A Sequel Bursting With Callbacks

The references to previous Alien movies in Alien: Romulus start with the logo for 20th Century Studios, which holds on an ominous musical note in the classic Fox fanfare a la the famous opening of Alien 3. The first actual scene of the movie is a reference too — not to Alien itself, but to its marketing.

“In space,” warned the 1979 film’s tagline, “no one can hear you scream.” And so Alien: Romulus’ establishing shot of a ship gliding through stars plays over absolute silence. The camera hurtles noiselessly toward the craft, and then up to one of its windows. Only when the movie cuts to a scene inside the ship do we begin to hear the familiar bleeps and bloops of a sci-fi movie computer humming to life.

The screams come later, both from the characters onscreen and from the audience — although some of their yelps may be out of frustration as much as fear. All through the 1980s and ’90s, Alien was known among film aficionados as the franchise that didn’t play it safe. Each sequel was directed by a wildly different filmmaker; James Cameron replaced Ridley Scott on Aliens and made a maternity allegory wrapped in a Vietnam War satire. David Fincher took over for Cameron on Alien 3 and replaced the latter’s hope in the face of atomic horror with religious overtones and a human cast nearly as sadistic as the alien itself. Then Jean-Pierre Jeunet took Alien Resurrection into snarky territory, sprinkling in some truly weird designs and a demented sense of humor amongst glossy ’90s sci-fi action.

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Those Alien sequels weren’t all masterpieces, but they were consistently unpredictable. They took risks, they embraced the dark, and they pushed the envelope. Alien: Romulus, the first sequel in seven years, makes an effective monster movie, but that’s about it. It doesn’t move the franchise into uncharted territory; it drags it, kicking and screaming, back into the past.

The film can never break free of the original Alien’s legacy — which, given its human characters’ indentured servitude to an evil corporation, feels bitterly ironic. As Romulus begins, the protagonists’ lives are so terrible that they have very little to do lose by willfully walking into the Xenomorph’s disconcertingly moist embrace. Scott’s Alien was set on a cargo ship called the Nostromo that hauled minerals across the galaxy; Alien: Romulus takes place on a mining colony where the Nostromo might have been headed if it hadn’t been waylaid by that darn face hugging extra-terrestrial.

This outpost in deep space, on a ringed planet cloaked in perpetual darkness, is where we find Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a colonist buried under an unbreakable contract to the Alien universe’s mega-corporation, Weyland-Yutani. After the company denies her request for a transfer to a more hospitable colony, Rain agrees to help a group of friends as they perform a risky heist.

This crew, which includes brother and sister Tyler (Archie Renaux) and Kay (Isabela Merced), discover a derelict ship named Romulus orbiting their mining colony. It supposedly contains enough cryofuel and suspended animation pods to allow the group to travel to another planet. This vessel is floating in the upper atmosphere, unguarded, ripe for the picking. Now, sure, its orbit is decaying and in 36 hours it’ll crash into the colony, but extracting the cryofuel should take 30 minutes. What could possibly go wrong? Uh, I don’t want to spoil it, but I will give you one hint: It rhymes with beenomorphs.

The director of the chaos that ensues is Fede Alvarez, an experienced conductor of cinematic terror who also happens to know a thing or two about taking a classic scary movie and updating it for modern tastes with modern levels of gore. (See 2013’s Evil Dead.) That’s the part of Alien: Romulus where Alvarez seems most in his element; hatching creative ways to kill people via the various quirks of the Xenomorph’s powers. Alvarez also introduces an admirably disgusting wrinkle to the twists and turns of the alien’s already convoluted life cycle.

That’s about the only novel component of Alien: Romulus, though, which otherwise plays like a monument to a bunch of better old movies. It awkwardly recycles classic lines of dialogue. It borrows music cues. It lifts costume designs, themes, and even a couple plot twists. And it ties directly to — and in the process gets tied down by — legacyquel connections to Ridley Scott’s Alien. (Scott also served as a producer on Romulus.)

Those connections involve yet another harebrained scheme by Weyland-Yutani, and the universal corporate fixation on capitalizing on human evolution. Given Rain and her allies’ strident opposition to the company, you could almost argue that it’s thematically appropriate that the movie that stands so firmly against cinematic evolution as well. Besides its big budget and some fancy effects and gadgetry, Alvarez refuses to stray too far from Scott’s path, with an occasional detour or two into Cameron territory.

Of course, part of the secret sauce of Riley Scott’s Alien was its amazing cast of blue-collar grunts, who seemed so ordinary and so vulnerable. Alvarez doesn’t create a single memorable human character here, not even Rain, the latest heroine in the Ripley mold of an ordinary but unbreakable woman who refuses to give in to the alien menace.

What’s here isn’t necessarily boring or bad, but it represents a back-to-basics approach for Alien that feels like a betrayal of something central to the Xenomorph’s toxic DNA, which is forever mutating into another deadly creature. Fittingly then, every Alien sequel for a long time took a flamethrower to the previous entry. Each one burned down what had come before as part of its transformation into something new. Alien: Romulus just hands the characters some flamethrowers, because that’s what they used in the earlier movies.

Additional Thoughts:

-I’m not sure if it was the actors’ accents, or a wonky sound mix, or just a screwy speaker system at my particular screening, but I found it difficult to make out a lot of the characters’ dialogue. It only got worse as the film goes on and the heroes are talking through walkie-talkies or oxygen masks.

RATING: 6/10