**½/****
starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced
written by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues
directed by Fede Alvarez
by Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. It’s at least an hour before the fan service begins in earnest, and until it does, Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is a sterling example of how to tell another story in a familiar universe without regurgitating what came before. Although I’m a sucker for Rogue One, I can’t really defend its exhumation of Peter Cushing and a young Carrie Fisher to live as zombies in digital eternity. It feels infernal, a punishment invented by Dante. In space, no one will let you die. But, oh, that first hour of Romulus, in which we’re introduced to Jackson’s Star, a miserable, exploitative, blue-collar mining colony teeming with poverty and indentured servitude. (In a nice touch, these exhausted 22nd-century schlubs still carry canaries in cages and black lungs in their chest.) Orphaned miner Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her adopted, Black, android brother Andy (David Jonsson) dream of starting a new life in an off-world colony (time to begin again!) but find their entreaties to the company store falling on corporate’s deaf ears. The films in the Alien universe are at their best when they’re invested in the working class: first miners, then soldiers, then prisoners. Though centring Romulus on miners again demonstrates a lack of imagination and should have been a red flag, after the strained mythopoetics of the last couple of Ridley Scott pictures, it actually ratcheted my hopes up high. I mean, even Rain’s ship is named, again, for an element of a Joseph Conrad novel, the “Corbelan”–just like the “Nostromo” of the first film, the “Sulaco” of the second, and the “Patna” of the third. Hearts of darkness, indeed. Capitalism will destroy us all.
Titling the film “Romulus” is another red flag I wanted to ignore. Here, a derelict space station called “The Renaissance” is composed of two parts: “Remus” and, yes, “Romulus.” It’s a reference, of course, to the fratricide at the root of the creation story for the Roman empire, and the fifth-century BC Etruscan sculpture Lupa Capitolina is the emblem that adorns the airlocks to the station. The explicit references to the Romulus and Remus myth invite excavation. I’ve been doing my best, but I don’t get it. Born of a Vestal Virgin and the God of War, twin boys Romulus and Remus are nursed by a she-wolf after their human father, King Amulius, leaves them to die in the river Tiber. Eventually deposing Amulius, they set out to erect a city of their own and disagree about which hill to build it on, leading to Romulus’s murder of Remus and the founding of Rome. It’s a troubled myth, complicated by the fratricide element and most effective as a reduction of the nursing from a wolf mother: an image of unfiltered, archetypal masculinity that by itself betrays the aggressively vaginal element the alien “xenomorph” represents. It’s possible to read “Romulus” as the aliens’ repudiation of a male attempt to control it, thereby framing all of these films as the failure of patriarchal constructs in subduing a devouring, feminine-coded Nature. In that conception, naming this movie after the founder of a civilization that falls is the soul of irony, yes? I don’t buy it. Later, there’s a reference to Prometheus that should have been another red flag, though by that point, it’s already done the thing it shouldn’t have done, and there’s no point in keeping track anymore. What good are red flags when you’re already in the belly of the beast? It’s like building a guardrail after you’ve careened off the cliff.
Coming to terms with their fate as permanent employees, Rain and Andy agree to the half-baked plan of macho idiot cousins Tyler (Archie Renaux) and Bjorn (Spike Fearn) to loot cryo chambers from the Renaissance and facilitate an escape to off-world. I was surprised to learn there are no safeguards preventing the miners from leaving Jackson’s Star. It’s surprising. But they go. Tyler promises they’ll be in and out in half an hour, which is like a guy in a WWII foxhole showing his buddies a picture of his sweetheart. If you picked the Chinese girl (Aileen Wu) as the one who’ll be impregnated first, don’t be so proud of yourself. That’s the other problem with Alien: Romulus: it’s very clever for a while but never unpredictable. It’s not tense in either the Alien way or the Aliens way; it lacks the extraordinary depth of the female protagonist’s journey in a man’s world in Alien3, and it’s not as balls-out goony as Alien: Resurrection (whose reputation probably explains why this one isn’t called Alien: Renaissance). It feels like a Disney movie. It feels, as it happens, like Disney’s version of the Star Wars films. There is a shellac of safeness to Alien: Romulus, despite a closing 15-minute stretch that would be astonishing if its echoes of both the med-pod sequence from Prometheus and the chimera from Alien: Resurrection didn’t cause franchise déjà vu. Even the casual fan will be able to pick out the allusions to the other films: the “teaching how to use a pulse rifle” bit from Aliens, the “carefully getting into a spacesuit while in skivvies” from Alien, the fucking around with the Fox logo from Alien3. What does it all mean, these callbacks, these sophomoric Shrek-isms?
Not much, I don’t think. Not when almost all of Alvarez’s maximalist audacity is conspicuously neutered. Consider a scene where a roomful of facehuggers swimming around in thigh-deep water fails to raise pulses. In fact, there’s a whole series of alien encounters that feel enervated and perfunctory. Consider a plot that depends, repeatedly, on giant leaps. Did I miss the scene where a salvage ship docks with the derelict station? Why is the station derelict? How much time has passed between prologue and the movie proper? How much attention should I devote to searching my memory of the other films to determine if lore has been violated or simply nudged in another direction? The film’s worst sin, though, is its digital reanimation of a dead actor to resurrect a 45-year-old performance, and not even in a cameo, as in Rogue One, but in a major speaking role as a sneering villain. Kerry Conran tried this with Laurence Olivier 20 years ago and the technology hasn’t seemed to improve any. There’s a fine line between nostalgia and necrophilia–between “Oh, that reminds me of Mum” and “I stuffed Mum and set her taxidermied carcass in her favourite seat by the window.” More’s the pity for how good Spaeny and Jonsson are–how remarkable their chemistry is and how much information and history between them gets conveyed with a glance. Jonsson, already wonderful in last year’s Rye Lane, is somehow a revelation. A moment where another android tells Andy he’s honoured to be working with someone so integral to the success of the Company even raises the spectre of chattel slavery in a productive, brilliant way, the implication being that all the first-gen synths were Black. There’s meat on this bone, enough that the fact that there isn’t more speaks loudly to the compromises made. Still, Jonsson’s Andy is so…dear, a “Flowers for Algernon” character (complete with reference to a rat in a lab given a dose of a special tincture) Jonsson takes from innocence to cruel wisdom and back again with a star’s magnificent ease. He’s so good that I’ll see Alien: Romulus again, so good that I wonder how he’s doing right now–not Jonsson, Andy. I hope, if we see him again, it’s in a movie with one creator allowed to execute a ferocious vision without bowing before a boardroom of quotidian opinions and their Greek chorus of flashing calculators.
