Movie Review: Alien: Romulus

Young miners ransack a derelict Weyland-Yutani ship in a decaying orbit around their planet, only to find a wholly alien threat onboard.

Alien for the Gen Z moviegoer, and I’m mostly saying that because the cast are older Gen Z. It makes some marketing sense, as Alien: Covenant, the previous film, had a mostly Gen Y cast getting slaughtered. Time to bring in some fresher meat for the grind. There’s also a “neuro-divergent*” character that the Zoomers tend to adore, a defective android appropriately named “Andy.”

First, I’ll mention one functional plot element I will praise the writers for. It’s really small, especially in light of the endless dozens of ridiculous plot contrivances seen in Romulus. But I thought I’d find something positive. The multiple facehuggers onboard the Romulus were kept securely in stasis, even after the ship’s systems went all haywire after the accident. A billion dollar astro-tech corporation is going to have the top 1% of Earth’s scientists and engineers working for them on this super-secret project, so they’re going to take every precaution when transporting an outrageously dangerous bioweapon. Also, the writers should not give them the Big Stupids™, because scientists and engineers just don’t have it unless it’s being addressed in the plot. The ship’s systems required a high-level security clearance to remove the batteries (basically) that kept the bioweapon from being released. Alien: Romulus‘ writers didn’t force us to accept one of the Gen Z scavengers backpedaling into a single mechanical lever and oopsie-doo unleash unholy terror aboard the ship. You had to do something very intentional to release them. There’s plenty of other demonstrations of the Big Stupids™ elsewhere in the film, but this, thankfully, isn’t one of them**.

The stasis-facehuggers were a great set up to kick off the major second act complication that the writers didn’t take up, and the writers’ own Big Stupids™ really come into play. They should have had Rain install the chip in Andy that made him function “normally” before they got to the facehugger chamber, because a rogue android having security clearance to remove the batteries makes no sense. That clearance would only be granted to certain people onboard the ship, one of them being Rook, whose functioning chip Andy received. That way, some of the Gen Z scavengers, who knew Andy had changed, post-chip, and became more of a “normal” android, would suspect Andy of releasing the facehuggers on purpose. Is he still an ally, or is he secretly going about Weyland-Yutani’s business? Was he always like that, despite Rook’s chip? The Gen Z Meat Samples already have a healthy distrust of the corporation, so the suspicion would come easily and foremost. The parts depicting Andy actually being beholden to Weylan-Yutani directives would have to be written out or shown later; there’s a lot of reduced tension if, even if the characters aren’t sure of Andy’s loyalty and intentions, if the audience already knows.

A few drawbacks. In the scene where they walk through the room with the facehuggers hanging out, why not just send Andy through by himself if the facehuggers would only latch onto natural humans? Rook, an android modeled after Ash from the original Alien, reprises his role as the White Male Villain. The face of Ian Holm, the late actor who portrayed Ash, was CGI’ed onto Rook and I think the SFX folks thought the fact that Rook was badly damaged and mostly viewed through a ship monitor, that it would cover up any uncanny valley effects of the doctoring. It didn’t work that well. In the prologue, Weyland-Yutani recovered the original xenomorph corpse that Ripley jettisoned at the end of Alien, so they knew about the events that happened on the Nostromo at some point. But in the deposition scene in Aliens (featuring a great bit of acting by Sigourney Weaver), they had no knowledge of the xenomorphs at all. Granted, they were technically government bureaucrats and not Weyland-Yutani executives, but must have been some intense intel-sharing among elites at that time. Maybe they were playing dumb, or maybe the xenomorph thing was privileged information, only known at the higher levels of government, but the situation does raise some continuity questions.

Dialogue was good in some parts, average mostly, and a few really bad callbacks to earlier movies. Rain’s final words echo Ripley’s monologue at the end of Alien—an obvious, and forced, memberberry. The most obvious callback was, after Andy killed a particularly irksome xenomorph, said Ripley’s “get away from her, you bitch!” line from Aliens, and it fell very flat for me, even without the memberberry aspect to it. Andy was too innocent to curse in the first place. You could make it work if he always bowdlerized his language throughout the movie, and Rain or some other characters kept telling him it’s okay to swear, and he just couldn’t get it out, but he managed to croak it out when he killed the xenomorph…then it would make some sense as a fun mini-character development. But the line came out of nowhere. Another way, I think the biggest way, the line didn’t work is that there was a strong mother-daughter dynamic between Ripley and Newt in Aliens. Though Ripley wasn’t quite at fault for abandoning her daughter, she nonetheless felt enormous guilt about all of it, and caring for Newt was her vehicle for redemption. The “bitch” line was a emphatic testament to her reestablished motherhood as she protected Newt from the Alien Queen—two moms battling it out. Lastly, calling an murderous alien a “bitch” is funny the first time you hear it, and we all know something gets less funny if you repeat it.

I was hoping Romulus would finish off the prequel trilogy started with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, because there needs to be a link from the Engineers and their experiments, to the derelict ship that the Nostromo finds on LV-426, to the emergence of the Alien Queen. We know Walter One did a decade of nonstop experiments and documentation to get to something close to the standard facehuggers and the ovomorph. We’d need to know what happened after the end of Covenant, with David, his barfed-up facehugger embryos, and the hibernating colonists, all en route to Origae-6, and all of that, but the bridge from that to the rest of the story is missing, at least in mainline film format.

There are some clues in the Alien: Covenant – Advent, where David talks about the Engineers’ Planet 4 home world, their history and society, and his experiments. It was going to take 7 years for David and the remaining colonists in stasis onboard the Covenant to reach Origae-6. It would be the year 2111 then, and Alien takes place in 2122—that’s 11 years, plenty of time for some crucial things to happen. What I would do for this final film to connect the story, is depict some kind of war or conflict on or around Origae-6. You’ll have the colonists, many of them gone from David’s forced impregnation with the facehuggers, fighting against the resulting xenomorphs. You could have a faction of the Engineers involved, either fighting against the colonists and the xenomorphs, or taking a side, and another faction of Engineers taking the opposing side. There seemed to be an internecine conflict with the Engineers, because some of them held to the quasi-religious impregnation rituals in the past David explains in Advent, and others would seek to stop those rituals from being revived. Many of the Alien mainline films have been sci-fi/horror, and there hasn’t been any other action-oriented movie like Aliens at all.

Unrelated: the theater ran a preview for the movie 1992, which is one of the worst titles I’ve come across. The movie takes place during the Rodney King riots of 1992. Why not just name it King of 1992? Maybe it puts too much focus on King when it’s about a group of normal folks dealing with the aftermath, but still…I’d put a lot more brain effort into coming up with a better title.

* Despite my distaste for neologisms to cater to the overly-sensitive, I like the term “neuro-divergent.” Before that came along, there really wasn’t a neutral term to describe people whose mind works differently than most others’. We had repurposed words like “special” or “different” or “slow,” which were really attempts to politely call someone “nutty” or “psycho,” which in turn are pretty poor labels if you’re talking about someone non-threatening. “Neuro-divergent” is a good label that can encompass lots of different types of mental machinations that diverge from the majority.

** Mauler points out some things particular to Romulus, and the Alien story as a whole, that indicates there’s a lot of Big Stupids™ going on, but also some Big Smarts™.