Almost as fraught as the Terminator franchise is the Alien franchise with the good-bad ratio decidedly in the red. After Ridley Scott's seminal Alien and James Cameron's genre-defining Aliens, the series suffered through David Fincher's disowned & meddled-to-death Alien 3, the worse-than-you-remember Alien Resurrection, and a pair of Alien vs. Predator movies no one talks about. Scott returned to the series with 2012's Prometheus which suffered from a disjointed script, but looks slick, and its far worse sequel Alien Covenant which was both stupid and a victim of being an Alien prequel which was stuck trying to meet up with the original's continuity despite a totally different aesthetic like how the garbage Star Trek: Discovery series' ships look like the Kelvin Timeline's Apple Stores when the time frame is just ahead of the original series.
Overall, the scorecard is two good, five bad, and one middle. Into the breach steps Alien: Romulus, co-written and directed by Fede Álvarez (2013's Evil Dead remake; Don't Breathe) and is set in between the first two movies while Ripley was off sleeping lost in space for 57 years.
Opening with a montage of a ship collecting what turns out to be a cocoon holding the xenomorph from the wreckage of the Nostromo (which was supposedly blown to dust by Ripley's overloading the reactors, so huh? Also, how did they know there was any alien to recover when Ripley and her logs are three decades away from being recovered?) we meet our obvious Final Girl, Rain (Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla), and her "brother" Andy (David Jonsson, HBO's Industry), who was a broken android fixed up by Rain's now-deceased father and programmed with plenty of dad jokes.
They live on the Weyland-Yutani (the Alien universe's Big Evil Corporation) colony of Jackson's Star, a miserable place which gets zero hours of sunlight per year. An orphan whose parents both died of diseases on this godforsaken rock, she has been laboring to finish her contract with WY, but when she goes to get her travel permit to emigrate to a free colony called Yvaga she learns that due to staffing shortages her contract has unilaterally extended from 12,000 hours of servitude to 24,000 hours, meaning another 5-6 years, but now in the mines. (How her family got into this contract situation and the reason WY can basically enslave workers isn't explained.)
Facing a bleak non-future, she's receptive to a scheme proposed by her friends - her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux, Netflix's Shadow & Bone), his sister Kay (Isabela Merced, Madam Web), their cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn, say it out loud), and his adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu) - to go up and loot a derelict spaceship for hypersleep cryo pods which could allow them to make the nine-year journey to Yvaga, leaving the oppressive control of WY behind. They need Andy, a WY product, to go to open doors and access systems for them.
With Navarro piloting, they head into orbit - so the Big Evil Corporation that literally enslaves its workers to borrow the company cargo ships for heist jobs with no oversight, remote controls, etc.? - and discover its more than a ship, it's a space station in a degrading orbit heading for the planet's ring in a matter of hours. Docking with the station, they quickly find the pods, but they don't have enough fuel to power themselves long enough to make the trip. More cryo fuel will be needed and they figure the station's lab may have some.
Upon reaching the lab they discover a scene of chaos with dead bodies and holes melted in the deck. While retrieving the fuel cells, they trip an alarm which locks down the room Tyler, Bjorn and Andy are in and Andy can't open the door due to lack of clearance. Rain realizes the half-melted android in the main lab could have a chip which would upgrade Andy's privileges and while they're retrieving it, the containers holding many facehuggers begin thawing, opening, and unleashing their peril on the young group, eventually landing on Navarro's face and, well, if you've seen an Alien movie you know what's coming. (Especially if you've seen the trailer which spoils the event.)
After that, it's a race to get off the station before it's accelerated decay crashes it in less than an hour while masses of facehuggers and full-grown xenomorphs lurk everywhere and Andy's upgraded programming causes a shift in allegiance from protecting Rain to protecting WY's interests.
Where Alien: Romulus shines is in nailing the grungy lived-in low-tech aesthetic of the first two movies, especially the original. Displays are CRTs, not flat panels or transparent or holographic; the emphasis is on practical sets and effects; the design language is of a piece with Scott's first trip into space. The colony is dingy & bleak, making the young people's decision to try and escape perfectly rational. Álvarez's staging of things also works for the most part in ratcheting up tension in a 45-year-old franchise where we know the drill a bit too well.
But where it lacks is in the story and some dubious choices in callbacks. It's always tempting to member berry new movies with references to previous entries (e.g. Terminator movies have to say, "I'll be back") and for the most part Alien: Romulus handles things subtly, fun for those who catch the references without being obvious (e.g. the computer is called "Mother" for MU/TH/UR; oooooh, look, Colonial Marine pulse rifles), but it wildly goes overboard quoting Aliens' signature line verbatim then borrowing one of the lamest bits from Alien Resurrection with a similar denouement. But more questionable is the distracting attempt to resurrect a deceased actor's character to play a similar role. It would've been fine to just create a new character, but in trying to chain it directly to the original and doing such an odd job of it backfires.
Spaeny and Jonsson are good in their roles with the latter having more notes to play as he changes levels of sophistication. The others are written too flatly - Navarro's distinguishing traits are being Asian, having a shaved head, being a pilot, and dying first (not really a spoiler if you saw the trailer) and she's more fleshed out than the guys - and the twists aren't really surprising. The whole deal about the absent government allowing WY to abuse its workers for years, the independent colonies, etc. begs for more amplification. The cast also feels too young; despite the actors being 23 to 31 years old, they all seem like teenagers raising questions about why WY had families on such a harsh world as laborers, unlike the families terraforming LV-426 (Hadley's Hope) in Aliens. Merced's Kay draws the shortest straw and is such a non-entity that when she was shown after a while I'd forgotten about her.
While not an unqualified return to form, Alien: Romulus sits below Prometheus in my rankings by virtue of returning to stylistic terrain of the original and its monster-in-the-house plotting, while missing out on staking its own claims to fresh storytelling or world-building. Cameron took the bare bones of the original's milieu and was off to the races, creating THE defining space marine archtype which everything from Halo to Starship Troopers tapped; making Weyland-Yutani into the Big Evil Corporation that overshadow the galaxy. While he nibbles at some new concepts, Alvarez ultimately falls back into member berry box checking.
The A/V presentation is good with the dingy environments never crushing to indistinct blacks on my QD-OLED display. There's not a lot of bright highlights as the color palette is mostly grim browns, grays and blacks, so it's the holding of shadow detail that benefits from the HDR grade. Surround audio is clear and active.
Score: 6/10. Catch it on cable.
0 comments:
Post a Comment