Seemingly designed to settle the debate over whether the Alien films count as horror, Alien: Romulus amps up the goo, creature effects, and invasive violence to graphic degrees. Horror for the win, I guess?
This isn’t a serious Alien film, but then again, the last two installments—Alien: Covenant and Prometheus, both directed by Ridley Scott—were ponderous to a fault. Here director Fede Alvarez (2013’s Evil Dead, Don’t Breathe) emphasizes the carnival house of horrors aspect of the science-fiction franchise, an approach that feels like something of a relief. Set between the events of Alien and Aliens, Romulus follows a rogue group of miners who attempt to flee their dead-end jobs on a sunless planet by snatching space-travel equipment from a decommissioned space station. Needless to say, something else is also onboard.
Alvarez and co-screenwriter Rodo Sayagues borrow the gnarliest elements of this world—we get facehuggers and a chestburster, and that’s just for starters—but do little with them beyond exploring the ickiness in greater detail. The one interesting idea that’s given any real attention has to do with the relationship between one of the miners, Rain (Cailee Spaeny of Priscilla), and her android/synthetic, Andy (David Jonsson of Rye Lane). Given to Rain by her late father, who found him after he’d been discarded, Andy is something of a brother to Rain. But onboard the space station, where Andy interfaces with the corporate program running the operation, she begins to wonder if white blood is actually thicker than water.
Described as “damaged” by one of the other miners, Andy gave me pause early on, especially the way Jonsson portrays him as juvenile and naive, even giving him a problematic stutter. Yet the character—and performance—become more interesting later on, right around the time of the film’s standout scare sequence. With two of the miners trapped in a lab on the space station, their tinkering having locked the doors and activated a collection of hibernating facehuggers, Rain desperately decides to reboot Andy with a corporation chip so that he can unlock the doors. His reboot plays like a possession sequence, all while tentacles and skittery legs are flying about, searching for a face to violate.
From there, Alvarez amps up the creature quotient to the point of nullifying their impact. The great genius of 1979’s Alien—also directed by Scott, ironically—is that less of the alien threat is more. Still, in Romulus, the dynamic between Rain and Andy offers enough of an emotional anchor, especially as Jonsson balances Andy’s corporate coldness with notes of empathetic confusion. And while I may not particularly care for where things go in the final moments, I’m impressed by the movie’s audacity. Indeed, it’s another horror play—a bonkers big swing that’s less reminiscent of the other Alien films and more akin to recent gonzo fright flicks like Barbarian and Malignant.
(8/14/24)
