Disturbing Choice Drags Down Otherwise OK Alien Franchise Film (Spoiler)
I feel like I say this a lot, but I wasn’t super optimistic walking into Alien: Romulus. While Alien is a stone cold classic, I do feel that the sequels are by and large diminishing returns. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy seeing the Xenomorph as much as the next person, but I sometimes wish that Alien movies were allowed to explore different areas a bit more (ala the Predator series and Prey, or the various Star Wars series on Disney+).
Alien: Romulus begins with a group of young people stranded on a Weyland-Yutani Corporation mining colony where there are zero days of sunlight a year. Our main character, Rain, is denied travel permits and sent to the mines so she and her Synthetic, Andy, go to commiserate with their friends. This is where the plan is hatched, to break into an abandoned space station, steal their cryopods and head to somewhere that’s green. I’m sure you’re wondering why the Weyland-Yutani Corporation would abandon a giant space station and I’ll give you one guess.
If you guessed aliens you’d be correct! This film takes place between Alien and Aliens so I guess the company has managed to keep a lid on this Xenomorph business but boy are there a lot of them on this space station and they look great. It appears that this crop of Xenomorphs are largely practical — there’s some behind the scenes images of animatronics and puppets and they really steal this movie. From here forward it is a fairly standard group of people vs. Xenomorph movie — there are some creative action and chase pieces, some chest bursting, a visit from a former installment member, all the makings of a good legacy sequel.
David Jonsson gives an awesome performance as Andy, the Synthetic. The rest of the cast is fine. There’s some slightly inconsistent accent work but they carry the action set pieces fine. There’s also some fairly noticeable deep fake work and the effects take a dip in quality in the third act.
Things go off the rails in the third act and honestly, I found it so off putting I am not sure I can recommend this film. I’ll put my conclusion above the break in case you want to avoid the spoiler. I give Alien: Romulus (20th Century Studios; R; 1 hr 59 mins) a 2.5 out of 5, with a content warning for the below-mentioned scene.
Warning: big spoiler ahead.
There is a character who is established fairly early on as pregnant, and the third act is mostly about her miscarrying/giving birth and it is brutally violent and gory and very different from the rest of the film. Personally, I felt this content wasn’t handled super well and it felt very exploitative. This combined with the fact the person who got chest-bursted in this film was also a woman made the entire film seem like it was just presenting women with ambition as these corrupted vessels for life and nothing more. I do not associate Alien films with “putting women in their place” but that was very subtextually present here. The aesthetic and tone of the film were so dialed into what I loved about Alien but the subtext made it fairly clear that something was lost along the way. This may have been Fede Alvarez’s attempt to subvert what an Alien movie is but it really didn’t connect for me. But if we’ve learned anything from science fiction the only valid form of feminism is a gun-toting paragon of strength, no interiority allowed.
