Alien: Romulus

Ever since Star Wars: The Force Awakens netted two billion dollars for Disney it seems that the done thing, when resuscitating VHS-era franchises, is to remix the instalments that imprinted themselves on the audience. These kind of deliberately nostalgic quotations are a difficult thing to get right though, especially in such a late-arriving sequel. Obviously, co-writer-director Fede Álvarez's Alien: Romulus plunders its beautifully appointed predecessors for grist - quite apparently the gap between productions is too long and too creatively disconnected for it to be otherwise - but it's how these pieces are refined or transferred into the new whole that really matters. So, hearing notes in Benjamin Wallfisch's Romulus score that are reminiscent of Elliot Goldenthal's turbulent, shrieking Alien³ Adagio, while an astronaut thrashes around with clawed horrors in the void of space, isn't just thematically fitting, it underlines the sheer, surging quality of the sampled work. The move is celebratory too: Goldenthal's music a beloved (and perhaps underappreciated) aspect of an unfairly maligned sequel. 

What absolutely does not work though is the decision to reanimate an actor who has, sadly, already passed on. Romulus' recreation of Ian Holm's face is frozen inside a role that the actor played over forty years earlier. This is perhaps the most overt aspect of Disneyfication that Romulus is subject to: ransom demand-level amounts of money spent on deep fake AI processing (and, no doubt, scores of end-of-pipeline tweaks courtesy of multiple computer animation vendors), all to spit out a dented puppet that is far more physically repulsive than any of the other, evolving nightmares on display. These periodic reminders that Disney is very heavily invested in these uncanny regurgitations of extremely real people has never not been alarming. It goes beyond the simple revulsion of a human face untethered from time or the personality that previously animated it. The practice is reductive, imagining human value in stark, temporary terms: the periods in which a person impacted upon some property that can be franchised off into the future. What is the end game here? Summer blockbusters packed with marionettes of these digital undead? The resurrection we're subjected to here isn't even canny enough to be brief. This shade lingers, relentlessly regurgitating lines from its point of origin. 

This is another, vivid problem in Romulus. Although the special effects departments, the stunt performers, the creature effects people and the actors themselves are very often working in fabulous concert, Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues (or perhaps the Disney bean counters) cannot help themselves, excreting famous lines from previous instalments all over this film's crowning moments. It's actually kind of maddening. Why work hard to add something new or genuinely exciting to such a well-worn property if the final revision is so desperate to remind its audience of older, greater episodes? Are viewers really so enamoured of reading these signposts? Of being given the opportunity to elbow the neophyte they've tricked into sitting next to them, then confidently state which sequel the quip originated from? It all depends on how you view these films really. Are they important milestones in science fiction cinema or are they the latest opportunity for a sentimental, box office haul? Thankfully, for those of us who would put the first three Alien films over any similarly lauded trilogies - Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings shrink beneath their brilliance - there is still meat to get your teeth into. 

Ron Cobb's design for an atmospheric processing tower is lifted out of Aliens then deposited onto the mining colony where this film begins. Surrounded by open-air markets and an abundance of human squalor, the pyramid takes on a sinister quality. Although it never made it into the final film, when prepping Alien, Giger imagined the egg chamber residing in a bulbous, organic pyramid; an enormous boil that had been deposited onto this inhospitable landscape then, somehow, flourished. Cobb's mastaba serves a similar function here. Not only is it a risen symbol that denotes an extraterrestrial befoulment, it allows the audience to get a sense of what one of Weyland Yutani's shake and bake colonies looks like a couple of decades down the line. Comparatively, the twin facility we saw back on Acheron was trapped in a specific moment in time. Hadley's Hope was staffed by young families looking to make a name for themselves on an unknown and unmapped planet. Jackson's Star, the Romulus equivalent, is the home of Cailee Spaeny orphaned Rain. It is a full-blooded company operation that imprisons generation after generation of its citizens into a hopeless, life-draining servitude. The frontier romance experienced by the Jordans, before they trespassed onto a prehistoric derelict at least, has long been paved over. 

Accompanying Rain throughout Romulus is David Jonsson's Andy, a gentle and childlike alternative to the other, usually far more malevolent, synthetic beings in this universe. Liberated from a rubbish tip by Rain's now deceased father, Andy is a decommissioned artificial person that has been reprogrammed to be a guileless and ever-present companion. The simplicity of this rewiring, as well as the obvious misuse of Andy before he became a part of Rain's family, has left this mechanoid vulnerable and prone to debilitating seizures. Although Rain treats Andy with the fatigued care of a glass child, her friends respond to him as either a useful gadget or as a target for bullying derision. Unexpectedly, Romulus takes a similarly sympathetic position as Ridley Scott's prequels, asking us to identify with a being built purely for slavery while still worrying what shape his self-determination will eventually take. As Andy trespasses deeper into Romulus' decaying mausoleum, his fragged directives begin to reorganise and re-emerge. Jonsson effortlessly switches back and forth between these two, clashing perspectives, using the slights aimed at his depleted form to inform an angry, emergent personality that has been radicalised by company doctrine. 

Despite any worries generated by Romulus having such a young and apparently carefree cast (not to mention the project's beginnings as a straight-to-streaming feature), Álvarez's film is actually far more considered than expected: a conscious effort to return the series to its blue collar roots. No longer are we stowing away with billionaires as they pursue their follies. We're generations removed from middle-class, middle-aged professionals attempting to hot desk in from a wooden cabin that resides in a different galaxy. The subjects here are the children that followed in their wake. The displaced, despondent youths forced to grow up malnourished under churning, leaden skies. Their dreams are tiny: Rain genuinely yearning only for a feeling of warmth on her face. No wonder they want to escape, to raid a deteriorating satellite and pilfer enough stasis tech to die a little death and be transported somewhere that has slipped through The Company's grasp. Romulus' slower, earlier passages are its best: bickering teenagers trampling over the wreckage of some doomed, inhuman experiment, completely oblivious to the danger that they are in. Although we are eventually subjected to an entire menagerie, Álvarez's film happily builds several set-pieces around the scurrying threat implied by the facehugger; that leathery-looking arachnoid that has been side-lined as a serious, ambulatory threat since the mid-1980s. 

In fact, Romulus so successfully repositions the parasite stage of the Alien as a legitimately entertaining danger that its eventual progeny registers as somewhat superfluous or, maybe more accurately, formulaic. Ever since Paul WS Anderson's AVP: Alien vs Predator, the creature's lifecycle has been in overdrive, with chest-bursters following rapidly after even the briefest of infection. Romulus does not buck this trend, with towering drones nosing around dripping corridors seemingly moments after their rib-cracking birth. The presence of these adult creatures foretells a rough, structural gear shift in Romulus as well, a move away from sweaty, creeping tension and on to a more triumphant style of redress. Of course Rain gets her hands on some heavy weaponry. Naturally, the creatures line up to get their pearlescent domes detonated as well. What else where we expecting? To Álvarez's credit though, these fist-pumping moments quickly segue into the immediate and unintended consequences of all this blood-letting, with weightless nebula clouds of hull-melting acid spiralling towards heroines dressed in little more than company-stamped sweats. It helps as well that, prior to Rain's zero gravity manoeuvres, we have a recent reference point for the kind of danger this substance represents: fingers instantly melted down to their knuckles; sternums, and the organs they encase, reduced to smoking boreholes by only a trickle. 

Finally there's Romulus' addition to the Alien lifecycle, a fourth act creeper who reveals its hairless head after several overlapping countdowns have concluded. Romanian basketballer Robert Bobroczkyi, underneath a thin layer of desiccated make up appliances, plays Offspring, another example of a ruthless biomechanoid's vision for an evolved, space-faring human being. In Romulus that brief is interpreted as a swaying, sexless giant riddled with pulsing orifices and a barbed tongue that it uses to extract sustenance. This Offspring also provides the filmmakers an opportunity to tweak and reassess Chris Cunningham's Newborn, a creature designed for Alien: Resurrection that began its life as a diseased etching that combined the black carapace of Giger with the overlong and atrophied limbs of the terminally undernourished. Unfortunately, that chimera was rendered for the screen as a slathering goo monster. Resurrection's failure to accurately translate this sickly intermingling of human-presenting flesh and airbrushed Necronom is to Romulus' benefit though. While not as visually striking as a Big Chap, Offspring allows the filmmakers to portray an Alien in the same singular, hair-raising terms as the original film. 

Although only a final stretch player, Offspring impresses because the threat it implies isn't simply that of the tooth or claw. It stalks and looms, appraising its quarry with a leering fascination that is genuinely uncomfortable to consider. Successive sequels have drained the series of the idea that the Alien isn't a static creature that will always grow to similar dimensions, it's a reflection of humanity: our basic, reproductive drives written into a massive, androgynous insect that is incapable of coupling with or even raping its prey. Hives and matriarchal scaffolding have elbowed out the notion that this orphaned mayfly doesn't necessarily want to strike and bite on sight. In Scott's film, the Alien certainly slaughtered the men it encountered but the women trapped on the Nostromo gave Kane's son pause. It appraised them, fascinated by the sight of their soft skin or some (undetectable to the audience) scent that issued from them. Romulus follows suit, even having a shot of its Offspring - drawn up on its hind legs - as if about to issue some awful, engorged member from the little crocodile button that sits centred in the frame. Romulus doesn't subject its battered cast to that kind of outrage but some underlying intent does seem to be on display. The Offspring doesn't nuzzle the bleeding mother that birthed it. This infant invades her space and prods its beak-like nose at her, using it's size and weight in such a way that an intent is clear: it's demanding to be noticed, it wants to be embraced by the shrinking, dying woman beneath it.