Alien: Romulus
First screened and reviewed in August 2024
Director: Fede Álvarez. Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu. Screenplay: Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues (based on characters and beasties created by Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett).VOR:①
Sturdy-ish execution can't disguise the almost willful avoidance of risk or ambition, especially for a series that thrived on them.
I spent 90 minutes writing a Romulus review that's now all gone, because when an Android phone drops to 20% power, the automated switch to Battery Saver mode wipes the Letterboxd screen clean. It's the only app this happens with. I really, really hope the company can fix this glitch.
Put otherwise, as the Alien franchise constantly teaches us, Androids are absolutely remarkable inventions but at some level can't be trusted.
Alien: Romulus is fine as a straight-up, haunted-house creature feature with acid blood and a bare-bones, already-established mythology that this entry takes wholly for granted. It's solid on jump scares but low in ambition and even lower in confidence, at least from atop the production pyramid: everything from the cast to the strong re-centering in horror (a cheaper genre than sci-fi) to the setting on a planet with no sunlight (and then a ship with little power) suggests monomaniacal cost-saving on a franchise that's been on life-support for a while, and for which two expensive and convoluted hail-mary's didn't remotely change the game.
You can feel this green team working resourcefully within limits, so you feel sorry for them and for the movie, or at least I did, even while I was enjoying it or biting my nails. Even by those standards, there are some iffy calls in story and scene construction, plus one hugely off-putting enlistment of a dead actor's likeness in a major role—the kind of thing all of SAG went on strike to protest. No matter who signed off or why, that's a whopper of an ethical judgment call when all you get in return is this thoroughly mid franchise-extender.
Cailee Spaeny is sporting and tough, if not quite up to shouldering a film like this. David Jonsson is nimble in moments of personality confusion but also a problem; his choices for telegraphing gentleness or eliciting sympathy too often seem like pleas for the audience to pity his character, which is rarely a good look. (We aren't miles away from the Green one, if you get my drift.) All other actors are totally forgettable, and there's not much to celebrate in the craft departments, either. The best tricks are the simplest: a clever, suspenseful moment when characters can't hear what they need to through a Plexiglass door, and another when someone's unwittingly loud (and rightly terrified) when quiet is imperative. Bigger swings in staging or effects tend to yield mixed results.
This has been my shitty short-handing of what I promise was a life-changing write-up. But then, for all that Alien: Romulus is a fine way to spend two hours on the exact terms set forth in the trailer, the film itself feels like the ersatz version of something that would have liked to be more. If you're not into half-hearted facsimiles, write your Letterboxd pieces on the desktop site so you don't have to slap the wall and then half-reconstruct them, and be wary of a franchise that seems to know on some level that it's lost its charge. If Alien is to continue, it's going to need an acid transfusion. Grade:C+
(In case you missed it, I originally wrote this review on Letterboxd.)
Academy Award Nominations:
Best Visual Effects: Eric Barba, Daniel Macarin, Nelson Sepulveda, Shane Mahan
