Alien: Romulus (2024)

Rated R for a good reason.  Fede Alvarez is a brutal director.  Luckily, that brutality really works for the Alien franchise.  Be aware, Alien movies are scary.  That's what they're aiming for.  This one is maybe the scariest out of the bunch.  It shows a bit more than most people are used to in these movies, but it works considering that the whole aesthetic was based on Giger's works.  There's some language and body horror, occasionally involving infants.

DIRECTOR:  Fede Alvarez

Just a heads up before I get into this.  I got me a new computer!  It's cheap, but so far pretty great.  But the problem is that I'm typing on a new computer.  There might be a ton of typos in this blog.  Please don't lose your minds.  I don't proofread these things before uploading them.  

I'm also going to go into blasphemous territory right off the bat.  Be aware, I'm actively trying to combat my recency bias right now.  But --and this is coming from a guy who adores the original Alien as a near perfect movie --Alien: Romulus might be the best of the franchise.  I told you that this was going to be blasphemous.  I was thinking, earnestly, if I didn't have such a high regard for the first movie as a groundbreaking piece of cinema and I saw this movie, would it blow my mind? Yeah.  I think it might be impossible to make an Alien sequel this far removed from the original and anyone giving it its due credit.  Now, I know that this is one the higher rated ones and it did incredibly at the box office.  I'm  just taking it a step further.  Now, the only thing that might stop me from dying on this hill are a few things. But right now I'm riding really high on Alien: Romulus.  

And that's coming from a guy who traditionally does not care for Fede Alvarez movies!  (Sorry, Fede Alvarez. I find you to be a cruel director who leans a bit heavily on brutality.)

Here's what's stopping me from dying on this hill.  Ready?  Alien: Romulus stands on the shoulders of giants.  A lot of my glee that came with this movie came from a return to what an Alien movie should look like.  I feel like the later movies had the same problem as the Star Trek reboot: everything looked like an Apple Store.  It was all a bit too clean.  Now, here's the paradox.  Alvarez really makes his world look like Ridley Scott's original world.  Everything is a bit dingy and a bit gross.  But would I really care about that if I hadn't been so obsessed with the original Alien?  Probably not.  It just aggressively felt like the first real movie to get what it meant to live in a Weyland-Yutani world.  I know, some of you are screaming Aliens, but I don't love that movie like everyone else loves that movie.  Also, it's been a hot minute since I've seen Alien 3.  

The second thing is the most annoying thing on my list: the stupid uncanny valley.   I'm being a huge hypocrite with this one.  I shouldn't even write about this.  Rook, who is the same model as Ash (and apparently went through the same wringer)  took me back.  I loved the Ash storyline in the original.  Seriously, it was like Alvarez was making this movie for me and me alone because when I saw Ian Holm in this movie, I lost my mind.  But then Rook became this huge character in this movie.  I was actually taken aback by how much Ian Holm is in this movie.  And the upsetting part is that it isn't actually Ian Holm.  That's that fine line that we've been treading and dancing around for a while.  Bringing back dead actors for legacy sequels --especially when the characters shouldn't be ravaged by time --seems a little gross..  There's that fine line between honoring the fallen with reminding a modern audience of their former performances and then also just stealing the person's face to make money in a movie.  On top of that, while there are moments when Rook looks freaking great, there are other moments where the character looks rough.  Like, I mean really rough.  It feels like a painted on flat face on a round object.  It's a stupid complaint, but it's also one that ran through my head whenever Rook was on screen.

But let's talk about how much I loved this movie.  It's so hard.  The weirdest thing about this movie is that it successfully manages to put a hat on a hat.  That's normally a bad thing, but Alvarez, against all of my better judgment, makes it work.  Honestly, every time I think the movie is over, something else happens.  Like, I hope there was nothing after the credits because I missed out if there was.  I mentally did not think another beat could happen in this movie.  But Alien thrives when it is about just trying to survive this situation when it really isn't your fault.  I mean, these movies nail the anti-Capitalist rhetoric pretty well.  It's the ultimate tale of how corporate America is leaving us to deal with the problems that it creates.  These are some people who just say "Forget the system" (which is a nicer way of me not using a curse word) and are still punished for not being wage slaves.  (I'm using this rhetoric because it's a lovely shortcut.  If you want me to preach about the dangers of capitalism unchecked, I can.  That's not what I'm trying to do right now.)  But the message is there and then we have these people who are punished for just trying to make it out of a system that is killing them slowly.  Instead, it kills them quickly.

And that survival has to be scary as heck.  My goodness, Alvarez makes good use of the facehugger.  The facehugger was also was something that was used as a jump scare alone.  But Alvarez makes them these amazing predatory creatures. Heck, I'm going to go as far as to claim that the facehugger is the primary threat in this movie and that the xenomorphs are almost secondary scary things.  It doesn't make them less scary.  It just makes them not as much of a horror to the facehugger.  I love that change in dynamic.  

But then there's this argument that I've been having about sci-fi for a while that Alvarez tackles head on.  See, mentally, I have a hard time with the robot being a person trope.  When I watch Star Wars, I have difficulty treating Droids as people.  I've had the conversation before.  Like, we're really cool when C-3PO gets ripped apart doing what is ultimately slave labor.  (I'm getting real liberal in this one, guys.)  I have a fine line with that concept that people are people and robots are robots.  I mean, I, Robot tried to get me on that team and it did nothing for me. Heck, I even like A.I., but I didn't get my mind changed.  But Andy in Alien: Romulus?  I have authentic concern for that character.  The way that Andy and Rain interact made me question so much.  When the Weyland-Yutani tech overrid his protocols, I kept wishing to have the old Andy back.  It's great.  How did I get so moved by that?  I mean, a lot of it had to go to David Jonsson, who played two very different version of Andy.  Alvarez, and this is so much credit to him, made a lot of the threads that other Alien movies tried out and failed with work.  Seriously, the Prometheus double-feature desperately tried to make the cold-hearted synthetic story work with mild success.  Romulus?  Absolutely nailed it.  My big problem with Aliens was making them ultra killable because there are more?  Romulus nailed it.  They're still scary, buit they also can be taken out with a gun.  Heck, it even fixed Alien: Resurrections human / xenomorph hybrid work and it was really scary.

Like, most of this movie works and it works hard.   I was looking forward to it, which might have made me go in full throttle.  But Romulus might be the best Alien movie.  If not the best, I put it in a solid second place.