered a great sequel because it manages to be its own movie and add meaningful changes that do not contradict what was already established. Alien 3 and Resurrection may have been bad films, but they still felt like they were trying to tell their own stories and not just stealing ideas from previous entries.

The longer a franchise goes on, more rules are established—certainly in science fiction—which makes it harder to keep making sequels without breaking or bending those rules. So, filmmakers often rely on fanservice to cover up the cracks. What you’re left with is a hollow movie that is spackled together with paste and mud, which easily falls apart if you poke at it even a little bit. As I watched Romulus, I couldn’t help but be reminded of The Force Awakens and how that was a movie in the Star Wars franchise that was more about copying existing material than inventing anything new. Unlike the first Alien, Alien: Romulus lacks its own identity or enough quality to stand on its own. Had this been the first movie in the franchise, it would not have been able to hide behind the deceptive veil of quality established by its predecessors. It would have been a forgettable, mediocre horror movie with some completely illogical moments that don’t physically make sense and some mentally deficient characters who say things that aren’t necessarily appropriate for the situation.

TL;DR

Alien: Romulus may have done well at the box office, may have garnered praise from the general public, and may not be as enragingly awful as Alien: Covenant, but it is no “return to form.” Despite all the polish and good-willed attempts to make this entry seem like it deserves to sit right along with its progenitors in the pantheon of sci-fi horror, there are just too many instances of contrivances in its plot and script for me to ignore. If you want to enjoy Alien: Romulus, I suggest you just turn your brain off and enjoy the spectacle because you cannot be the slightest bit scrutinous of it before it starts falling apart. I’m in the minority with my opinions, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s been nearly 40 years since the last good Alien movie, and I’m still waiting.

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