A L I E N Romulus

Holm On The Range

A  L  I  E  N  Romulus
Directed by Fede Alvarez
USA/UK/Canada/Hungary/New Zealand
2024  20th Century Fox
UK cinema release print

Warning: There are things people need to be starting a conversation about so, yeah, there are huge spoilers in here. Don’t read if you don’t want to know.

Okay, before I start with this somewhat problematic review, I’ll preface it by saying that Alien Romulus is the best Alien movie since the fourth in the series, Alien Resurrection (and certainly blows away the last two terrible movies). It’s entertaining and feels like it’s part of the Alien franchise but also has a level of suspense which is up there with the best of them. So, before I cover the plot set up and then get into the pros and cons, I want you to understand that I had a, mostly, pretty good time with this ethically unsound film. But, as I said in the spoiler warning, there’s a bigger conversation to be had.

Okay, so the set up is that the film starts off with a ship picking up a certain piece of ‘Alien’ debris from the floating, exploded remains of the Nostromo, which Ripley destroyed near the end of the original Alien (how it got in that piece of debris, though, I have no idea... she was well clear of the Nostromo by the time she did that) and, a few months or more have moved on since this opening scene, is my guess but, the movie properly takes place between Alien and Aliens (yeah, their will be reviews of those movies coming to the blog at some point, when I get around to taking the Blu Ray set out of shrink wrap and revisiting them one day). So this film really is set some 20 years after the first movie... and many decades before the second one (so, sometime while Ellen Ripley is sleeping away in hypersleep).  

The film features a group of ‘young adults’ being exploited on a Weyland-Yutani colony on some planet when some of them get wind that an abandoned space station, comprising of two halves (the titular Romulus, where the action mostly takes place and Remus), is about 36 hours away from burning up in their planet’s atmosphere. Everybody wants to get off the colony and Weyland-Yutani are pulling a Catch 22 on anyone who reaches their years of servitude in their mines, upping the number of years when they get to their agreed target).

So, with the help of Rain (played by Cailee Spaeny... who I’ve seen in a few things and is a pretty good actress) and her android Andy (or synthetic human, if you like, played by David Jonsson), they stage a heist on the apparently deserted space station to try and steal the hypersleep chambers on board so they can get to a more welcoming and functioning colony.  And of course, things happen when they get up there as the station was the ship where the dead xenomorph and other things ended up and... yeah... experiments have been done. Everyone on the station is actually dead and its full of face huggers and big aliens alike. Also, something happens to up the ante because the ship shifts a couple of degrees and there’s now less than an hour before the craft burns up in the atmosphere. So the film becomes a race against time... and some other, added biological complications... while what’s left of our raggedy band try to survive the running time as best they can.

Okay, so the good stuff first because, the other stuff is going to take me a while to sum up, I suspect.

The acting is brilliant. All the cast in this are great and with a special mention for the phenomenal talent that is David Jonsson, who plays not one but two very different iterations of the same synthetic human (that’s not a spoiler, you know what he is right from the start). I won’t give away why but, yeah, he does an amazing job throughout this movie, it has to be said.

And the film looks a lot like the first two movies, somehow mixing outdated looking ‘future speculation’ technology from the first two films with modern day expectations to a degree that it does, at this moment in time at any rate, seem to seamlessly blend in with those first few earlier outings in the franchise. And Benjamin Wallfisch’s score (sadly unavailable as a proper CD at time of writing) is suitably sedate and sinister in a not dissimilar vein to what Jerry Goldsmith and, to an extent, James Horner were doing in the first two films.

Plus, it’s chock ful of suspense and ‘oh no, I can’t believe you just did that’ moments. And the full size aliens are felt rather than seen a lot of the time... only really overly used in an Aliens inspired shootout in zero gravity towards the end of the film. So this stuff is all pitch perfect and there are some lovely call backs to the other films such as sound samples, computer screen displays and even one of those nodding/drinking ducks I like so much which were prominent in the original movie. Now to the big spoilers... you were warned...

Yes, there’s an alien/human hybrid in this movie. But it is kinda terrifying this time and works a heck of a lot better than the one they came up with in the fourth film in the series (which looked more like a Casper The Friendly Ghost Alien and was the one bad thing about that entry). It retains some H. R. Gigerish details on an essentially humanoid frame and, yeah, it’s relatively effective (in the lighting they use... I suspect it looks awful in broad daylight but these kind of movies are always about smoke and mirrors anyway and it works effectively here).

Okay, lets look at the bad stuff then.

Those call backs to the other movies are not subtle (which half works some of the time) but some of them are waaay too much. Certain lines and even paragraphs of dialogue associated with other actors in the franchise seem like they’ve just been pasted into the mouths of the characters here, to the extent that it feels like those actors are stepping out of character just to get the call backs in. You will definitely know them when you see/hear them and some of this stuff was just popping me out of the movie... because that’s what it seemed the characters kept doing. Popping out of the movie to make a ‘cool reference’.

Also, ridiculously, some of those homages don’t go far enough. If you’re going to reference the long, voyeuristic shot of Ripley in vest and knickers getting into the space suit at the end of Alien, maybe hold the shot longer than a second... the whole point of the way that first one was shot in that scene seemed to be to enhance the sexuality of the actress to the audience gaze, so this small nod seems undercooked, for sure. Why have it at all?

And, by the way, future generations who decide to watch these movies in order of when the story takes place, are not going to get half of the references yet because they haven’t taken place so far in the order they are watching it in. They may well think, for instance, that Corporal Hicks’ gun tuition speech from Aliens is a call back to this movie, if they don’t pay attention to old timey release dates. It just doesn’t really work.

Then we have the other big problem with the movie... which has a couple issues tied up in it.

So perhaps the biggest call back in the movie is the return of Ian Holm as an android from the same model series (and identical looking) as the android he played in the first movie, Ash. This one is called Rook, presumably to try and link it into Lance Hendrickson’s Bishop character from Aliens, Alien 3 and, kinda, Alien Vs Predator but... well let’s put it this way... it’s way much more than a cameo. The studio has resurrected this dead actor with the use of CGI and mimicry to give a new performance (albeit one which includes some dialogue from the first film) and he’s in several scenes and is a main plot point.

So two things about this because, his inclusion makes this movie morally reprehensible.

Firstly, it looks pretty bad. This CGI actor replacement rarely works well and this looks just as bad and fake as Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher did in Rogue One (reviewed here). It looks like someone’s just pasted the face on in Photoshop and it doesn’t quite match, looking really flat and useless.

Secondly, when Harold Ramis was brought back as a ghost for a few scenes in Ghostbusters Afterlife (reviewed here) everyone was accepting of this because the usage was respectful and, heck, everyone knows that in his lifetime, Ramis was trying to get another Ghostbusters sequel off the ground for decades so, he would have agreed to it. Ditto when a computer generated younger version of actress Sean Young was used for Blade Runner 2049 (reviewed here)... she was on board with it and had been in talks with the film makers. But, honestly, I don’t care how involved his family or estate were in this decision (or how much money they were compensated... if they were, I hope... that’s another can of worms), Holm may well have decided to not take part in this one. He may not have liked the script. He may well have thought it would diminish his classic performance in the first movie (which I feel it kinda does but, that’s just me). And, no, I don’t think Hollywood should be allowed to bring back dead actors as anything more than a fleeting glimpse, or cameo. The problem here is that it’s a whole performance of a major character and, not only that, it feels really flat and unreal.

And, bottom line, did we really need him to be here for yet another call back to previous elements of the franchise when another actor/character would have done just fine and the film is already overpacked with references anyway. Bringing back a dead actor to just fizz up your movie is a really low move in my opinion and I really hope Hollywood stops this terrible practice soon. It’s one thing to see a fleeting glimpse of George Reeves as Superman in The Flash (reviewed here) but it’s quite another to create a new performance. It just feels wrong to me and, frankly, should be outlawed.

But that’s me done with Alien Romulus, I think. Good effects (apart from the CGI Ian Holm, which just looks bad), great acting, some nice callbacks (too many) and, apart from the ethical issues, which may give you pause, a mostly great time at the movies.