Review: 'Alien: Romulus' Falls Into A Black Hole Of Fan Service

By Jason Adams | Film | August 16, 2024 |

By Jason Adams | Film | August 16, 2024 |

The Alien franchise has penetrated its nightmare path through a lot of murky moral quandaries in the 45 years since Ridley Scott’s original film, slicing up corporate greed with the same razor-tipped talons that it’s torn at changing concepts of motherhood with. But from where I’ve stood as a lifelong fan, the films have always been an interrogation of one particularly modern malady—the mounting confusion between the “real” and the “artificial” and the uncanny chasm of horror that yawns in the microscopic spaces between.

The franchise’s best characters have always been gritty regular folks, types with dirt under their nails and pockmarks in their skin, thrust into a future-scape so immense and unfathomable—all the infinity of the cosmos, basically—that their eensy authenticity becomes foregrounded by the contrast. From the space truckers of the first film to the quirky mercenaries of Resurrection, each film has made a point of putting its sense of character, of humanity, first—it’s built, you might say, right into the franchise’s DNA.

Because their human imperfections must then come into conflict with and be refracted through two equally disturbing and dehumanizing lenses. First, there are the “synthetics,” the man-created robots that look just like us (save their white blood and balloon-ish innards) and who must continually, across all of these films, tussle with their feelings about their own artificiality. (Scott’s prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are especially fascinated by the triangulation between god, man, and man-made gods—our creation and destruction all intertwined in an elongated helix formation shaped like Michael Fassbender.)

And then there are the monsters. The Xenomorphs, facehuggers and chestbursters, oh my, with acid for blood and slobbering little metallic-fanged mouths that shoot out of slightly larger slobbering metallic-fanged mouths. And these Giger-designed creations are so (dare I say) alien to us, so foreign to humans, that the only conceivable reaction to them is total mind-melted terror. Even if nobody can hear you scream in space, you scream, and you run, and you keep running across centuries and solar systems to get the fuck away from them.

The tension of these films has always been milked from the breakdown of the barriers between the human, the utterly inhuman, and the cyborgs in the middle. Not just genetic and biological breakdowns—although the films have certainly gotten a lot of deliciously disgusting mileage out of its body horror, to put it mildly. But morally. Our Supreme Court might’ve ruled that corporations are people, but the callous indifference represented by Weyland-Yutani (aka “The Company”) in these films has always been shown to be an aid to the invasive species and a complete betrayal of humanity. And along with it go any characters, human or constructed, who take The Company’s side. Paul Reiser’s nice-guy slimeball Burke in Aliens is the standout example, but every film in the franchise has foregrounded teasing us with which side its android character will take. That is central to all of it.

Which brings us (finally) to Alien: Romulus, the ninth film in the franchise—hey it’s nine films, I get to have a long lead-in—and the one that is out in theaters this weekend. Directed by Fede Alvarez—who surprised us all by successfully rebooting the Evil Dead franchise eleven years ago by injecting into it a nasty nihilism that put Sam Raimi’s delicious slapstick on blast—Romulus weirdly feels like both a standalone movie and a greatest hits package in one. (I thought repeatedly of JJ Abrams’ Star Wars: The Force Awakens, and take that as you may.) There are moments of tremendous beauty on display here, and there are moments of rollicking rollercoaster-ride fun. And there are moments of fan service so clunkily offensive to a fan who loves being serviced that I nearly tore all of my skin off right there in the theater. But more than anything, this is a movie about which side the damn android will take and what that means for us.

Romulus stars Cailee Spaeny (faultless and terrific) as Rain, an indentured mine-worker who’s worked her hands to the bone (and watched her parents work themselves into their early graves) for The Company, all under the promise that she’ll eventually earn herself and her brother a ticket to other-world paradise. Her brother Andy (David Jonsson) is a slightly-malfunctioning android that Rain’s father bonded together with Rain as a child—Andy’s main directive is to help Rain achieve whatever Rain wants to achieve. And Rain in turn has learned kindness and empathy having to take care of this simple (and widely despised by those around them) figure. They make for an inseparable pair.

And if you’ve been wondering in the lead-up to its release why this film is called Romulus, then everything I said in the last paragraph might tip its hat to you—if you know the ancient tale of the twins Romulus and Remus and how the formation of the Roman Empire only came at the expense of the latter, anyway. But no worries—the film fills you in if you don’t.

Because when The Company flips Rain the bird on that whole “not working herself to death thing,” she decides to take her friend-with-benefits Tyler (Archie Renaux) up on his nutty idea to hijack a piece of space-junk floating just above the atmosphere, one that he somehow knows has the exact tech they need in order to make the trip to paradise their own damn selves. If they can scavenge that stuff before somebody else, they’re golden. Off to the wild free frontier. But whaddya know, it’s not going to be that simple—the space junk turns out to be an entire abandoned space station. One separated into two halves. Halves named (say it with me) Romulus and Remus.

So while the Alien franchise’s longstanding obsession with motherhood gets a great big nod in Romulus’s last act (and don’t worry, you will not miss it, I promise you) what Romulus is more concerned with—if you could say it’s concerned with much of anything besides making you jump in your seat every five minutes, and I’m not totally sure of that—turns out to be siblinghood. (As was Alvarez’s Evil Dead, which also hinged on a sibling bond.) Rain and Andy are the only characters who leave any impression here—Rain’s friends who tag along on this space-junk caper don’t get defined much beyond their stock types, and pretty clearly boil down to cannon fodder from the moments they’re introduced.

But in this way Alien: Romulus does manage to find itself a fresh sliver of humanity worth prodding around in—the bond between human and android as community, as fraternal hope, teetering on a terrifying abyss. It’s very right now, of this moment, as our own enmeshing with technology becomes less escapable by the millisecond. We need to make peace with our half selves, our manufactured skins, because our future maybe really does seem to depend on it in some very important, very vital ways. And somewhere, underneath all Romulus’ characters behaving like absolute and total buffoons from start to finish, these ideas are indeed blinking like a reboot light.

That said, ultimately, Romulus feels undone by a corporately-infused sense of risk aversion. (The blasted Company strikes again!) This franchise was once famous for bringing in a new visionary director who’d reshape its world to fit their vision. But the bits of Alvarez’s former work on display here—the aforementioned sibling bond out of Evil Dead but also the “dumb kids on a crime spree” plot comes right from his film Don’t Breathe—all feel crammed here into somebody else’s monster. What should be simple, and what is being sold as being simple, instead becomes knotted and torturously devoted to what came before. It proves too big for Alvarez—maybe it’s too big and tangled for anybody at this point. I hope not, but maybe.

When the film literally Frankensteins itself an inexplicable monster in its last act out of feeling the need to bridge the franchise’s ill-fitting pieces, it feels less like the big weird swing that it ought to than it does the glop that got shat out of the machine at the end of David Cronenberg’s The Fly. All metal and flesh and twitching pools of pus. It just don’t make no sense. It’s goopy, often fun, and it is very clearly made with a fanboy’s love and a heap of fine craftmanship on display. But the pieces just don’t fit. It’s three halves searching for a whole and once again humanity pays the price.