(Bloomberg) -- The scariest thing in Alien: Romulus is not one of the towering xenomorphs, its jowls dripping with goo. Nor is it the army of fast-moving facehuggers pursuing our heroes.
No, the most frightening aspect of this entry into the 45-year-old franchise is the choice to use the face and voice of an actor from the original movie who’s no longer alive. It’s an unintentional, chilling vision of the future that has nothing to do with chest-bursting monsters.
You might find this palatable. For me, it ruined what was otherwise a fun, icky trip to space.
The trouble every new Alien movie has is that it’s required to compete with two unimpeachable masterpieces of the sci-fi genre: Ridley Scott’s 1979 Alien and James Cameron’s 1986 follow-up, Aliens.
Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), the most recent additions to the seven-movie canon, not including the silly Predator crossovers, were prequels directed by Scott that went in a more mythological direction, trying to unearth the origins of this fictional universe.
Alien: Romulus, directed by Fede Álvarez, is the first outing in the now-Disney-owned IP and an often successful attempt to return to the grittiness of its older forebears. The action is set in 2142—which is 20 years after the events of Alien and 37 years before Aliens—and centers on a group of young people marooned on a mining colony operated by the sinister Weyland-Yutani Corporation. They are imprisoned by lengthy labor contracts and susceptible to the spread of disease.
One of these twentysomethings is Rain Carradine, played by Civil War star Cailee Spaeny, who’s joined at the proverbial hip with Andy (David Jonsson). She refers to him as her brother, but he’s really a malfunctioning synthetic (bio-mechanical android) programmed by her now-dead father to protect her.
When a group of her friends hatches a plan to steal some cryogenic pods from an abandoned vessel drifting in space with the intention to use them to escape their circumstances, Rain reluctantly agrees, knowing those chambers are the only way she can find a better life on a planet nine years’ travel away. Naturally, this all goes horribly wrong.
What Rain and her compatriots encounter is not a marooned ship, but the remnants of a space station named Renaissance with two wings—Romulus and Remus—where the human and android employees of Weyland-Yutani were running experiments that involved harvesting the titular xenomorphs. All those people are now dead: These new interlopers are next.
Alien: Romulus thrives in its horror action. Álvarez is known for his brutal experiments in the scary space like 2016’s Don’t Breathe and the 2013 Evil Dead remake, and he utilizes those talents well here, finding increasingly creative ways for our heroes to battle and be terrorized by xenomorphs in their various stages of development.
It’s a well-worn formula for these films: You know at a certain point mayhem will descend and guts will be spewed, but Álvarez has a lot of fun hitting his marks in those confines. In one sequence, the humans (and humanoid) must silently move through a room crawling with the squirmy, scorpion-esque facehuggers ready to pounce if they detect any body heat. In another, they use a lack of gravity to their advantage while the slick adult aliens swarm. It all culminates in a wonderfully vile final boss fight.
During the early scenes, you can almost taste the wet, tainted air of the mining colony, where its perpetual darkness and depression is the biggest export. Later, the red hues of flashing emergency lights color the faces of the potentially doomed adventurers. The outpost is hurtling toward destruction by way of a beautiful but dangerous ring of space rock, which lends the plot a ticking clock structure. If Rain doesn’t escape the maws of the xenomorphs, she’ll certainly die anyway in that crash.
The heart of the film, and the best performances, belongs to Spaeny and Jonsson, as they navigate a strange, uneven relationship. The other characters invading the Renaissance alongside them are thinly drawn, with dialogue occasionally so muddled it’s hard to understand. Initially, the movie even has a bit of a young adult vibe with this ragtag group of gorgeous ingenues. But Rain and Andy give the narrative some emotional heft.
Rain cares for Andy as if he were human, but the sadness in Spaeny’s eyes conveys that she knows this isn’t the case. As Andy, meanwhile, Jonsson has the trickiest job at hand.
At the start, he charmingly spouts corny jokes with the affect of a neurodivergent child, but when Rain modifies his programming by inserting a chip from a nearly destroyed model she finds on the Renaissance, his demeanor changes. He becomes subtly menacing, echoing other synthetics we’ve seen in this world—namely Ian Holm’s Ash from Alien. It’s a skillfully executed performance that highlights Jonsson, who was previously on the HBO show Industry.
But it’s here where Romulus goes deeply wrong. Holm, who died in 2020, has been digitally revived to play Rook, the Renaissance’s resident robot who gives Andy his new directive. (The vocal performance is by an actor named Daniel Betts, much as how Rogue One: A Star Wars Story revived Peter Cushing as Grand Moff Tarkin.)
It’s an upsetting, eerie choice that’s both unnecessary—he’s not playing the same synthetic as the first film—and a simply creepy exhumation of the dead, the kind of thing a villainous enterprise like the Weyland-Yutani Corporation would produce. Holm’s face, with that uncanny valley deepfake sheen, is an unexpectedly large presence throughout the film, and is an example of the worst instincts of both Romulus and Hollywood at large, which is likely to feature more and more of these kinds of grotesqueries as AI gets more advanced. This sort of manipulation was one of the sticking points of the actors strike last year, after all.
Whenever the film makes a direct, sometimes ham-fisted, reference to what came before—including regurgitating a very famous line—it can be groan-inducing. While undoubtedly some fanboys cheer upon seeing a familiar face or hearing referential dialogue, it cheapens the entire effort. It’s a shame, particularly because Romulus is an utter blast when it’s a symphony of disgusting kills and nasty situations instead of a derivative and disconcerting remix.
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