Artless Mucus Porn
Artless Mucus Porn
'Alien: Romulus' is an Alien movie for people whose favorite part of Alien movies is all the drool and mucus.
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Part of the appeal of the Alien franchise is that it takes place in a distant future when we’ve colonized space and mastered interstellar travel, but all the existential worries - death, decay, cosmic meaninglessness - are basically the same. Rapacious corporations are still indifferent to man’s suffering, and everyone’s still mostly battling for scraps and eking out a mean existence in environment of scarcity, even with an entire galaxy to plunder. Yes, there are face-sucking aliens, but there are also salty engineers who just want to know if they’re getting hazard pay for this. There’s an element of Alien where it’s like Dirty Jobs in space, a future that’s technologically advanced but enduringly grimy.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that for me, the “quiet” parts of the Alien franchise were mainly the draw. The gore and mucus and murder are necessary for tension, and occasionally the action is as memorable as the buildup (the Noomi Rapace abortion scene and Fassbender getting his head torn off in Prometheus still stand out to me as brilliant moments) but mostly I find myself enjoying these movies more in philosophical terms, and as exercises in suspense, than as splatter reels.
That doesn’t seem to be the case for splatter master Fede Alvarez, director of the new Alien: Romulus (previously of Don’t Breathe and the Evil Dead remake). It seems like he really likes that the aliens have chrome teeth and blood made of acid and that they menace tough but beautiful women who say cool stuff in between nostril-tight closeups. Grrr, xenomorph lore! Alien: Romulus is an Alien movie for people who fast-forward to the “scares.”
Necessary caveat: it’s possible that the sound system in the theater I saw this in just sucked. It was an IMAX theater at a major chain (Regal) on opening night, so I don’t know why that would be, but they kept the house lights on full blast throughout 25 minutes of previews (I’m fine with previews but only when I can actually see them), so perfect projection and a properly calibrated sound mix were probably well down their list of concerns. Which is to say: I can’t say for certain that I saw Alien: Romulus how it was meant to be seen. Most theater chains do run their operations like the Weyland Corporation these days, but I can only review what I saw.
The sound mix seems worth mentioning because it contributes to a feeling that so much of the setup in Alien Romulus is intended as mere blah blah blah between face huggings and acid corrosions. Something to be done away with as quickly as possibly. Alvarez yadda yaddas big parts of the plot and “yadda yadda” was essentially all I heard.
Alvarez recently told Variety that Romulus was meant to “unite the franchise timeline.” Continuity across seven or ten films (depending whether you count the Alien vs. Predator ones) is something that’s hard to imagine caring about, but that corporations always seem to value highly. Personally, I just want to see a good movie, not have it feel like a node in a rewatch in which I feel rewarded every time I spot an homage to a moment I remember, like the name of a spaceship or a character wearing Reeboks. Homages work best as flourishes, not as justification for entire plotlines. Continuity is for completists. No thanks!
Alien Romulus’s setup seems promising, initially. Cailee Spaeny plays Rain Carridine, an orphaned young adult (both her parents died of Lyme Disease) living on a toxic mining colony where they never see the sun. Her constant companion is “Andy” (David Jonsson), a Weyland Corporation android her father programmed to be both her protector and adoptive brother. Andy, a glitchy old robot who presents as a nerdy brother with a stutter, is constantly telling Dad Jokes to put Rain at ease. Which is a fun conceit, though it would’ve worked better if even one of the jokes had been a little bit funny, or even surprising (buy a joke book, maybe?). Meanwhile, complete strangers physically assault Andy to the point that he falls unconscious and bleeds white brain goo (hydraulic fluid) into the asphault. And his assailants were kids who hadn’t even heard his jokes. I guess they hated his stutter? This world seems excessively sociopathic, but I guess things might get chippy if it was always night.
Sadly, we don’t get much time to enjoy or explore the possibilities of the setting before we’re off to the next subhead of the plot outline. And so shortly after the corporation denies Rain’s request to transfer someplace where she can see the sun (they’ve extended her work-hour quota by half a decade or so, in a sort of intergalactic indentured servitude situation), her ex-boyfriend Tyler, played by Archie Reneaux, loops her into his Big Plan. Seems there’s a defunct space station orbiting the mining star, and if they and their friends can just climb aboard and get the cryo stasis chambers working, they can conk out and wake up nine years later like it’s the following morning, on a planet that has more sunshine and fewer Lyme Disease mines. The gang needs Rain and Andy because Andy’s obsolete software just so happens to be compatible with the abandoned space station’s operating system (a nice touch).
As David Franklin recently wrote, “There’s a genuinely terrifying moment about 15 minutes into this where they put the whole cast in one room and you realise this is who you’re going to be spending the next two hours with.”
And yes, that’s about the long and short of it. Alien: Romulus’ lousy cast of characters seems to consist of a handful of cockney orphans, each with a single notable character trait. Aside from Rain’s ex-boyfriend, there’s the pilot, Navarro (Aileen Wu), who has a shaved head, Tyler’s sister Kay (Isabel Merced), who’s pregnant, and his cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), an irredeemable asshole with an even more unintelligible accent than Tyler, who hates androids because one sacrificed his mother (a callback to Aliens). That they’re all young is a choice, presumably to drive home the point that the mining colony tends to kill workers before they get old. But did they have to be so completely unremarkable?
Anyway, they’re off to complete their big heist, with part of the gang searching the abandoned space station for the cryopods they need and the other half hanging back on the space craft shouting advice at them through their headsets. If the rushed plotting wasn’t a problem before, it soon becomes one when all the expository utilitarian dialogue is conveyed via mouth-full-of-bread-pie accents coming from crackly speakers while an intrusive horror music score blares. How would Vinnie Jones say “don’t go in there!” in rhyming slang?
In any case, Tyler soon discovers that the stasis chambers don’t have enough cryo-fuel to keep everyone frozen for the duration of the journey. That means they have to try to scrounge some from another part of the station (which is called “Romulus”). Can you guess what happens when they start siphoning cryofuel? That’s right, they get thawed out aliens. And so facehuggers start swimming through the murky water collecting at the bottom of the space station, and pretty soon some cockneys get facehugged, including the pregnant one, and they all react in the stupidest ways possible. “Hey, we got the facehugger thingy off her, she’s probably fine now, right?”
Meanwhile, the only two characters who aren’t so hopelessly moronic as to make you actively root for their grisly demise are the two androids. Oh right, did I mention that there’s another android on the ship? Besides Andy (and David Jonsson is far and away the most competent actor here) there’s also the acid-blood melted torso of the Romulus’ android guy: the science officer, Rook.
The glitchy, disembodied talking torso is admittedly a good visual (and another justification for more garbled audio), even if this character is “played” by the CGI resurrected visage of Ian Holm, who in real life died four years ago. Holm played the android Ash in the original Alien, and they’ve digitally looted his sarcophagus in order to tie in “Rook,” who is… apparently a character from the Alien graphic novel series? Sorry, I’m not watching 12 hours of movies as homework for this one. I’m also putting it in my will that if you ever posthumously digitally recreate me for a bad movie, let it not be in service of a nonsensical tie-in to a novelization no one remembers.
Aside from the inherent sacrilege, Holm’s character is sort of Alien: Romulus in a nutshell, where unnecessary plot complications compete with unnecessary callbacks and the whole thing ends up feeling hopelessly busy — just like the sound mix; while essentially devoid of personality, just like the characters.