Alien: Romulus Review
By Colton Gomez | 08/23/24 | 6:58 P.M. Mountain Time
Horror, Sci-Fi | Rated R | 1 hr 59 min | Film Release Date: August 16, 2024
I hate to say that I was severely disappointed with this film. My theater was practically empty, save for a couple sitting on the very sides of the theater who seemed to seriously consider leaving about halfway through the film. I can’t say I blame them as I was also despairing sitting through the rest of the film that couldn’t seem to end.
What you’ll get from this film is perhaps a good nap, despite all of the action and explosions and yelling and loud noise, and a slew of complaints that arise in your mind while watching it. The egregious amount of cliches and imbecilic decisions the characters make made this film a chore to sit through. I’m sure the man’s wife’s misery was compounded on the drive home, as he was audibly regretting watching the film and his complaining didn’t stop from when we exited the theater to when we reached the parking lot. He said to the poor teenage theater attendant who was waiting to clean the theater, “You should be paying us to watch that film.” I’m sure he hears a lot of these as he seemed to be trying not to roll his eyes, and didn’t say anything except for a dry, polite chuckle.
I was immediately thrown off by the music and sound design of this film. For a slim moment, I was excited by the silence of space and its capacity for both beauty and violence. After that, I don’t think silence is utilized in any meaningful way and is largely absent. This is probably the loudest film in the entire franchise. In the very beginning, it seemed to want to use the classic sound effects of the original film but quickly strayed from that path and opted for a more cartoony score and completely uninventive foley. I found myself quietly laughing at an operatic sting that only reminded me of a SpongeBob episode in which the characters are primitive cavemen and discover the uses of fire that is accentuated with a live cutaway of a barbershop quartet that sings a very similar operatic melody. From then on, my expectations tanked.
The film follows a young woman or teenager (I don’t really know how old she is supposed to be) named Rain (Cailee Spaeny). Her dreary world consists of 2,700 people who are all miners on a planet that never sees its sun because of the thick atmosphere. Despite having no muscular build, she is supposedly one of them. Her brother is a synthetic human who is of similar age that her deceased father programmed for her, along with an endless barrage of severely unfunny dad jokes that even dads would be offended by. He is a whimpering, weak model whose directive is to “do what’s best for Rain.” Along with the two peas in a cryo-pod, there is another brother and sister duo, and a boyfriend and girlfriend. You won’t remember any of their names and their involvement is vastly unimportant. Despite putting in her thousands of hours of mining for the company, the quota has just been raised, so she has to stay and mine instead of traveling to another, presumably better planet. It really is a shame to see an Alien film serve as the background for a nothing story. The world created by Scott and Cameron is highlighted in this film but lacks all of its intrigue.
Being fed up with the rule change, she decides to help her friends to steal a ship and leave the planet for an abandoned outpost hovering in the planet’s orbit. There, they hope to find cryo-pods and sleep nine years while traveling to another system. They manage to do this extremely easily. Out in the open, they climb into a ship and start it up flawlessly with the help of the synthetic. No one tries to stop them. No one even seems to notice or care that one of these probably multi-million-dollar builds is flying away with a bunch of workers who aren’t authorized to leave. I guess there is no surveillance or satellites or anyone who cares to stop them, drastically reducing the risk and tension.
From there, they reach orbit and the outpost in seconds. There, they discover the havoc wreaked upon the outpost, now knowing why it was abandoned. They discover that the cryo-pods don’t have enough fuel for their nine-year sleep and scour the rest of the outpost for more. But whoops! They accidentally free hundreds of face huggers who are extremely less aggressive and accurate than those of the other films. They race their way out of the outpost and to the ship, but not before one member of the group gets their face hugged and an alien implanted in them. This leads to her chest bursting and now an alien is on the ship, along with hundreds of other xenomorphs and face huggers who have been incubating and now desire their human snack. The rest of the film is alien encounter after alien encounter with the group being picked off one by one until only the film’s decided hero manages to escape and kill a bunch of acid-bleeding aliens with relative ease.
I can't say the film was altogether mush. Some of the performances, notably from Cailee Spaeny, Isabela Merced, and David Jonsson, were exciting to watch. Merced's performance was captivating but her character had almost nothing interesting to do. Jonsson's range in playing a synthetic human who ranges from meager to assertive was my favorite performance of the entire film. Spaeny's intelligent acting chops were on display but unfortunately, none of them were really able to help the movie from being a sad slog Aside from that, the film doesn't have much to offer. It does not comment on AI any more than the other films. It does not build the world any more than the other films. It does not do anything that the other films haven’t already done. This film felt like an extended theme park ride. But there’s a reason why those rides are short.
There’s a love plot that goes nowhere, a synthetic whose character development depends on a chip insert but ends up not mattering, and of course, expendable characters who add nothing. This is certainly not of the caliber of Scott and Cameron but more along the tune of the lesser entries into this franchise, possibly the lowest of the bunch. It’s incredibly disappointing to see that director Fede Alvarez did nothing with this world and simply added another forgettable title.
There is nothing that matters in this film. There was a moment where I thought that the synthetic would chauffer the human characters into a more logical state of mind than their extremely emotional ones (they are teenagers or something after all), but that too decided not to commit. There was nothing done by the characters to win me over to their efforts and root for them. I can’t say for any moment in the runtime that I felt a shred of suspense or fear for the characters. They are either going to survive this dangerous encounter or not, and frankly, I really didn’t care which it was.
A film is not the best way to enjoy this particular entry. Had it been developed as a video game, instead, I think the reception would’ve been immensely more positive and far less painful to endure. I kept thinking that these set pieces would be very fun to navigate myself instead of watching it.
Commonly, the aliens seeking a human host in which to gestate in their extremely quick fashion, emerged either prematurely or misshapen, much like the thought put into this film.
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