‘Alien: Romulus’ Review
Xenomorph stew.
SET BETWEEN THE EVENTS of Alien (in which the crew of the Nostromo is almost wiped out by a single alien with acid for blood because a greedy corporation wants to study said alien) and Aliens (in which a platoon of space marines is almost wiped out by a bunch of aliens with acid for blood because a greedy corporation wants to study said aliens), Alien: Romulus involves a band of thieves attempting to steal valuable equipment from a space station almost being wiped out by first one, and then a bunch of, aliens, all of which have acid for blood. Why are all of these motherf—in’ aliens on this motherf—in’ space station? You guessed it! A greedy corporation wants to study them.
The whole thing feels like it’s cobbled together from the pieces of other Alien movies. Romulus borrows a character from the first, the industrial look of the mining planet from the third, the weapons used by the space marines in the second, the inciting goo from the prequels, some creature designs from the fourth, and bits of dialogue, verbatim, from several. The line between homage and theft is slim, and this movie gleefully hops back and forth across it.
Rain (Cailee Spaeny) lives on a mining planet where the sun literally never shines; her parents dead and her only companion the CPU-damaged synthetic Andy (David Jonsson), Rain believes she has worked enough to pay for travel to another, better planet. One where the sun shines and the mines don’t fill your lungs with carcinogens. Except, oops, the company arbitrarily changed the amount of work that needed to be done to pay for the flight, so she’s here for another five to six years.
Realizing she’s never going to get off the planet legally, Rain agrees to a plan hatched by a group of Lost Boys—Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Navarro (Aileen Wu)—to take a ship into orbit, hack into an abandoned corporate space station with the aid of Andy, and steal the cryopods needed to make the journey to Rain’s desired destination. This space station is divided into halves, Romulus and Remus, and seems to have been an experimental lab working on, well, you know.
Alien: Romulus has some breathtaking visuals, particularly in the shots of outer space: Whereas the original Alien’s journey into space was intentionally empty, Romulus offers up a slightly more cluttered vision of life in the vacuum. Here we have a derelict, damaged space station above a scarred, storm-covered mining planet, the ice rings of which serve as a deadly hazard to our merry band of thieves. And it is genuinely tense in a chest-tightening sort of way: Director Fede Álvarez showed he understood how to convey movement through constricted space in his brilliant horror-thriller Don’t Breathe. He plays with light and shadows and movement in a way that keeps audiences guessing, and there’s a scare late in this movie that I guarantee will elicit high-pitched shrieks of terror from the assembled followed by nervous laughter. This movie is kind of goofy and gratingly reliant on self-referential mythology, but it is effective, and that counts for a lot.
Of particular note in Romulus is Jonsson’s performance, which is split into two distinct halves. At first he is clearly damaged—physically weak, able to do little but repeat the dad jokes programmed into him by Rain’s father—and then, after an upgrade on the space station, he gets better. From a stuttering, stumbling mess to a confident, though darker, whole, it’s a powerful performance from Jonsson, one that renders the film’s theme—that corporations don’t care for you, just what you can do for them—almost palpable. Indeed, the subtext becomes text when, midway through the film, we learn that the upgrade Andy received on Romulus overwrote his primary command—to do what’s best for Rain—with a new directive: “To do what’s best for the company.” Needless to say, Rain and her friends are now expendable, except insofar as they serve the greedy corporation’s goal of acquiring a Xenomorph for study.
And here’s where things get … sticky, ethically. There’s a fairly major spoiler coming, so I’ll put it after this image if you’re worried about that sort of thing.
The greedy corporation, of course, is Weyland-Yutani. As this series has evolved, the overarching story has shifted from a survival tale focused on Ellen Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) centuries-long effort to fight off both the dreaded Xenomorphs and also general corporate greed, to, specifically, the efforts of the corporation founded by Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce in Prometheus and Alien Covenant) to harness the power of the Xenomorphs in an effort to improve upon humanity in a way that would allow the corporation to expand galactic business operations.1
Which brings me back to Andy and his mentor on Romulus. When Rain and her friends get to Romulus, they find a devastated command center with an acid hole running through the middle of it that has destroyed the lower body of a synthetic. When they turn the synthetic on, it is revealed to be the same model as Ash (Ian Holm) from Alien. And, indeed, the thing is played by Ian Holm. It is this Holm-portrayed synthetic that informs Andy he has his new prime directive, that the only thing that matters to him is the good of the corporation.
Except, of course, that it’s not Holm, who died in 2020 at the age of 88 from Parkinson’s. The film wasn’t shot until 2023. One imagines that Holm’s estate gave permission for this, and I’m sure we’ll see many loving stories about his affinity for the series and how the genius special effects people used the miracles of modern science to bring him back to life, and how they’re paying homage to a great actor, and how this is no different from the appearance of Peter Cushing’s CGI ghost in Rogue One, and on and on.
I guess. But my real takeaway here is that Ian Holm’s work on behalf of 20th Century Studios and the Disney Corporation is never done. Is it what’s best for him? I dunno. He’s not here to say. But I do know it’s what’s best for the company and its customers, who will undoubtedly swoon at the return of this classic villain. And in the end, that’s all that matters.
Interestingly, this shift first reveals itself in the (I believe) non-canonical masterpiece of corporate synergy, Alien vs. Predator, in which one Charles Weyland (Lance Henriksen, who also played the synthetic Bishop in Aliens and appeared as a Weyland-Yutani official in Alien 3) organizes a trip to the Antarctic and uncovers a Predator temple where Aliens are hatched to be hunted by young warriors. That I know all of this off the top of my head is deeply depressing.