Flasz On Film

We live in the era of fully industrialized blockbusters where Hollywood-derived entertainment either follows well-established formulae (i.e. a shared universe McBlockbuster, a piece of branded marketing disguised as storytelling, a conveyor belt genre piece or a nostalgia sequel to a well-known property peppered with DEI casting) or risks becoming a massive box office disappointment. Therefore, the idea of staging another sequel in a well-established genre franchise like Alien comes both with a set of parameters to work within the confines of and perhaps a glimmer of hope that this time round whoever’s at the helm would refuse to base the movie on output generated by NostalGPT.  

Consequently, I was walking into the cinema filled with conflicting emotions as on one side I was excited by the prospect of watching another movie in the series and trepidatious about the distinct possibility for the movie in question to be nothing else than a nice hot bowl of disappointment stew seasoned generously with broken dreams and garnished with unmet expectations. However, I remained hopeful in part because of the vibe set by the film’s marketing campaign and the name displayed underneath the “directed by” text on the screen. Say what you will about Fede Alvarez (Evil Dead (2013), The Girl in the Spider’s Web, Don’t Breathe), and I’m not the biggest fan of at least one of his movies, but he does have a knack for creating intense experiences reliant on suspense, dread and unseasonable amounts of gore, all of which are requisite ingredients in what I’d call a reasonably successful attempt at an Alien movie. 

That and the rather specific atmosphere of a lived-in science-fiction universe inhabited by lifelike characters. Anything else is entirely optional.  

Hence, after a brief introductory scene in which an artefact found in the cloud of debris that used to be the mining ship Nostromo from the original Ridley Scott movie is found to contain what looks like the rather familiar Xenomorph-like shape, all fossilized into some kind of space endospore I presume, I was greeted by a world I recognized. Not because the filmmakers were bent on introducing me to characters I must have remembered from any of the number of movies that preceded this instalment in the series, but because the world had the ineffably recognizable smell of familiarity. You know how you can immediately feel at ease when you walk into your own house after a few weeks away or how memories flood in when you cross the threshold of your nan’s kitchen? That kind of familiarity is what I have in mind. Alien: Romulus just looks, sounds and smells like an Alien movie I could get behind because the sets look right, the props remind me of the worn-out equipment used not by space explorers of the Star Trek variety but by space proles doing a job for minimum wage, flying dangerous loads from one end of the galaxy to the other.  

That’s where Fede Alvarez positions the movie at the get-go as he introduces the viewer to Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a young orphan who works in the mines on some kind of a prole planet. She dreams of leaving this God-forsaken place where sunlight never makes it through the thick layer of clouds, but her fate seems completely controlled by the ever-powerful and insidious Weyland-Yutani corporation. Her transfer application is denied as the idea of letting worker bees leave their indentured servitude runs counter to the corporate goal of extracting every bit of their life essence and productivity, so Rain is sent to the mines. Potentially to meet her fate there.    

However, she is presented with an opportunity to take her life into her own hands as she is asked by her ex-boyfriend (Archie Renaux) and his friends to accompany them on a potentially illegal expedition to a derelict space station which is about to fly by their planet. Helped by Rain’s adoptive brother Andy (David Jonsson), who also happens to be an android reprogrammed by her father, they plan to steal whatever it is that fuels cryostasis chambers we all know and recognize from other Alien movies and leave their hellish existence the rearview mirror. 

But we all know where things are going because that derelict space station is not what it seems and the ragtag crew of space pirates on the hunt for cryostasis fuel are about to find out that the original crew of the station hadn’t necessarily disembarked of their own accord. Although not much is known, at least initially, about the reasons why this spacecraft is abandoned, any Alien fan with enough braincells to successfully pilot a spoon into their own mouth will be able to predict what’s going to happen to Rain and her friends. The “what” of it all is perfectly predictable and familiar. It’s all about the “how” of the experience, which is where Fede Alvarez looks as though he had done his homework. 

At least for a good chunk of the film, Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus navigates around the formula of what now may be a canonical nostalgia sequel by placing his bets on the combination of the atmosphere, set design, tone and very specific yet somehow subtle visual nods to the movies directed by Ridley Scott, James Cameron and David Fincher in particular. His movie feels as though it belonged in this universe, as opposed to fitting within it narratively or through a plot-related combination of happenstance, retroactive continuity or logical projection. The space station is a scary place through which he navigates his camera with great ease and where he introduces quite a few interesting and fresh ideas hoping to give his movie enough latitude to exist on its own terms… as a movie set in the Alien universe, not a movie tied to the series legacy, if that makes any sense.  

Therefore, I was a big fan of the Chekhov’s gravity reset machine, which is used on several occasions with great effect and in at least two of them becomes a basis for entire, visually distinctive and quite unforgettable, dramatic action set pieces. In a similar manner, I quite enjoyed the way Alvarez uses the facehugger and finds new ways to use the concept of a spider-like monstrosity threatening to forcibly fellate its victim and plant an egg in their lungs. As far as visual acumen goes, Alvarez paid a lot of attention to H.R. Giger’s ideas which set this film series in motion and gave it its distinctly gross allure.  

And it all works, at least initially because the Alien world, when executed by artists who know what makes it tick and how to use its elements correctly, is an incredibly immersive universe. Thus, the experience of watching this movie is quite fun… up to a point.  

Unfortunately, you can only hold in a fart for so long. Furthermore, according to a longstanding urban myth (and I did fact-check it with ChatGPT and confirmed it as completely bogus, so don’t you go around telling people I told you this is true, OK?) if you keep holding in your farts, the gas buildup in your intestines will make its way back into your bloodstream where it will redissolve, recirculate back into your lungs and expel through your mouth… thus making your breath smell like doo-doo.  

That’s what’s happening here in Alien: Romulus because all this time—a bit more than half of the film’s running time—the filmmakers successfully sell this idea that they’re not going to become prey to the cultural nostalgia sequel trend and fall back in line with all other countless formulaic legacy sequels we see march through the main stage of the popular culture like college graduates collecting their diplomas and disappearing off-stage to join the queue of freshly-minted degree holders lining up to get a job at a local Starbucks. That they somehow believe the tone, mood and atmosphere combined with a handful of really cool ideas and Fede Alvarez’s signature penchant for gory violence would be more than enough to make this movie a success.

But somehow or other, an odiously sulfurous smell begins to perfume the air, as it were.

Circumventing the NostalGPT formula entirely? No, sir. This would be a fantasy, and we live in a stark reality of profit-driven entertainment instigated, supervised and bankrolled by bean-counting managerial types beholden to their Wall Street backers and their seemingly bottomless appetite for revenue. Therefore, it was a matter of time before Alien: Romulus would succumb to its teenage desire to be a part of the club as opposed to stepping in front of the pack and suffering the blinding daze of the limelight illuminating its kisser with all its perceived imperfections.  

So, after a period of squirming and trying to hold in the foul stench of nostalgia sequel formula, it all comes out with a vengeance and pierces the viewer’s serenity with the symphony of fan service flatulence like you haven’t seen since Ghostbusters: Afterlife. I honestly cannot begin to describe the turn this movie takes and decisions it seems to have kept under wraps for so long… all to be released on the unsuspecting public like a clowder of rabid kittens. From the de-aged Ian Holm serving as a “manbearpig” hybrid of exposition delivery device, a piece of overt fan service nodding back to Ridley Scott’s original and an ever-so-slightly flaccid villain for the movie as a whole, all the way to quoting Aliens verbatim (“Get away from her, you bitch!”) and recreating specific scenes from nearly all movies in the franchise, Alien: Romulus disintegrates in a manner of minutes and devolves into a brainless medley of visual references all piled upon one another like a pancake stack assembled in a hurry by a hungover sous chef with a bone to pick with his employer and a complete disregard for his job security. 

All of a sudden, this movie just turns on a dime and abandons whatever illusion of actual respect it may have displayed towards the series it attempts to add to and becomes nothing more than a did-you-see-that where’s Waldo of movie references checking off each and every movie in the franchise. Thus, you would be excused if you took out a bulletin board and started placing ticks against the list of titles of all Alien movies Fede Alvarez decided it was a good idea to wink at in the span of thirty minutes or less. The engineer from Prometheus? Check. A gross-out birth from the same movie? Yes, sir. The image of a weirdo human-alien hybrid clearly harking back to Alien: Resurrection, a movie which nobody in their right mind ever thought it was a good idea to remind people about until now? It’s here too. A few visual nods to Alien: Covenant. Several lines lifted from Alien and Aliens are here in spades. Even the concept of vastly shortening the chest-burster gestation period to minutes, which we might remember from the Alien v Predator movies, is here; presumably for convenience of not having to find reasons for the characters to stay aboard the station for long enough to allow the Xenomorphs to mature and become both lethal and human-size. And finally—come to think of it—what I decoded as an organic attempt at a franchise-accurate style and tone of the first act is also probably nothing more than an extended piece of homage to the prison planet from Alien 3 and David Fincher’s idea of meshing the Ridley Scott aesthetic with a Janet Jackson music video. 

I kid you not: within the span of the final thirty or forty minutes, Alien: Romulus devolves from inspired and refreshing to formulaic and insufferable with the way it tries to execute its obligations towards the series and bring the story together in a way you most assuredly would recognize from one of the previous and more beloved entries in the franchise. It turns out that in addition to having a penchant for the cool kind of gross stuff, Fede Alvarez is also perfectly capable of making decisions that will make you go “eww” for all the wrong reasons.  

However, as a man of science and hard facts, I have to look at Alien: Romulus holistically and, while considering the nosedive it takes in the final act, also remember that an ending does not a movie make and the preceding hour or so must have counted for something. Therefore, even though I was inches away from storming out of the cinema in protest towards the end because what I was witnessing was almost too much to bear, the whole experience averages out to just about passable because the tone and production design in combination with those few intriguing ideas are enough.

At the same time, I wish someone with a clean conscience and a confident voice had been in the room when these fan service ideas either were being introduced into the shooting script or brainstormed in a high-level meeting. But something tells me they may not have gotten the invite to the meeting or maybe they ended up hogtied and tossed into the broom closet when their opposition to the concept of turning a potentially solid movie into a kaleidoscope of low-level fan service and a diarrhoea of overt references was interpreted as mutinous and altogether disruptive to creating a value stream of shareholders disguising as Tier-1 entertainment courtesy of Tinseltown.