Alien has been Disney-fied. It hasn’t been softened or sanitized for a younger audience. It has instead been tweaked and studio-noted to mollify executives, under a clear, deeply misguided mandate to make product camouflaged “for the fans” in service of The Company. This mandate includes, but is not limited to: 1. including at least one recognizable character or characters; 2. if the actor responsible for that character is deceased, deploy a gluey, CGI replica in their place. (Nobody dies at Disney, and if they do, hopefully they’ll keep working long after they’ve decomposed.) Let’s add: 3. catchphrases and callbacks, unmotivated or illogical, are a must; 4. all of the above are doctrine, because market research indicates they bump up the CinemaScore by half a letter grade or more.
It’s a dire, inhospitable environment, wherein corporate interests can give way to ghoulish monstrosities, and those just trying to navigate the chokehold of capitalism are doing their best to survive. In a way, Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus may be the most meta Alien film to date. No stranger to playing in others’ sandboxes, the Evil Dead helmer is, at first glance, an encouraging fit for the sci-fi horror franchise. Like the original, 2017’s Alien: Covenant––an underrated high point for these films––was at its peak when threading its headier notions with gleefully mean-spirited cynicism towards its human subjects. Alvarez has that same kind of nasty streak in him, and much of Romulus’ mandated fan service smacks of carefully chosen battles in an effort to commence with the gnarly stuff.
Alien: Romulus’ aims are simple, with a script that hums efficiently. Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her adopted, obsolete android brother Andy (David Jonsson) long to flee their mining colony and are recruited into scavenging a nearby derelict space station in order to make the interstellar exodus possible. This abandoned post is on a collision course with the colony’s asteroid belt, and so the clock ticks on their mission as they contend with more face-hugging and chest-bursting than they bargained for. It’s a tight yarn. The How and Why of it all won’t be spoiled; Alvarez is clearly most interested in the carnage of the What. Lacking thematic subtlety or dimensionality outside of Rain and Andy, Alien: Romulus compensates with a killer instinct deployed with squirming glee. The ensemble isn’t outfitted with a Yaphet Kotto, a Bill Paxton, or a Michael Wincott, and that kind of charisma is sorely missed, but Spaeny is an impressive anchor amid a handful of inventive setpieces––one of which implies Fede Alvarez has likely seen (and clearly enjoys) 1992’s Sneakers.
When daring to innovate rather than appropriate, Romulus manages to deliver some of the series’ most harrowing imagery. But those pesky Company orders dare not be ignored. Innovation be damned, keys must be jingled to service a die-hard segment of the audience (which may not even exist). What results is the shoehorned return of a legacy character, one of the more egregious digital resurrections of an actor from a studio with a monstrous track record of it. It’s a blatant top-down decision made all the more obvious by the number of narrative ways it could have been sidestepped, thus scoring an early own-goal that plagues an otherwise-unencumbered narrative.
This character’s blight on the film’s merits is also dependent upon the mileage one gets from rampaging Xenomorphs. Despite that unfortunate pitfall for a solidly entertaining Alien film, Fede Alvarez’s wicked concoctions are worthy deviations from a directive that is otherwise––to put it in Weyland-Yutani terms––“what’s best for The Company.”
Alien: Romulus opens on Friday, August 16.
The post Alien: Romulus Review: Fan Service with Killer Instinct first appeared on The Film Stage.
