Alien: Romulus Review

“Fu**ing thing’s hunting us!” – Bjorn

It’s an odd thing, with the exception of Aliens, no movie in the Alien franchise has really impressed me on my first viewing at the cinema. This odd turn of events dates all the way back to 1979 and the first film. An odder thing is that subsequent viewings at home have given me a deep appreciation for the Alien franchise as a whole, except for Alien: Prometheus, which I find to be meandering at best, and tedious at worst. Alien: Romulus is, sadly no exception to this phenomenon.

And that makes me feel a little sad. I’ve been looking forward to watching this, because the trailer promised a kickass monster movie. Yes, it’s capable of being labelled as sci-fi I guess, because it’s set on a spaceship and features aliens, but at its heart – it’s a good old fashioned monster movie and unless you’re completely new to this site, you’ll know how much I love those – right?

Before I delve in to what went wrong as far as I’m concerned, let’s have a quick overview of the film and where it sits in the timeline.

It’s not, as I had hoped, a follow up to Alien: Covenant, that shows the fate of the colonists (though we can guess). It’s actually set around twenty years after the events of Alien, when the Weyland-Yutani corporation (bad guys – hiss) have been combing space, looking for the wreckage of the Nostromo after it had been abandoned and destroyed by Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). They find said wreckage and salvage it – but on it is exactly what they’ve been looking for. Some samples of the original Alien, the Xenomorph.

So far so good.

We meet a bunch of scavengers who are trying to escape their forcibly extended contracts, mining for the evil corporation, who steal what they think is a derelict spacecraft but it’s one that’s been used to develop more Facehuggers from the sample. One of the scavengers is a synthetic android, he is the adopted brother of Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaenly). Before long, the crew are hip deep in Facehuggers, with the ship in emergency lockdown. And the Facehuggers are evolving into Xenomorphs fast.

So, it all sounds great. All the ingredients are there. There are some fan-pleasing easter eggs, finding the Nostromo, a manipulative synth in the image of Ash (Ian Holm), references made to the Colonial Marines. There’s even an outstanding scene involving zero gravity and floating pools of alien blood, which you might recall is molecular acid that have to be navigated past in a narrow corridor before they touch the sides and dissolve the walls. We even get a new Xenomorph hybrid we’ve never seen before. So, what’s the problem?

As soon as the scavengers are on the ship and realise the depth of the can of worms they’ve just opened, it adopts many (far too many, I felt) story beats from the original Alien. It’s obvious that Rain is the new Ripley, even having to crawl into a space suit in her underwear for the final confrontation. We have the sad instance of the good synth (not the Ian Holm one) mutter “Get away from her, you bitch” when he takes down a Xenomorph. Now that’s just either trying too hard to please long-time fans (and failing) or the screenwriters are just stuck for a wholly original idea. By my guesstimate, this one is 75% recycled material, 25% original. There’s paying homage, and there’s desperate imitation. I’m not sure which side of that line this falls on. I’m going to have to see it again to make my mind up.

Okay, so why would I see it again?

Well, I don’t think I’ve actually SEEN it properly yet.

I found the film presentation to be overly dark. I mean really, REALLY dark – to the point that it was difficult to see what exactly was going on at several key points. I had much the same problem with A Quiet Place – Day One several weeks ago. But this time, it’s worse. Romulus is edited in very fast cuts from camera to camera, and when you’re already having trouble discerning what the director is trying to visually establish, this makes matters worse. Then, guess what? They add in some strobe lighting to add to the drama, which confused me even more.

These aren’t just some scenes, here and there, scattered throughout the movie – this is the bulk of the film. (Obviously, in the future, spaceships and space stations won’t be well lit and astronauts won’t be able to see where they’re going.) The darkness of the presentations used to be a problem I had with 3D films in the past, but seems to carry over to certain 2D films as well, as evidenced here. I don’t know whether the cinema chains are using lower wattage bulbs on their projectors or whether the prints provided to them are just dark. But this kind of problem is usually completely absent on Blu-ray and you get a pristine picture. So, I’ll be seeing this again on disc on my home set-up, in the hope that I can see how many Facehuggers there were in a certain cavernous chamber, instead of some lumps that were near the front of the screen. I think the point was to show the audience there were a lot.

So, until I can reassess – the Rob Rating on this one is a tad lower than I would’ve hoped.

Rob Rating = 6