Alien: Romulus - A Divisive New Chapter in the Iconic Franchise

Alien: Romulus review: a down-and-dirty creature feature that plays it too safe | Digital Trends

Alien: Romulus Score Details "What Álvarez has really assembled is a sampler platter of Alien leftovers." Pros Great set design Great effects Some gnarly, inventive sequences Cons Boring characters Endless winks at the other movies One very misjudged cameo Most of Alien: Romulus, the umpteenth installment in a series forever docked at the intersection of horror and sci-fi, takes place aboard a derelict space station. You know the kind: cavernous, leaky, closer in ambiance to an abandoned factory than a Starfleet hub. You also know what happened to all the missing people. They ran afoul of that spindly, leathery, parasitic abomination Ridley Scott sent bursting out of a chest cavity and into the pop-culture imagination back in 1979. The place should give us the willies, but there's actually something kind of... cozy about it. Maybe it's the retro flicker of the computers, their primitive graphics and ancient lines of green code painting a vision of the future dreamt up in the past. Or maybe it's the way the mawlike air vents open and close with a comfortingly familiar metallic whine. Fans of the hostile universe Scott first imagined have been here before. To them, a floating deathtrap mausoleum looks like home. Throwback production design is just one way that Romulus takes Alien back to basics. It follows in the wake of Scott's divisive prequels, Prometheus and the more baroque Alien: Covenant, which rewound to the beginning of the saga the director kicked off without recapturing the primal simplicity of his opening installment. Those were oddball epics with divided priorities, straining to reconcile their gory fan service with loftier inquiries into the matters of creation and destruction. Romulus is not so ambitious. It's a down-and-dirty creature feature with no delusions of grandeur -- a straightforward Alien movie for the bloodthirsty purists. Unfortunately, it goes about tapping into the soul of the original in a rather thuddingly literal way. Our characters this time are desperate youth -- a group of twentysomething future laborers caught in the exploitative employ of Weyland-Yutani, the evil corporation that greedily enables the gnashing in every Alien movie. It's cool to see the series center on working-class heroes again, but these kids don't look like they stepped out of a mineshaft so much as a Levi's commercial. Where are the interesting faces and personalities of Veronica Cartwright, Charles S. Dutton, or Ron Perlman? At the center of the team of makeshift scavengers, tiptoeing down the wrong corridors in search of cryogenic escape, is our resident understudy Ripley. Played by Cailee Spaeny, the delicately expressive star of Priscilla and Civil War, this orphaned heroine has forged a sibling bond with a defective company android (Rye Lane's David Jonsson) who starts out like the movie's artificially intelligent version of a retrograde neurodivergent sidekick -- think Rain Man as an actual counting machine -- before his allegiances are unwillingly complicated. In so much as Romulus has any interpersonal drama to go with its gooey run-and-scream mayhem, it hinges on whether the robot will land closer to Ash than Bishop on Alien's spectrum of varyingly friendly AI crewmates. The "brother"/sister relationship is one way Romulus marks itself as the work of writer-director Fede Álvarez, who brought a similar familial dynamic into his record-breakingly bloody Evil Dead remake. This is also the second movie he's made, after the terrifically suspenseful home-invasion thriller Don't Breathe, about a group of down-on-their-luck burglars breaking their way into the wrong darkened property. The Alien series has always accommodated the sensibilities of new filmmakers. Mostly, what Álvarez brings to the assignment is a slick panache, and a deep affection for the analog qualities of the franchise, to which he pays special tribute via the physicality of his sets and practical effects. When Romulus is really cooking, it achieves a squishy glory. There's some great splatter in this movie, and a few inspired set pieces. Álvarez does creepy-crawly wonders with the Facehugger, the scurrying, spider-like larval stage of the alien; we've never seen as much or this many of them before. And a nifty, tense sequence involving zero gravity and the beast's famously acidic blood shows that he's thought about how to vary the action of the series, even as he clings to its monster-movie fundamentals. That said, Álvarez hasn't figured out much new to do with the Xenomorph itself. Maybe no one could. Seven entries into the franchise -- or nine, if you count those regrettable title fights against the Predator -- the novelty of H.R. Giger's sinewy, biomechanical space roach has worn off. The longer the movie goes on, the more its fresh ideas start to recede into the background of its collage of references. What Álvarez has really assembled here is a sampler platter of Alien leftovers. The class politics, the question of machine morality and sentience -- these are microwaved themes, mere scraps of the full meals Scott and Cameron served. Set between the events of Alien and Aliens, Álvarez's legacy sequel (or "inquel") seems content echoing old stories instead of telling a compelling new one, though it deserves credit for working in nods to the franchise's less popular corners, too. Fan-favorite lines are rotely repeated. Easter eggs, like a little drinking bird of '70s vintage, are trotted out. The Alien series used to boldly reject the past. Each new sequel felt like a reinvention -- sometimes cruelly so, as in the criminally underappreciated Alien 3, which incensed fans by harshly extinguishing the light of hope on which Aliens ended. The paradox of Scott's prequels is that they used the host body of Hollywood's laziest franchise strategy -- the origin story -- as an excuse to take the series in a new direction. The worst you could say about them is that in substituting the timeless minimalism of the original Alien for dense mythology, they misplaced the inherent appeal of the premise. But isn't that better than simply playing the hits, or scavenging Alien's lineage for applause lines? Romulus has been made with craft and a clear admiration for the movies that came before it. (Even a little Prometheus DNA squirms into its petri dish of influences.) But its artistry is eclipsed by a more cynical Hollywood logic, an exploitation of nostalgia that would make the execs at Weyland-Yutani blush. Around the midpoint, we reach the pandering nadir: a cameo so ethically dodgy and aesthetically displeasing that it zaps you right out of the story. It might be easier to wave off this development as a passing miscalculation if it didn't feel like a tidy symbol for the cannibalistic spirit of the endeavor. Synthetic reanimation is the movie's whole deal. Alien: Romulus is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd's writing, visit his Authory page.

Alien: Romulus' ending, explained | Digital Trends

Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Alien: Romulus (2024). In its franchise's typical fashion, Alien: Romulus puts its heroine, Rain (Civil War star Cailee Spaeny), through the wringer for much of its 119-minute runtime. After using one of the Romulus Space Station's pulse rifles and its anti-gravity surges to survive endless attacks from both Xenomorphs and Facehuggers, it looks for a moment like Rain may have finally reached a well-deserved happy ending. Recommended Videos As she promises her android "brother," Andy (Rye Lane star David Jonsson), that she'll find a way for the two of them to stay together, and puts her pregnant, sole-surviving human friend, Kay (The Last of Us season 2 star Isabela Merced), into cryosleep, though, experienced Alien viewers will likely start to get the sense that the rug is about to be pulled out from under her one last time. The calm before the storm Sure enough, that's exactly what happens because, unbeknownst to Rain, a desperate Kay chose to inject herself with the Weyland-Yutani Corporation's supposedly life-saving, Xenomorph-based compound to try to save her and her baby's lives during Alien: Romulus' nerve-shredding third act. Rain discovers this when Kay's vitals suddenly enter critical condition in her cryo pod. She opens her suddenly very pregnant friend's cryo chamber just in time to witness her give birth to an alien shell containing a terrifying Xenomorph-human hybrid. It isn't then long before she, Kay, and Andy have all found themselves face to face with a tall, tailed monstrosity that looks -- likely deliberately -- like a cross between a Xenomorph and one of the Engineers featured in Ridley Scott's Alien prequels, 2012's Prometheus and 2017's Alien: Covenant. What follows is a showdown between Rain and Kay's hybrid baby that, thanks to the former's attempts to blast it into space, also seems reminiscent of Ellen Ripley's (Sigourney Weaver) final battle against her Xenomorph foe at the end of Alien. Rain's fight ends in slightly more explosive fashion when she uses both the acid from the hybrid's Xenomorph-like birth shell, as well as her ship's unloading levers, to trap Romulus' final monster in a container that is promptly torn to shreds by the nearby asteroid belt that has lurked like a cosmic Chekhov's Gun throughout the entirety of the film's story. Rain manages to survive the encounter by the skin of her teeth, but the same can't be said for Kay, who is tragically killed by her own creation after she (understandably) rejects its baby-like bid for some motherly affection. Rain subsequently puts a wounded, badly drained Andy to sleep in a cryo chamber of his own. Alien: Romulus then ends with Rain, like both Ripley and Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) before her, recording an audio log identifying herself as the last survivor of her ship's human voyage and expressing both hope and uncertainty about what lies in her future. Having taken control of her ship again and set a course for the seemingly pleasant planet of Yvaga, Rain has a reason to be, at least, somewhat optimistic about what may come next. Then again, should Romulus ever get its own sequel, it seems more likely than not that her and Andy's journey to Yvaga will get interrupted once again. Alien: Romulus' ending is, in other words, a bit of an amalgamation of moments and tropes from its franchise's past entries that have been remixed just enough to make it feel both familiar and new. The same is mostly true for the film itself, which relies a few times on references to Alien and Aliens that are too ham-fisted to actually work and doesn't do anything particularly new so much as it does what it does with a whole lot of entertaining style and flash. Even Romulus' last-minute introduction of a human-Xenomorph hybrid owes a huge debt to the climax of 1997's Alien Resurrection, which ends with Ripley coming face to face with a monstrous creature that just so happens to be the result of cross-contamination experimentations between her and a Xenomorph Queen's genes. That fact doesn't make Alien: Romulus' fourth act any less thrilling or jaw-dropping, though. On the contrary, it sends the film out on an appropriately horrifying high that lets director Fede Álvarez fully flex his body-horror muscles. How does Alien: Romulus end? Alien: Romulus' final battle marks the moment when the film finds its most ingenious way to bridge the gaps between it and the other Alien movies. The nature and outcome of Rain's climactic confrontation with Kay's hybrid baby creates a clear parallel between Romulus and Alien, while the crossing of Kay's human genes with those of a Xenomorph even manages to make something out of Alien Resurrection, a film that most fans had previously chosen to forget even existed. The creature's humanoid face and black eyes, meanwhile, visually call to mind similar characters from Ridley Scott's unfortunately abandoned Alien prequels. If one wanted to be extremely generous to Romulus, they could also say that the film's most biting bit of thematic messaging exists in the introduction and destruction of its human-Xenomorph abomination. The compound that creates Kay's hybrid baby is, after all, the result of Weyland-Yutani's efforts to give human beings an "upgrade" that makes it easier for them to comply with the demands and lethal challenges of their colonial space work. It's a bit of deranged corporate malfeasance that, in a time when so many real-life tech executives and pundits are right now touting how much "more efficient" AI will make every company, hits with stomach-churning force. The fact that it's the Weyland-Yutani compound that then results in the creation of, perhaps, the Alien franchise's most terrifying monster to date may in turn be telling when it comes to how Álvarez and his Romulus co-writer, Rodo Sayagues, feel about some of our modern era's more concerning, growing technological trends. That may arguably be too deep of an interpretation of a film that, for most of its runtime, doesn't feel like it has much more going on beneath its surface than its superficial, undeniably pleasing genre thrills. The fact that such a reading is there, however, is a testament to how well Alien: Romulus is able to frequently walk in the footsteps of its classic predecessors -- even if you may also leave it wishing that it did a better job of carving out a new path for itself. Alien: Romulus is now playing in theaters.

Alien: Romulus' Surprise Cameo Is Ugly and Unnecessary - IGN

The newest Alien movie commits an unforced error with its unexpected cameo. Alien fans can breathe a sigh of relief. Fede Álvarez's Alien: Romulus lives up to the hype, delivering a real back-to-basics, claustrophobic sci-fi horror movie that doesn't completely cut ties with other recent Alien sequels like 2012's Prometheus. There's just one fly in the ointment here in the form of a distractingly bad and completely unnecessary cameo character. Let's take a closer look at why that cameo almost derailed a perfectly good Alien sequel, and why Hollywood needs to knock off this trend of using CGI to bring dead actors back to life. Again, beware of full spoilers for Alien: Romulus ahead! Alien: Romulus is set 20 years after the events of the first Alien movie but decades before Aliens. Because of that, there's not a lot of room for Romulus to bring in familiar faces from the franchise's past. Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley is still frozen in suspended animation, and the rest of the Nostromo crew were killed by the Xenomorph. But Romulus finds a way to bring back one of those characters in a new form. Midway through the film, we encounter the battered remains of Rook, an android synthetic who shares the likeness of Ian Holm's character, Ash. Similar to how Rogue One: A Star Wars story digitally recreates the likenesses of the late Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin and Carrie Fisher's Princess Leia, Romulus uses CGI to simulate Holm's performance. Perhaps it's fitting that computer technology is used to bring an artificial person to life, but there's just one problem here - Romulus' digital Holm doesn't look good at all. It's a distracting and, frankly, unnecessary addition to the film. Hollywood studios have a long history of relying on CGI technology to either de-age actors or digitally resurrect dead performers. 2006's X-Men: The Last Stand is a notable early example, opening with a flashback scene featuring de-aged versions of Patrick Stewart's Professor X and Ian McKellen's Magneto. What's most surprising about that scene in hindsight is how little the technology has improved over the years. We saw that de-aging tech employed on a much bigger scale in 2010's Tron: Legacy, which features Jeff Bridges in dual roles as an aged Kevin Flynn and the youthful Flynn simulacrum known as CLU. Even at the time, Legacy's de-aging tech was somewhat less than convincing, betraying a real Uncanny Valley effect that mars an otherwise enjoyable Tron sequel. There's also the aforementioned Rogue One, which digitally resurrects Cushing's Tarkin by superimposing Cushing's likeness over a performance by Guy Henry. Similarly, The Mandalorian and The Book of Boba Fett use CGI to introduce a young, Return of the Jedi-era version of Mark Hamill's Luke Skywalker. In both cases, the thrill of seeing an iconic Original Trilogy Star Wars character given new life in the 21st century was marred by the fact that the finished effect simply wasn't good enough. These characters look like what they are - digital zombies sharing space with flesh-and-blood actors. And now, with the release of Alien: Romulus, we can see that this tech still hasn't progressed to the point where it can escape the Uncanny Valley. And to be fair, given Romulus' relatively modest $80 million budget, maybe it was never realistic to expect this film to succeed where so many more expensive projects have struggled. Using CGI to brute-force your way into resurrecting a dead actor is not a cheap or easy process. Regardless, the point stands that Romulus' Rook is every bit the eerie, distracting CGI character CLU and Tarkin were before him. Similar to Tarkin, Rook was created by superimposing Holm's likeness over actor Daniel Betts. Also like Tarkin, while the end result sounds great (whether because the film uses AI to simulate Holm's voice or because Betts' Holm impression is just that good is unclear), it looks pretty hideous. Rook looks like what he is - a digital mask pasted over another person's face. His facial movements are clunky and robotic. At times his mouth has no depth, which suggests the film is relying on AI deepfake technology. Rarely does this digital Ian Holm look very convincing. So once again, Romulus is guilty of the exact same sin as those Star Wars projects. It recreates an iconic performance but does so in a way that is utterly distracting and takes viewers out of the moment. What's especially frustrating about Romulus is that it's not even clear why the film needed to go through all this trouble to digitally resurrect Holm. It's not as if the film is specifically bringing back Holm's character Ash from the original Alien. Rook is simply a synthetic of the same model and purpose as Ash. Why does Rook need to look like Ash? It's empty fan service - a callback to an older movie in a sequel that already has plenty. Yes, the Alien universe has established a precedent for synthetics of the same model sharing identical features. The David and Walter androids are both played by Michael Fassbender in 2017's Alien: Covenant, and there are multiple incarnations of Lance Henriksen's Bishop in the franchise. But do all scientist synthetics need to look the same or be the same model? Rogue One can at least be forgiven because there was an actual, story-based need to have Tarkin appear. That need doesn't exist in Romulus. Does it even make sense for Weyland-Yutani to have an army of identical Ashes and Rooks, given what we know about Ash from the original movie? Ash is planted by the corporation as a sleeper agent, one intended to ensure the Xenomorph is brought under company control. No one on the Nostromo crew recognizes Ash as a synthetic until he gets his head knocked off. But if there are numerous versions of the same model in operation, wouldn't that greatly increase the odds that someone on the crew would recognize Ash for what he is? But even assuming there's a valid need to make Rook into an Ash duplicate rather than a completely original character, did Romulus need to rely on shoddy CGI tech to do so? Why not go the path of least resistance and simply cast an actor who looks and sounds reasonably similar to a young Holm? That's the approach director Mike Flanagan took in 2019's Doctor Sleep. That sequel to The Shining simply cast new actors to play a young Wendy Torrance and Jack Torrance, rather than try to digitally recreate the likenesses of Shelley Duvall and Jack Nicholson. The new actors may not have looked 100% the part, but it's a lot easier to accept an actor who looks slightly different than a character who isn't entirely real. Romulus makes the same mistake as The Book of Boba Fett. That latter series features actor Graham Hamilton as the physical base for young Luke Skywalker. But looking at behind-the-scenes photos of the episode in question, it's clear Hamilton is already about 85% of the way to looking like a young Mark Hamill. Would it have been such a crime for Lucasfilm to simply cast him in the Luke role and leave it at that? Star Wars fans have accepted Genevieve O'Reilly's Mon Mothma just fine. Similarly, couldn't Álvarez and his team have simply found a Holm lookalike and saved themselves the time and expense of trying to will a posthumous Holm performance into existence? That doesn't even get into the ethics of casting choices like this. No doubt Holm's estate signed off on allowing his likeness to be recreated. But would Holm himself have done the same were he still alive? Would Cushing have approved of his likeness being used in Rogue One? It's clear that today's actors are going to have to get used to leaving very specific stipulations in their wills about how their likeness can be used after death. It's the only reason Disney hasn't released a fourth Aladdin movie starring Robin Williams. Because with the advent of modern technology, practically any Hollywood icon can be revived on the big screen. It's more than a little frightening. Will we eventually get to the point where these CGI recreations can be seamlessly inserted into new movies without triggering the Uncanny Valley effect? Perhaps, but the tech certainly hasn't evolved as far as many might have expected a decade or two ago. The same basic problems remain. Incredible amounts of work and budget go into creating characters that are, ultimately, more distracting than anything else. Alien: Romulus is just the latest example of a Hollywood problem that doesn't need to exist. Do you think Alien: Romulus should have relied on a digital recreation of Ian Holm's likeness? Cast your vote in our poll and let us know your thoughts in the comments below. For mroe on Alien: Romulus, find out how the series has recycled old deleted scenes and learn how the Alien universe is secretly connected to Blade Runner.