"Alien: Romulus" Rebounds

Minor spoilers ahead.

We've seen the "Alien" franchise get all grand and epic in Ridley Scott's recent trilogy, and now it's dropping all the fancy philosophy and mythology in favor of getting back to basics. The newest "Alien" movie, "Alien: Romulus" is a haunted house in space movie, just like the original "Alien," where a group of unwary youngsters stumble across an old space station and accidentally unleash the most lethal killing machines in the universe.  And thanks to the efforts of director Fede Alvarez, and his talented cast, it's a pretty good time.

The first twenty minutes of "Romulus" are the most important, efficiently setting up all the characters and stakes that will get us to care about the other ninety-odd minutes that follow.  Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is an exploited worker on one of the evil Weyland-Yutani corporation's miserable space colonies.  She and her "brother" Andy (David Jonsson), a simpleminded salvaged android, are convinced by friends to take part in a foolhardy scheme - they plan to steal cryo-chambers from a derelict vessel that has entered their system, and use them to escape to Yvaga, the nearest planet with better conditions.  Along for the ride are Tyler (Archie Renuax), Rain's ex, his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), who is pregnant, their cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), a hothead, and Navarro (Aileen Wu), who is their pilot friend.       

Rain and Andy are the only two characters you really need to care about, and Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson are perfectly cast.  Rain is our new Ripley, full of empathy and painfully vulnerable, but capable of keeping her nerve under pressure.  Andy continues the franchise's long tradition of fascinating android characters, and there are all sorts of implications to our first non-Caucasian model being presented the way Andy is in this movie, with the character arc that he gets, that I'm going to enjoy unpacking later.  The other actors are solid, especially Merced and Wu, who are featured in some of the most graphic and upsetting horror sequences - have we had enough traumatic births this year? - but aren't really full characters the way that our leads are.  As with most of the "Alien" movies, the survival rate is not high, and we don't need to get too attached.    

 

I wonder if the most recent round of reboots and legasequels are best suited for more casual franchise fans who actually don't remember all that much about the original films.  I spotted several of the most distracting callbacks and homages to the original "Alien" in "Alien: Romulus," but I know I missed a few others.  I'm not sure why they bothered with the old one-liners and cameos, since "Romulus" is essentially one giant homage to the first two "Alien" films already, full of chases and fights on metal catwalks, viscerally scary alien creatures, and highly destructive weaponry.  "Romulus" gets top marks for its production design and creature effects.  The facehuggers and xenomorphs are as alarming as ever onscreen, and Fede Alvarez understands how to use them for maximum impact.  This one really  feels like the "Alien" movies I watched as a kid, not just because it's using old computer displays or getting out the puppetry rigs again, but because "Romulus" is a very simple, straightforward story.  Once the facehuggers are loose, everyone just needs to get out alive.     

So for the most part, "Alien: Romulus" is everything I want out of an "Alien" movie.  It presents some new monsters to have nightmares about, introduces some new heroes to root for, and delivers some really excellent chills and thrills.  If you're here to get your questions answered about the space jockey or the "Prometheus" Engineers, this is not the movie for you.  If you're here to scream at the monsters and root for the girl with the big gun to make it to the end, I recommend it.  Like "Twisters" earlier this year, the movie may be part  of a franchise, but it works because it gets the fundamentals right.  "Alien: Romulus" is genuinely scary, gruesome, exciting, and a great time at the movies.  Sequels are being planned, of course, but I'm only interested if they keep the scope limited and the stories dead simple.  For "Alien," you really don't need anything else.  

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