Why You Liked … Alien: Romulus

I’ve got this poster hanging on my wall. It’s an ad for the original Alien movie; I have been waiting what feels like a thousand years for a movie to come out that is of its equal in terms of all the messages it’s trying to tell, and the tone.

So, does Alien: Romulus do that?

It’s probably worth mentioning that Alien: Romulus is number seven in a long train of arguable train wrecks. You’ll be forgiven if you think there are just two (that’s what I’ve edited my head to say; after Alien and the sequel Aliens, as far as I’m concerned they didn’t make a decent one since then … until now).

Does Alien: Romulus redeem the franchise, or is it another also ran in the annals of history and disappointed Alien fans? Director Alvarez is no stranger to horror … but what about sci-fi? Alien is a long cry from Don’t Breathe and … that’s okay as it turns out.

What did audiences expect from this?

If you ask any Alien fan, same as any Star Wars fan, you’re going to get slightly different things, but for me it’s a return to what made Alien and Aliens brilliant. I saw this post on Reddit and I don’t think it’s understood the brief entirely. I mean sure, the Force Awakens was a pretty good Star Wars movie and it was a lot of fun, but it wasn’t that it copied A New Hope beat for beat that made it a really good Star Wars movie.

What made it a good Star Wars movie is it reminded us of what Star Wars was before Han shot second.

The Force Awakens was a return to form because it lacked a lot of the bullshit that Lucas put in when he got high on his own supply. I don’t think there’s too many people who saw the original trilogy (starting with a New Hope) who then turned up to the prequel trilogies and went, “Fuck yeah, that’s why I’m turning up,” for but I do know a lot of people who watched the Force Awakens and said, “You know, actually that’s not bad.”

We’ve got all the things we want. Scrappy underdog? Check. Evil empire? Check. Man, the Millennium Falcon even gets a dusting off – double check. With Alien: Romulus we’ve got something a little bit different. The Alien series has had its fair share of missteps; if we start with the first movie, Alien gets a great score on IMDb; Aliens, a great score on IMDb; Alien 3 … oh hang on, numbers are going down here; Alien 4 what the fuck; Covenant, not many audience members giving this one a 10 out of 10.

When we come back to Alien: Romulus, this is scoring higher. Audiences do like this. It’s probably more than a riff on what made Alien successful from a plot point of view, because Romulus remembers the things that Alien didn’t say. If we look at Alien and Aliens as a duo of movies (and forget that the others existed at all), what we see is a movie that’s set in space; we know that it’s got a alien (that’s right there in the title), but what’s not explicitly spelled out for audiences (or maybe is more explicitly spelled out in the second one) is that the monster is not actually the xenomorph.

The monster is us.

And that’s a theme that Alvarez brings forward into Alien: Romulus. It’s not just a movie about monster closets and people getting face hugged and chests bursting and all that kind of good stuff (…I mean that shit happens and it’s good time, but it’s not just a movie about jump scares). It’s something a bit deeper. It’s talking about everything that we know is wrong with society (or were predicting was going to become wrong with society). Late stage capitalism. The military industrial complex. Corporations grinding us into the fucking Earth. It’s one of the reasons why if you look at Alien on IMDb it gets a cyberpunk tag. It’s not because it’s got neon lighting; it’s because it understands that the evil is actually within us, and it’s how we work together that’ll get us out alive. Weyland Yutani make a fine return to form in this.

Cailee Spaeny’s Rain is brilliant, showing us vulnerability and strength and equal measure as she goes throughout her character arc. It’s very much a call back to earlier movies, especially Aliens, where we see the hard-as-nails Ripley going through a reverse one of these when she she meets The The Lost Child. That’s an opportunity to show a little bit of vulnerability. We get that at the start of Romulus and flip the bit to become stronger as we as we go on.

This overwhelming cyberpunk, dystopian, or late stage capitalism focus is one of the things that is so horrific about Alien, and Aliens … and Alien: Romulus. In terms of these three movies, we’ve got a story where people are doing the things they have to do not because they want to (I mean, I don’t think Ripley was going, “You know what? I really want to do I want to sleep in a coffin for seven years and go between the stars.” She was doing that because she needed to get paid). In Aliens we see that come out in full force when she can’t get a job doing anything because nobody wants to hire her. In Alien: Romulus this is reprised; we get a very hard squeeze on the mining colony that Rain starts out in and it doesn’t really get any better from there. Everything is bad, difficult, and hard for our plucky heroes and that’s where the movie kicks off.

This origin story that shows that people have to do things to get out of where they are (and then the monsters arrive).

We’ve touched a little bit on Spaeny’s Rain and how brilliant she is as an actress, but I think the hidden talent inside this movie is David Jonnson’s Andy. Now, Andy is a bit of an android (there’s always going to be one in these movies). He’s a different android to Ian Holm’s, uh, android in the first Alien (and that’s fine). There’s an arc that he goes on where he becomes stronger and more powerful, and then cedes that power to become weak again because it’s actually what’s needed for the story. It shows a really humanising side of the android. We get to see a little bit of that when we watch Aliens; the android in that is not too bad. He pulls one out for the team. 

Who we really want to pine for in terms of characters, though, is Archie Renaux’s Tyler. We know this guy is going to die; it’s written all over every trapping that the the plot has. We just don’t know how and when, and when it happens it’s brilliant. We we feel it through Rain; we feel it through everybody in the cinema with us. It was a good death, but a bad death at the same time.

What does that mean?

Alvarez has brought a tremendous cast together; what about the rest of the movie? Where it deviates most strongly from Alien and Aliens is that it starts off as a teen slasher flick. This is not space haulers, hardened criminals, or Marines. Nothing like that. This is a group of kids who are trying to find a way out. You can imagine them all hanging out together, hitting the bong, having a few beers, that kind of stuff on a Saturday night (assuming they get any time off work from the 85 hour work weeks of Weyland Yutani) and it goes on from there. We know that it’s going to end in tragedy because these people are full of idealism, and that’s the most dangerous thing that’s going to kill them in space (spoilers: it absolutely does).

In terms of its style and tone it’s pure Alien; it’s pure cyberpunk. But in terms of its return to form? I think arguably it’s closest to Prey. Prey was a movie that hit me from left field. I didn’t know how good it was going to be; I absolutely loved it because it understood the assignment. That’s the commonality between Alien: Romulus, Star Wars: the Force Awakens, and Prey.

They all understood what made those franchises super successful, and are doing their level best to deliver that to audiences. They’re not trying to copy what happened before. They’re not trying to do anything other than pay homage and channel what brought audiences to the theatres and made those movies so charming in the first place. Probably the best analogy I can bring to this is Blade Runner 2049. When that came out, that was amazing! I thought that was a brilliant movie, but what it really did well was understanding exactly what made Blade Runner better, and then built on it. That’s what Alvarez has done with Alien: Romulus; he’s understood everything that makes Alien and Aliens really good movies. He’s understood what audiences want from them. He’s understood the horror of the creature and the body horror and the monster closets — he’s got all of that down, but he’s also got down the human component that brought those crews together. 

In Alien they were all trying to help each other out. In Aliens the Marines were fighting alongside each other, and in Alien: Romulus a group of plucky kids are just trying to get by and find a new place to live together.

Copy… or improvement?

That brings us back to the point we started with: is Alien: Romulus a direct carbon copy of Alien, or is it something better? I’d argue it’s something better. It’s learned from a lot of different movies over time. It’s understood what made Star Wars: the Force Awakens such a good movie. It’s understood what Blade Runner 2049 did to bring audiences back into the theatre for that franchise, and most importantly it understood what we loved so much about the first Alien and Aliens movies.

Alvarez has delivered on his vision it’s not just that in space nobody can hear you scream. It’s that nobody can fucking hear you at all, and that is a great place for this movie to leave us. 

What do you think? did you enjoy Alien: Romulus? I’m not saying it’s the second coming of Christ; it’s certainly got some flaws, but it’s a pretty good movie. Let me know down in the comments below what you liked about it and what you didn’t.