Movie Review // Alien Romulus

Alien: Romulus is not worth paying the money to see in the theater. There, I said it. If you want to see it, and I can’t blame you if you do—the trailer was deceptively well cut, just wait for it to come out on streaming. People in my theater were laughing out loud throughout scenes that were meant to be scary and full of heightened tension which is never a good sign. It’s being marketed as some summer blockbuster, when really it was a mere whimper in the Alien franchise, this 9th film will absolutely not be remembered in the pantheon of Alien films.

With most of the actors in this film being Gen Z, this latest addition to the franchise felt like the CW version of Alien. Sure, it was gritty and gory, but it was entirely too cheeky to be a good Alien film. Even the sole character of a certain age, the science officer Rook, was de-aged in unconvincing CG leaving the android in uncanny valley territory. This was in stark contrast to Andy, the synthetic human brother of the main character, Rain. Played by David Johnsson, Andy is the most human character of them all despite the fact that he bleeds white, he also had the most interesting character development in the film.

Rain is an employee of Weyland Corp who has lost her parents in the mines and wants to leave the planet whose resources she is helping to strip along with her brother. While attempting to leave, she is told that her contract with Weyland-Yutani has been forcibly extended by years.  She meets up with a crew of space scavengers who want to go to the wreckage of a derelict spacecraft which has drifted into orbit to retrieve cryostasis chambers so they can make the trip to the planet Yvaga. The crew fly to the spacecraft where they face unimaginable (unless you are Ridley Scott and HR Geiger) horrors. Only this time we can kind of imagine what horrors await, it’s nothing really new. You’ve got the face huggers, only there’s dozens of them, and you’ve got the xenomorphs, only there’s…dozens of them. There is something new, but it’s, well, it’s a giant disappointment.

Spoiler Alert. Seriously, stop reading here unless you want this film to be thoroughly spoiled. One of the crew, Kay, who is chased by the xenomorphs and face huggers is pregnant. Because it wouldn’t be an Alien movie without a grisly labor scene. She is grievously wounded by a xenomorph and injects herself with a compound rereferred to by Rook as “Prometheus Fire” which is intended by Weyland to perfect humans. This compound accelerates her pregnancy, and she gives blood-spraying birth to a xenomorph/human hybrid which proceeds to kill her and chase the remaining crew. This new creature has terrible design and is entirely too human to feel “alien” and scary. It wasn’t anything that we haven’t seen before and strongly reminded me of a nude version of “The Gentlemen” in the Hush episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The big reveal had the audience around me guffawing in their seats.

At the end of the day, whatever hardships at the mercy of facehuggers they’ve faced aside, these are space colonizers, do we really feel sorry for them anymore when they face the consequences of their colonization? Rain is simply a cog in the colonization machine, but even cogs have to step back and face their complicity in the devastation they are wreaking on the environment and other life forms. Perhaps it’s time for the humans in this fictional universe to stop trying to colonize space. Because at the end of the day it isn’t the Aliens who are the villains in these films, they are simply acting in self-preservation—it’s Weyland Corp that’s the Big Bad.  But then, if Weyland wasn’t colonizing we wouldn’t have these films to sit through every couple of years in the ever-diminishing hopes that this time they actually make a good movie that captures some of the magic of that original gritty/gooey film from 1979? This time they certainly didn’t.