When a new Alien arrives, questions must be answered. Like: Should I just watch Event Horizon? Or Species? Or Pitch Black? Or — let’s get frisky — Species 2? The late-millennium space horrors couldn’t compete with Ridley Scott’s original 1979 masterpiece or James Cameron’s very fun sequel, but their crunched-eyeball junkiness has aged better than the franchise they ripped off. Alien turned pretentious decades ago, all religion-coded Resurrections and Covenants. Scott’s recent prequels left me cold, overbaking a wonderful movie monster into a droning polytheist creation myth. All I needed from Alien: Romulus was a good scare. The runty new sequel starts strong, and ends stronger. But it has a chestburster problem: The middle is a bloody mess.
Cailee Spaeny and her single expression play Rain, a desperate wage slave in a sunless company town on some quagmire planet. She lives with her “brother,” a synthetic being recycled from a trashpile. David Jonsson embodies the android, Andy, as a helpless protector breaking down like an iPhone past warranty. Rain expects him to fizzle while she dies slow in the mines. But Rain’s friends have a ship. The planet of their dreams is a decade away; if they had cryogenic pods, they could make the trip in hibernation. An empty space station in orbit has a full complement of cryo-containers. The thieves arrive at the decommissioned facility expecting a quick heist. Faces get hugged, skin dissolved. The tongues have teeth.
Without Googling, I can’t tell you how old the first Alien cast actually was. (John Hurt probably looked that ancient in preschool.) They seemed mature, though, these workaday job-o-nauts witnessing the glory of the cosmos like they were stacking shipping containers. The Romulus crew is young and very high school. There’s a hothead and a nice guy whose names I forget. Isabela Merced (from my beloved Sicario 2) plays a teen-horror type, The Girl Who Got Whoopsy Pregnant. YAlien isn’t the worst bad idea. Must admit I don’t get Spaeny’s whole thing, but Jonsson is great as the group’s odd tin man out.
Director Fede Álvarez made the least funny Evil Dead and the most ridiculous Dragon Tattoo. His 2016 thriller Don’t Breathe had a clever concept (don’t let the blind murderer hear you!) but he approaches IP like he’s pouring gasoline on a leftover cigarette. Romulus has cool zero-gravity setpieces. A couple attacks rediscover a ‘90s strain of tactile gooeyness. Andy is an endearing character who becomes something mysteriously different after receiving a programming upgrade.
And then this low-key spinoff takes three dumb left turns into deep canon. The new xenomorph comes from a familiar location. A key figure in the plot recycles a dead performance. There is linkage to the most bio-cosmic Prometheus concepts, and one plot point lifted outright from another sequel. Álvarez builds several scenes around face-huggers, the tentacular spider-crabs who force-feed embryos into victims’ throats. The fixation is telling. Romulus wants to impregnate itself into the center of its series, nonsensically repeating famous lines and rehashing cool Sigourney Weaver moments.
The new stuff works better than the old stuff. There’s a looming threat of a crash into planetary rings, rendered onscreen as an ice-block mass of glistening doom. People sneak through a dangerous room without making a sound — which is, yes, the plot of Don’t Breathe, but don’t hate the hammer for finding nails. Álvarez tries to evoke Scott’s original slow-burn tension and Cameron’s heavy-metal delirium: Buddy, ya gotta pick. Young people working hopelessly for a faceless corporation is an intriguing plot for a Disney movie. But the references feel less like a studio mandate than a fan servicing himself. There’s a point where Álvarez tries for an outright splatterfest, but the cinematography is too muddy to distinguish between ooze, goop, slop, and gore. (There’s a difference, dammit.)
Skip it, turn on Netflix, watch Life. In that 2017 Alien riff, terrible things keep happening to wonderful actors and Ryan Reynolds. It’s silly, crass, and effective. Romulus almost takes flight in that direction, but gets stuck laying somebody else’s egg.