Kelaru & Fulton rating: ★★★★
Available in cinemas | Runtime: 1hrs 59 mins
Love is in the air—specifically, a love for the original Alien (1979).
Fede Alvarez’s approach to this latest instalment in a franchise that has been, at times, mishandled—even by its own creator (*cough* *Covenant* *cough*)—is to return to the original formula: swap in younger actors, retain the core elements, and tweak the ending just enough to keep the door open for future interpretations.
And the formula works. Alien Romulus is the good ol’fashioned thriller in space where a bunch of people are trapped inside a space station with a monster that is several levels higher on the evolutionary scale and is eager to multiply.
This idea from the original Alien was so revolutionary in 1979 that it started a subgenre in itself with dozens of films that have followed the formula in the following decades. I remember reading the original script for Alien by Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett and from the first page you can immediately ‘see’ the film that would later grace the cinema screens. The setting—an empty, hollow, oil-slicked space station—felt cold and menacing even before the alien’s appearance.
Alien Romulus strives to deliver the same feeling and for the most part, it succeeds. Without relying on too much CGI, the interiors do a very good job at imparting that ominous feel of danger that can jump at you from every corner on the abandoned space ship that the film’s younger crew board is destroyed in such a mysterious way that further enhances the anxiety for the viewer and especially for the characters.
This new set of characters, led by Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her android ‘brother’ Andy (David Johnson), along with a crew of other young adventurers, attempt to raid an abandoned space station for equipment that will help them escape from LV-410, the dark colony they've called home since birth. The colony, kept in perpetual darkness due to constant industrial activity by the Weyland Corporation, has never seen sunlight.
90% of the film happens on this space station that - you guessed it - harbours a xenomorph and we all know by now what its priorities are. The film shines in the scenes on this space station mainly due to the practical special effects. The alien itself is a mechanical build and in other scenes the alien was played by a human in very convincing prosthetics. Along with the practical sets, the many throw-backs to the original Alien film, the excellent sound FX, the confident direction and the great chemistry between its two leads, this makes for a very engaging and enjoyable Alien film, a great contender to the top 3 Alien films in the franchise.
Alien has always been a horror-film-in-space to start with and for someone that has seen the first 3 films at the time of their release (or very close to it), this is what an Alien film should be. I don’t mind having a level of predictability in any iteration of an Alien film as long as I can root for the characters, the stakes are high, the action is gripping and the horror is on a derelict ship adrift in space. That is what we signed up for and Alien Romulus certainly delivers.