One Thing I Like About Alien: Romulus

The best sequence in the movie also serves as an illustration of how Alien movies are best when they keep the lore and world-building in service of the cinematic moments. (Spoilers for Romulus and potentially the entire Alien franchise).

When Alien: Romulus first came out, the buzz around it was so good that I was sure I was going to have to do the rarest of rare things in 2024: go see a movie in a theater. But after the initial wave of good vibes, the mood on the internet seemed to sour, with more and more people complaining that the movie was too derivative of Alien and Aliens without significantly improving on the formula.

I finally watched it last night (it’s streaming on Hulu via Disney+), and I thought it was excellent. I can’t say that I loved it, though. There were lots of baffling edits and confusing scenes — I still don’t know exactly how Bjorn or Tyler died, for instance, and it often cut to an odd angle or a weird shot at exactly the wrong moment. Plus there were some clunky moments late in the movie as things started to go off the rails. By the time they hit the inevitable “get away from her, you bitch!” it felt that they’d already exceeded their quota. For whatever reason, the clunky moment I found the most jarring was that after a scene of efficient action movie exposition, Rain stares off into the distance and quietly says to herself, “Andy? Are you there?”

But I disagree with the criticism that it’s too derivative of the other movies. I don’t disagree that it’s derivative; it absolutely is. It feels like the first half is a 2024 take on Alien: it sets up a bleak horror movie inspired by 1970s “hard” science fiction, centered around a bunch of miserable working class people sacrificed to terrible monsters by a terrible corporation. The second half feels like an attempt to plus up the Aliens template, a relentlessly escalating action movie with multiple simultaneous countdowns to doom. In the middle is an exposition-heavy bridge filled with (half-baked) ideas from Prometheus. But I don’t see this as a bad thing. To put it in the most obnoxious way possible: it’s not a bug hunt, it’s a feature hunt.

That’s because Alien: Romulus feels like it’s made by people who understand exactly what makes an Alien movie work, and even more importantly, what doesn’t. This might piss off the hard-core fans of the franchise, but I think the trick is understanding that the Alien universe just ain’t all that deep.

I always assumed that it was, since the first movie is so jam-packed full of intriguing stuff. Giant aliens! A whole different species of alien! Face huggers! Chest bursters! Acid for blood! Synthetic humans! Evil corporations! It all seems like there’s more than enough to fuel movie after movie exploring the darkest corners of the universe in more detail.

But the trick, as I see it, is to have all these details that are just evocative enough to prompt exciting set pieces. The best installments are all tight action or horror movies, focused on a small cast of mostly-doomed characters dropped into an environment where literally everything is trying to kill them, and surviving just by virtue of their own cleverness and humanity. The worst try to focus on lore or character-building instead of developing a sequence of clear obstacles for the characters to overcome, and that’s how you get stuff like Charlize Theron not having enough sense to run to the left and avoid getting crushed by a rolling space station.

The best part of Alien: Romulus is the extended sequence where Rain has to fend off a swarm of Xenomorphs, armed only with a rifle she’s been told she can’t use without killing everyone on board the station. I say it’s a great example of why Romulus is the third best Alien movie. And it’s a great example of why I think installments in this universe work better when the focus is on cinematics instead of story.

I came to this epiphany when I was trying to establish my bona fides: Aliens is one of my top ten favorite movies. I’ve seen all of the movies except for Covenant, and I think the only worthwhile ones are the first two and now Romulus. I haven’t seen any of the Aliens vs Predator movie installments, but I have read several of the comics, as well as several of the “Predator-less” comics. I’m too much of a chicken to play Alien: Isolation even though I have it installed on multiple machines. And I’ve never read any of the novels.

Over the years I kept trying to get into the comics, and I kept bouncing off. It seemed like such a natural fit for comics, since this was such a compelling universe. But as it turns out, reading about miserable, doomed people from their perspective just isn’t very fun. That’s why I was so impressed by how the first half of Romulus efficiently conveyed how our characters lived in such a bleak world, with everything stacked against them, and why they’d be so desperate to escape. The history of Weyland-Yutani is interesting only insofar as it spurs characters into action.

Similarly, the Xenomorphs had kind of a diminishing return, and there’s only so much you can do with them before you’re either retreading the same ground, or desperately trying to come up with an interesting new mutant/variant/hybrid. They’re really “the perfect organism” only in terms of being perfect movie monsters. Every aspect of them is designed to provoke another what the f?!? moment.

So if Romulus had simply forced its characters into repeating the same discovery beats as the crew of the Nostromo, and every failed expedition before and afterwards, then it would have been derivative. But what’s so clever about Romulus is how aware it is that it exists in a world not just with multiple Alien installments, but countless movies and video games inspired by the franchise, either directly or indirectly. The dynamic of the first half of the movie is completely flipped from that of Alien, where the tension is driven not by the unknown but by dramatic irony. We in the audience know way more about whats going to happen than the characters do. And the movie is full of visual teases that build suspense not over what’s going to happen, but when.

We see a glimpse of a face hugger biometric read out on a screen in the foreground, that the characters can’t see. We see containers open in a room in which two of our characters are locked, and we’re just waiting for the inevitable to happen: a face hugger to leap out and attach to the obnoxious and unlikeable Bjorn. And I’m not at all crazy about using a CG deep faked Ian Holm in the movie, but I get the intent: we all know what role that character served in the first movie, so we’re just waiting for his inevitable betrayal.

By the time most of the cast has been killed off, the movie is squarely in its Aliens mode, and Rain is having to fend off an oncoming swarm of Xenomorphs, the characters have caught up with the audience. That’s when the movie starts riffing on the known lore of this universe: these things have acid for blood? How do we turn that into a gruesome kill that hasn’t been done yet (as far as I can remember)? The space marines in Aliens had aim-assisted pulse rifles? How do we play around with the physics of that, and how do we get tension from showing the dwindling ammo supply? Add in the interesting aspect of artificial gravity — with the “gravity purges” not making a ton of sense but adding yet another countdown timer for suspense — and it’s one of the coolest sequences in the entire franchise. I especially liked how the massive elevator was both savior and threat throughout the sequence, and how it cleverly prevented the explosive decompression.

And the main reason I like this sequence so much is that it shows how Alien movies can excel at character development and thematic resonance, even when they’re focused on action and horror. Rain figuring out to use the zero gravity against the Xenomorphs showed that she was uniquely clever and resourceful. And her actions did a much better job of conveying the theme of the movie than any of the dialogue could: loyalty, staying true to your humanity even when every possible thing is stacked against you, and refusing to give in to despair.

The end of horror movies tracking the “final girl” are almost always just her trying to survive. Aliens made Ripley an interesting character just by having her choose to go back for Newt. And Romulus does the same for Rain by having her send Kay back to (what she thinks is) safety, even if it means giving up her only means of escape. For all the time the Alien installments have spent navel-gazing about the engineers and why do we exist, or synthetic humans and what makes humanity worth saving, it’s the action-driven installments that drive home the message the best.

One thought on “One Thing I Like About Alien: Romulus”

  1. “ that’s how you get stuff like Charlize Theron not having enough sense to run to the left and avoid getting crushed by a rolling space station.”

    God bless you

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