Something happened in August where I didn’t get out to the movies as often as I used to, and while that meant I missed things like Borderlands, it also means I somehow did not get out to Alien: Romulus. Sure, plenty of movie from that franchise have been less than good, but the buzz for the latest was overwhelmingly positive. The problem is when I fall behind, I don’t often get to see the latest releases, even if I try to catch up, and some things fall through the cracks. Case in point: I didn’t see Alien: Romulus last summer. It happens.
It’s on Hulu/Disney+ now, but the downside there is the commercials, seemingly designed to break up the tension at the worst possible moments.
On the dark colony LV-410, miner (and possible minor) Rain Carradine (live actor Dora the Explorer Cailee Spaeny) is trying to get off to a more idyllic planet. She has a few more years of work to put in after Weyland-Yutani upped the minimum amount of hours to earn a trip to somewhere else, and her only “family” is a busted android her dad found named Andy (David Jonsson), but there may be a way off the planet on an abandoned space station. To get there, she’ll work with ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux), his newly pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced), their android-hating cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn’s adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu). Using a stolen shuttle, the plan is to get to the station, swipe some cryogenic pods, and fly to a better colony, possibly leaving Andy behind because taking an android with them, even a damaged, mopey-looking one like Andy, will cause problems for the future.
However, there are other problems the group of desperate youngsters don’t know about: the station was abandoned for a reason. The xenomorph that Ripley ejected into space at the end of Alien was found and brought on board, one that spawned a whole lot of facehuggers, killed whoever was on board, and while Rain can borrow a chip from another android, that just makes Andy more of a company-robot. It’s not long before a facehugger latches itself to someone, and then the adult xenomorphs come out to play. Will any of these desperate people live to get off the station and maybe to a better life?
Let me start off by saying that it was nice to see an Alien movie that was good and didn’t need Signourney Weaver in it to be good. Director Fede Álvarez, who made a horror movie about a dangerous deaf man, managed to work in a lot of new angles for old ideas. He doesn’t necessarily reinvent the xenomorph so much as look at them and find new ways to handle them. For one thing, his movie notes xenomorphs don’t have eyes, so they must sense prey in other ways. Likewise, this movie may be the first one I have seen where someone is actually killed by the xenomorph’s acid blood. It’s a tense movie where the xenomorphs are always just behind the protagonists, picking them off one-by-one, and then Álvarez tosses out another curveball or two.
If anything, he actually doubles down on the franchise’s other villain in the form of Weyland-Yutani, here in the form of both the colony the protagonists are trying to escape to another planet that Weyland-Yutani isn’t running but also in the form of the corporate androids, even Andy for a period, whose concerns are more profit than saving human lives. The franchise as a whole has never exactly been pro-corporate or anything, but it just felt so much more blatant here, if for no other reason than to give the protagonists a reason to get as far away from them as possible. Here, it feels like the whole system is the problem, not just one or two slimy bean counters. If anything, it made the xenomorphs somehow seem less evil. Sure, they’ll kill you, but they’ll at least make it quick, and it’s every bit as impersonal.
Grade: B
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