★★

When a movie is less than good, it matters less where it lies within the chronological order of its franchise and more how it got to be its way.

A little over a decade ago, Fede Alvarez rebooted The Evil Dead (1980).  The final product was a misfire worth remembering only for the concentrated red juices that Alvarez pumped into it to make the gore effects.  Still, at least it succeeded in rebooting the Evil Dead film franchise… oh wait.

Alvarez is not without technical skill.  But it seems he only asks one question of the actresses to center his film: “can you scream good?”

The women that lead Alien: Romulus can scream, all right.  But what separated Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley from the rest of the horror stock of that year and from all characters before her was that she conveyed real humane fear without ever needing the effects to do the work for her.  Ripley’s basic competence and instincts carried the original 4-movie Alien series well past any logical endpoint it might have had were it any other franchise.

But the Alien franchise should have ended in 1997 with Alien: Resurrection.  Putting aside the fact that one year later, the video game StarCraft updated the xenomorph concept in the form the Zerg species and also the overconfident space marines into the Terran (it even copied the shuttle pilot), Resurrection is a near-perfect film, as long as you understand it as the parody that it is.  It may be the only time Joss Whedon’s “super-capable female created in a lab” character construct worked in a film, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet gave a final sense of feeling to the maternal themes of the Alien franchise when Ripley – herself no longer human – watch with pain as her loving child was consumed by the vacuum of space.  The first and last moment that Ripley felt the death of her family.  In Aliens (1986), her daughter grew up, got married, and died without ever seeing her again.  In Alien 3 (1992), Newt died before Ripley woke up, and the new alien in her belly was just a football she refused to give up.  In giving Ripley that moment, Resurrection also made fun of not only the entire franchise in a Mel Brooks fashion, but also made fun of the very idea of “resurrection” in the first place, almost as a warning to future films against doing it again.

The warning went unheeded.  After Ridley Scott returned to try (and fail) to make the xenomorphs interesting again with his dull Prometheus (2012) and slightly less dull Alien: Covenant (2017), now comes Fede Alvarez to take all the ingredients acquired from lessons learned over 45 years, and concoct a picture that emphasizes the best and mitigates the worst.  And with Alien: Romulus, it can be definitively said that he did not do that.

The first misstep is, strangely, the racism.  Romulus’s solo black character is a poorly optimized synthetic android.  “Andy” was obviously sold to actor David Jonsson as a kind of decathlon role, but it amounts to a mess of tropes, both from old classics that didn’t know how to have black people in them if they weren’t played by Sidney Poitier or Woody Strode and bad movies today that try to overcompensate for that by making their black character some kind of übermensch.  The result is a plot device the film sells as its answer to the question of how films can become the currency of Hollywood’s reparation payments.  It is a tiring style of storytelling, condescending in ways that only fail to surprise because I’m cynical.

Even worse is that no other character distinguishes himself.  The only one that I will likely remember is its own tragedy – a CGI import of Ian Holm as “Rook.”  Note that this is not a reprisal, given that Holm has been dead for four years now, but merely a cheap likeness.  Rook is like Ash in the sense that he has the same directive and lack of inhibition, with two differences: (1) his name is different; and (2) that’s it.

There are moments in Romulus strong enough to deserve their inclusion in any highlight reel for the franchise.  A certain zero-gravity sequence comes to mind, as does a moment where a pair of characters are trying to conceal themselves in plain sight by keeping their body temperature consistent in a very Mission: Impossible (1996) like sequence.  Alvarez knows how to play with angles to keep you as a viewer on edge, anticipating another horror right around the corner.  Many jump scares are cheap, but it’s hard to be annoyed when the film looks as good as Romulus does.  But this is the Alien franchise.  Looking good doesn’t score points when Ridley Scott’s original film from 1979 is maybe the greatest looking science fiction picture in history.

Alien has meaning bursting out of every frame of itself, and it ought to put to bed the lie that the science fiction genre is just a high-tech playground with nothing but sound and fury.  Yes, it’s a haunted house picture where the house is in space, but it is also a study of sexual self repression.  The first thing you learn about the species, aside from how they bleed, is their mating rituals, and the second thing you learn is how… quickly a xenomorph can grow.  If Freud ever stopped projecting his own phallic fantasies on others and could live long enough to see this, he would be the last one to tell you that sometimes an alien that penetrates your chest cavity and bursts out of you like a spear is… just an alien.

The revelation of Ash as an android is similarly sexual, and not just because he rolls up a nudie mag and shoves it into Ripley’s mouth.  When they stop him, Ash ends up looking like Randy Marsh in that one episode of South Park that I’d rather not say any more about.  And, of course, the dialogue around that ordeal was also unmistakably political in a domestic 1970s “all hail the cautious bureaucrats” kind of way, with a timely release mere months after the Three Mile Island meltdown.  This part of the original Alien hasn’t aged quite as well, but it will still outlast whatever the hell Romulus has on its mind.

Alvarez has at most a superficial understanding of filmmaking, which is why his plots are usually less objectionable than his themes.  But in Romulus, I kept noticing that the convenient “thing” for any character was always either within reach or close enough that nothing ever felt like a revelation.  Alvarez only understands the haunted house aspect of his film, and any other image he recognizes to him is just that – an image.  Which is why there can be an alien orifice on the wall that looks unmistakably like a vagina, and even drips and leaks like one after fun time, and then after the guy is all through, there is simply no reason to remember or retain it. It reeks of a Jenga tower of tropes stacked in a day.

This deficiency is clearest at the end in the final act, which is as clumsy as anything ever attempted in this franchise.  I knew it was coming only because a character did a stupid thing for no reason except to bring that moment about, and by that point the film was what it was.  This is not a prequel or half sequel; this is just another one that sums up the parts of many Alien films before and merely places itself at a very convenient place within the chronology of the saga to render itself above question.

Alvarez got some women who could scream good.  What Alien understood 45 years ago was not just that in space, no one could hear you scream, but also that characters worth remembering don’t need to do it so much.

– Vivek