The older I get, the harder it becomes to suspend disbelief. Watching Alien: Romulus, for example, I found myself thinking that the situation its heroes find themselves in is so impossibly dangerous that they’d all die horrible deaths almost instantly.
There would not be a film if the protagonists died in the first fifteen minutes. That holds true of pretty much all feature films.
I had a similar response to the Fast and the Furious franchise, which I wrote about in its entirety for my Substack newsletter Nathan Rabin’s Bad Ideas. That’s what you’re reading AT THIS EXACT MOMENT.
Only a fool would demand verisimilitude in a deathless franchise about acid-spitting killer aliens from the twisted mind of H.R. Giger. These are science-fiction horror films, not documentaries or docudramas. The point is to give audiences the heebie-jeebies, not reflect life as it is lived.
Alien: Romulus takes its time pitting its underdog heroes against God’s own killing machine, the xenomorph. Alien: Romulus inhabits a dystopian future brutal enough to make death seem like an appealing option.
Earth has become even more of a dark, dispiriting hellscape. When orphan Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) receives the unwelcome news that her work contract is being renewed without her approval or consent, she becomes obsessed with fleeing this godawful planet.
Rain disembarks on a space journey to retrieve valuable cryostasis chambers that will allow her and her friends to travel to more desirable planets. Rain is joined by ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux), Tyler’s pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), Navarro (Aileen Wu), and Andy (David Jonnson).
Andy is an android created by Rain’s father to protect his daughter in his absence. About halfway through the film, Andy receives an upgrade that elevates his intellect to the level of an autistic genius.
Since being diagnosed as autistic recently, I’m hyper-sensitive to depictions of neurodivergence in entertainment. I’ve noted, for example, that androids are often autistically coded because the neurotypical often see the neurodivergent as being robotic and alien in nature and disposition. All I can say to that is bleep bloop, motherfucker.
It’s a way of ostensibly flattering the autistic while at the same time depicting them as something other than human. These tough, resilient kids make one heck of a boner in investigating USCSS Nostromo, the ship where all of the unpleasantness took place in Alien.
The desperate young people soon learn that they have company aboard the decimated ship and not just in the form of android Rook, who is somewhat confusingly represented onscreen by Ian Holm but voiced by Daniel Betts.
You might be asking yourself at this point, “Isn’t Ian Holm dead?” The answer, regrettably, is yes. Holm died in 2020, but death is no longer an obstacle for actors! Through the dark magic of technology, they can keep acting for decades, even centuries, after casting off their mortal coil.
The only downside to resurrecting the dead for your own cynical purposes is that it is incredibly distracting. Wondering whether or not someone onscreen is no longer among the living really takes you out of a movie.
That’s a shame because, for the most part, Alien: Romulus is a gritty, atmospheric science fiction horror film in the vein of the early works of Walter Hill, who produced and did extensive uncredited revisions of the Alien screenplay and has producing credits on all of its sequels, prequels, and spin-offs.
Alien: Romulus is the work of Fede Álvarez, a Uruguayan filmmaker who made his name with 2013’s Evil Dead before directing the surprise 2016 smash Don’t Breathe.
I don’t want to be overly critical, but I’m not surprised that the creeps in Hollyweird are now encouraging audiences not to breathe. Do you know what happens to people who don’t breathe? They die. Pretty damn irresponsible if you ask me.
Alvarez, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Rodo Sayagues, is overjoyed to be playing in this particular sandbox. Four and a half decades and countless parodies, homages, and rip-offs later, the design of the xenomorphs retains its potency and power. We’ve never gotten tired of these unstoppable monsters. They remain something out of our collective imaginations.
Alien: Romulus feels winningly hand-made. The filmmakers wisely eschew the cold emptiness of CGI in favor of practical effects so fucking disgusting they make you want to puke your guts out in the best possible sense.
SPOILERS AHEAD
Deep into Alien: Romulus’ third act, we’re introduced to the product of Rook’s malevolent imagination: a hideous hybrid creature combining elements of human beings and xenomorphs and played by a former professional basketball player.
The climax answers the question, “What would happen if a Xenomorph and human being were to meet, possibly on an online dating site, fall in love, get married, and then, after struggling mightily to conceive, have a baby boy?”
My dumb brain refused to accept a villain known as “Offspring,” who looks like an outer space version of Slender Man or the protagonist of Powder if he were an evil giant space alien instead of a creepy pedophile’s weird fantasy.
“Oh hell no!” was my exact reaction to the big baddie at the end of the movie. Ten minutes later, my imagination stubbornly refused to accept the Offspring, partially because, like Dexter Holland, I believe that when it comes to human beings and Xenomorph genetic material, you gotta keep ‘em separated!
I haven’t seen an Alien movie since 1992’s Alien 3. So, I was not aware that the film’s ending references/echoes those of Alien: Resurrection and Alien: Covenant. Many people liked Offspring, or at least felt it did not single-handedly ruin the movie.
It would not be fair or accurate to say that Offspring's funky-ass character design ruins the movie, but for me, at least, it costs the sequel the half-star that separates a mixed review from a positive one.
Movies that end on a disappointing note are at a disadvantage because they send audiences home bummed. It’s much better to end strongly, and that, to me, is where Alien: Romulus loses its way.
That said, it did intrigue me enough that I think I’ll include the previous two entries in the series, 2012’s Prometheus and 2017’s Alien: Covenant, in my Great Catch-Up feature at Nathan Rabin’s Happy Place.
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Three stars out of five
Just saw ALIEN: ROMULUS tonight and....
1) It's not Earth they're on, it's a mining colony where they've been sent into indentured servitude. Earth never comes up in the movie, so I suspect it's either completely gone or they're so far out it's impossible to reach (like where the series FIREFLY took place). They use cryostatis tubes so they can travel long distances, which implies a future where Faster-than-Light travel doesn't exist.
2) The "spaceship" our heroes travel to is not The NOSTROMO, it's a space station where they took the Xenomorph from The NOSTROMO to study. What was left to study after Ripley blew the Xenomorph out of the airlock remains a mystery....
3) I don't think Andy's upgrade is supposed to suggest neurodivergence, but the very cold and calculating programming he had before he got the glitchy chip that makes him lovable to Rain and vulnerable.
4) The Human/Xenomorph hybrid you say took you out of the movie? Is a far more monstrous version of "The Kindred" from ALIEN RESURRECTION. I thought it was creepy and scary enough to be used a being that's even worse than the Xenomorph that we associate with the ALIEN series by now—which after having been used repeatedly in the movies, and even sold as a children's toy(!) when the first movie came out in 1979(!!!)
https://youtu.be/YQ8sYXVoAZA?si=atIDHijkZig1K6pM
has lost much of its ability to terrify.
I was sure the very silly thing that ruined the movie was going to be the useless resurrection of a glitchy, poorly captured Ian Holm's face. I was so disappointed in the choice. It would have been so much more satisfying to have practical effects using an actor who looked similar to Ian Holm, so that it was unsettling. It would be like Aliens, you couldn't be sure the artificial person in Aliens wouldn't betray Ripley until he didn't. In the new film, without Ian's face, you wouldn't be quite sure he was an evil presence but you'd definitely not trust him. What a lost opportunity!