Alien: Romulus Review

Alien: Romulus Review

I recently just watched through all of the Alien series in preparation for Alien: Romulus and after the travesty that was Covenant, I’m really glad to see Romulus go back to the Alien origins. Romulus takes place between the first Alien and its sequel, Aliens.

As soon as Romulus started playing, I was immediately in love with how the franchise decided to go back to retro future tech. In Prometheus and Covenant, the Weyland-Yutani ships had so much clean futuristic tech with floating digital overlays that it was hard to justify those two movies as prequels to Alien.

The only way I can keep that canon to myself is by justifying the high tech because the USCSS Prometheus had to house Meredith Vickers, the daughter of Peter Weyland, and was supposed to have the most advanced everything as the most revolutionary spacecraft at the time.

The Nostromo is a towing, cargo freighter so of course it wouldn’t have all the bells and whistles the Prometheus had. These are facts from each movie that you could use to justify the stark difference in special effects and futuristic tech. Still, the digital screens of Prometheus and Covenant really threw me out of the franchise lore.

Romulus fixes all of this though by showing how normal people are living on a colony planet, just 37 years before the events of Aliens. Our main character, Rain Carradine, lives on the planet Jackson’s Star with her synthetic brother, Andy. Rain’s parents died from lung diseases they contracted while working in the mines. 

We see that Rain also had signed on to work in the mines for Weyland-Yutani and we actually get a look at what their contract term lengths can look like. I personally really loved the detail of seeing how her contract was about 12,000 hours initially (just under a year and a half) but was extended to 24,000 hours additional (almost 3 years) due to a worker shortage.

No doubt the shortage was due to people dying of lung disease since the mines are incredibly toxic and the planet doesn’t seem to ever see the sun. The planet’s lack of natural light really just added to how hopeless life felt for that colony. The only light we saw throughout Jackson’s Star was barrel fires lining the dirty streets.

The grime of the planet was just so well done and it communicated just how backwards this community most likely was in the grand scheme of colonies set up by Weyland-Yutani. I mean, Andy was a synthetic Rain’s father saved from the dump and repaired on his own. You do what you need to in order to make ends meet here.

I could go on and on about the setting of Jackson’s Star but I’ll move on. We meet Rain’s rag tag group of friends? I add the question mark because they really don’t seem to be friends except for maybe Rain, her ex boyfriend Tyler, and his sister Kay. 

Tyler and Kay’s cousin Bjorn is just one big trope object with his only personality trait being “I hate synths,” and, ironically, Bjorn’s cousin Navarro is this incredibly skilled pilot who doesn’t really seem to have a personality at all. They’re just a weird group of kids living on Jackson’s Star working the mines, with the shared goal of leaving that rock.

The characters work surprisingly well when all in the same room, but all of the individual characters are pretty weak. My biggest gripe is probably with Bjorn, who just complains the entire time. He hits that trope of hating Andy and being an incredible dick to him because a synth shut the mine doors on his mother when an accident required the workers to evacuate.

Bjorn being angry at synths for existing makes sense, seeing as how one left his mother to die, but his continued intense hate towards Andy is ridiculous. This isn’t their first time meeting which means that Bjorn has just constantly been an asshole to Andy. you would think that with them having known each other for a while, Bjorn would’ve gotten over Andy being a synth or at least accepted him.

Bjorn just having this unshakable hate for synths honestly isn’t the worst part about his character. The worst part about his character has to be that he’s just poorly written and is an angry shithead because his mother died. Mommy issues.

To be fair, Andy’s whole synth character gave me Disney Star Wars vibes for some reason. He was cracking awful dad jokes and was this broken synth who’d been rescued and programmed to be good and protective. I think a lot of people forget that synths are given directives that they have to follow. There’s no real free will with them, they have to do what they’re told.

That’s a whole thing that plays throughout the movie when Andy gets another synth’s chip inserted to try and figure out what happened on the Renaissance Space Station. He becomes a normal synth with actual directives. The directives were from the company, sure, but still a normal synth function.

Starting fresh into the movie, I liked Andy’s character and thought he was sweet. Then about halfway through I realized he’s just kind of that droid fill-in that we see in Star Wars movies so often rather than an actual synth character we’ve seen in previous Alien movies. He only offers a bit of narrative drive and then loses it all again when he gets thrown into a wall and seizes up again in one of his broken synth convulsions.

Again, the characters are just weak and if it wasn’t for the driving force of the movie, they would offer nothing to the story. Romulus follows our little thieves through the Renaissance Space Station that’s actually quite impressive and I’m sad we didn’t get to see more of its interior. It’s broken up into two parts: the Romulus section and Remus section. We learn that it’s a research and development station that’s been housing hundreds upon hundreds of aliens.

The feeling of anxiety the movie gives us is actually pretty great. The music played a huge part in this and was by far my most favorite part of the film. The composer is Benjamin Wallfisch who also created music for Hidden Figures, It, Blade Runner 2049, and It Chapter 2. So it’s honestly no wonder he was able to do such great emotional pulls with his music.

The actual creatures for Romulus work really well for it too, the practical Xenomorph suit when hatching out of weird wall eggs looked incredibly realistic. The facehuggers were slightly less scary in this one but it was never the actual creature that was terrifying but what they implanted in you that was the actual terrifying bit.

Navarro getting the egg implanted in her chest having been spoiled in trailers was pretty frustrating, but the scene of her shining the x-ray device through her back and chest to see that Xenomorph thudding against her ribcage was beautifully gnarly. For all that violent rattling the Xeno gave her, Navarro’s chest didn’t just burst like I expected it too.

I liked that these were still early alien born of human chest burst prototypes that were still being developed. The facehuggers were so slow to implant eggs as opposed to the other films so it gave it more of an “early evolution” feel. 

Well, except for that Offspring alien that Kay birthed towards the end of the film. That thing was just an abomination. It’s honestly not even worse than what we saw come from the cloning  of a Xenomorph queen that was derived from Ellen Ripley’s DNA. I thought that Newborn alien was much more fucked up looking but there’s something about the way the Offspring just stood at its full 7 feet and some change height.

It just stood there, menacingly.

Knowing that was birthed through the human natural means was actually just grotesque and I loved it. Kay was absolutely an idiot for using that genome altering serum but it moved the plot along quite nicely so I guess it wasn’t an awful decision in the end.

Romulus was a good Alien film. As an overall standalone movie though, it was okay. Romulus was fairly smart in the way it set up the plot pacing, especially with the way Rain’s group’s ship crashed into the thrusters of the Renaissance Space Station, causing it to collide with the planet’s rings in 40 minutes, the approximate amount of time left in the film.

While some of that time was spent with rapt horror with the amount of Xenomorphs aboard the space station, the other half of the time was spent with the altered Andy who became increasingly difficult to want to see on screen. His new robo chip made him more cold and calculating and added unnecessary drama to the already complicated mess they were all in.

I get that it’s a plot device, I do, but wow was it frustrating to watch. The one scene I really liked with Andy was when he was restored to his pre-asshole chip self and was coming down from the elevator shaft to gun down a Xenomorph. He says, calmly, “Get away from her, you bitch.”

At first I was thrilled to hear that iconic line but then was taken out of it because again, it was said fairly calmly (and no I don’t mean in the same way that Dumbledore asked Harry Potter in the movie adaptation) and Andy’s character just had no gravitas with that line. Also, it was clearly just a fanservice line thrown to us. Honestly, I was fine with it and thought it was fun, but I could see why that part would take some people out of the scene.

Romulus just lacked really good characters you wanted to care about. Each individual character was just kind of there and none had the attention grabbing strength that Sigourney Weaver or Noomi Rapace had. I liked Rain’s ability to fight for survival but she didn’t really hold a flame to the previous female leads’ energy. 

Romulus does a great job of adding more lore to the already convoluted history of Alien. We saw that the company got incredibly close to achieving the higher human evolution Weyland so craved. However, Romulus seems to be just really good at giving us the lore rather than a story that we care to latch onto.

I am actually excited to know there’s a sequel to Romulus in the works. Alien: Romulus was a really fun movie filled with great horrible deaths caused by Aliens of all sizes and incredible music and space station environments. However, it definitely lacked good narrative design with poorly motivated characters with very little personality worth remembering. But, don’t take that to assume I did not like the movie. I loved it and thought it was a good return to Alien’s roots. I just wanted to see a little more from Romulus. Here’s to hoping Romulus 2 will bring more gore and great stories.