Alien: Romulus is like a speed run of previous Alien films

★★ | Alien: Redundant

Alien: Romulus is a well-made film with no personality of its own. It is an exhausting series of best-of set pieces reminiscent of a clip show.

Set during the period between Alien and Aliens, Alien: Romulus scraps the ending of Ridley Scott’s first film so that it can rehash iconography from an established classic. It’s a weird choice that sets the film up on a sour note. If it needs a callback even before the opening credits, what are we even here for?

The first twenty minutes promise a far better movie than what follows. Set on a perpetually darkened mining planet, it’s a tantalizing glimpse into the lives of the working class in the far reaches of space. Our leads, Rain and her android brother, Andy, have reached the end of their contracts. As they pack up to leave for good, the corporation that owns the planet reneges on the deal. Their future disappears as fast as it had appeared.

Luckily, Rain’s friends have a solution. In the stratosphere is an abandoned service station, now drifting towards an asteroid belt. If they can get to it first, it holds enough fuel for them to reach the nearest humane outpost seven years away.

With nothing left to lose, the group sets out on their desperate quest.

At this point, I had questions. Most of the time, they’re questions that a film doesn’t need to answer. It’s the nagging sound of reality that has to be silenced along with our phones when we enter the theater. If a film is good, we can quiet that voice quite easily. After all, this is an emotional experience rather than a logical one.

But when a film doesn’t work, I find that voice louder by the minute. It sits with me and points to all the things that don’t make sense. With nothing to emotionally grasp onto, I have no choice but to listen.

If the world is so hard to escape, how do these kids have a spaceship? Isn’t anyone monitoring their departure? If the world they’re heading for is anti-Weyland-Yutani, why does the company provide direct transit there? Wouldn’t it be easier to find sleeping pods on the planet rather than hope that a derelict space station drifts by?

Yes, these are nitpicks. I don’t expect the film to answer them all. Every Alien film has flimsy logic at best. We watch them to feel something that lives in the realm of nightmares. But because Alien: Romulus is neither captivating nor scary, it lends itself to scrutiny more than others in the franchise.

On Romulus, the derelict research station where the film takes place, the group finds a discarded android, Rook. It’s here the film takes a turn for the ghoulish, but not in a good way. Rook is a CGI recreation of actor Ian Holm, who passed away years ago. Holm was a seminal part of Alien, where his android character, Ash, delivered some of the most memorable lines of the film.

His reconstruction feels notably disgusting, as the film also tries to be a commentary on characters escaping a life of indentured servitude to a monolithic, faceless corporation. Even in death, actors will return to placate the nostalgia cravings of aging geeks.

If this was the only misstep in an otherwise solid film, I could accept it was a misguided attempt at satire. But Romulus consistently stumbles into crass depictions and unthoughtful conclusions. Most notably in Andy, played by David Jonsson. He’s an older model android, who only received one protocol, and no updates ever since. In the film, he is coded as an autistic individual, and treated as a child. When he “upgrades”, he goes from childlike to Sherlock. It’s hideously dated and wildly offensive.

The fault is not with Jonsson, who plays the part with nuance and heartbreak, even as the script is flat and ugly. I felt for Andy, though I hate how the filmmakers depict neurodivergent ailments.

I don’t think director Fede Álvarez is intentionally insulting. He’s too busy in replicating everything that he loves about the franchise to care what it means. Alien: Romulus mimics every major scene, visual element, and iconic moment from other films. Even when it doesn’t make sense to do so. (Watch out for a particularly egregious line reading from Aliens that has no business here.)

The result feels like a recap of the franchise by an excited fanboy, bereft of the nuance and spectacle that made it memorable. If this is the first Alien film you see, it might even be entertaining. How could it not?

It’s a patchwork of better films. But that’s all it is.