Five generic human teens, wanting to escape their mining colony world, travel to an abandoned space station in an attempt to steal cryo-pods that will allow them to sleep during a long space voyage. Rain (Cailee Spaeny), the only one of the five that it’s worthwhile listing her name, was asked to join the group because she has a robot, Andy (David Jonsson), who not only is the only character in the film, but can open up the space station because he can speak to Mother, the ship’s AI. Once on the space station, they are attacked by facehuggers and xenomorphs… You know the rest.
Alien Romulus is the film you make when you give up on doing anything interesting. We’ve seen it all before. It’s yet another haunted house in space, just like Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien Resurrection. Aliens worked because it changed the genre to action and added a metaphor of motherhood. Alien Resurrection switched the genre to B-movie schlock and that was different. Prometheus added theme and meaning. Alien Romulus changes nothing and adds nothing. Outside of the anti-capitalism message that underlies all Alien films, there is no theme here. Nothing. It says nothing. OK, the first Alien didn’t say much either. Romulus has little plot as well, also like Alien. So, if you don’t have an interesting theme or plot, you need character. That’s how Alien worked, great character. Alien Romulus has five tropes from teen slashers. These aren’t characters. They have no personality. We learn nothing about them because there is nothing to learn. We have the Good Girl, the Mean Girl, the Doe, the Cool Dude, and the Jerk. Add in that the Doe being pregnant, and I’ve said everything the film has to say about them. In Alien, when a character died, it was a big deal. Here, when a non-entitiy dies… Shrug.
And Romulus manages to be worse still by going even deeper with its copying of the previous films. It’s all fan service all the time. Hey, remember the experimenting and xenomorph-human hybridding that no one liked from Alien 4? It’s back. Did you think it was effective having Hicks flirt with Ripley while teaching her to shoot in Aliens? Well, get ready to see it again, but with non-entities. Do you like out-of-context parroting of famous lines from older films? You’re in luck as those are rammed in. And then we have the pointless CGI recreation of a dead actor. Why? They could have hired any new actor, but Romulus is all about nostalgia for better films. And the CGI is bad, like recreated Princess Leia kind of bad.
All that fan service ripping me out of the film allowed me to think about what it going on, and in a movie that defies physics, logic, human & corporate behavior, and previous continuity, thinking is not a good thing. How did they find the xenomorph from Alien? It would not be floating around by the wreckage of the Nostromo. Why is there wreckage of the Nostromo? Didn’t it blow up in a nuclear explosion? And wasn’t the whole point of Ash that he was masquerading as human? Why is the space station falling into this planet? Do space stations move? Where was it before? Why is no one from Weyland-Yutani going to the station? Why doesn’t anyone from Wayland-Yutani care about a spaceship taking off from the surface? Are little orbital ships capable of 9 year voyages? And why does the ship happen to crash into the hanger? Then there’s the timeline of this film. Things don’t match with the previous movies. And there’s the planet’s rings which have absolutely no connection to actual planetary rings. And I really shouldn’t be thinking about zero-gravity in Romulus. Apparently, in zero-g, objects leap into the air, dead alien bodies simply disappear, and blood does not follow the laws of momentum which would have it continue moving toward a wall, but just swirls about. And I could go on.
Excitement and fear should distract me from all those problems, but to feel either of those I need characters.
So, is there anything good in Romulus? Sure. It didn’t kill any beloved characters off screen, so that’s a plus. It also looks quite nice. Unfortunately, it’s simply copying the look of the first two films, so there’s nothing original in the art design. Still, it’s crafted well. Similarly, the monsters are well-made. Constructing animatronics was a nice touch. The sound design is solid. When a door shuts, you know it. And then there’s Andy. I said the humans were non-entities, but the robot is another matter. He’s developed. He even has an arc of sorts. Jonsson manages a tricky part, showing different personalities clearly. If the movie had focused even more on Andy, and on the threat at the end, and perhaps eliminated xenomorphs and facehuggers entirely, this could have been a smart little film.
But it didn’t, and it isn’t.