31 Days of Halloween: Alien: Romulus

2024, Fede Alvarez (Don't Breathe) -- download

OK, that was a weird experience. We started this movie on Tuesday night, a proper 4K copy, and I was entranced from the moment it opened: the colours, the contrasts, the dystopia and the machinery. It looked like my scifi vignettes jumped off the paper. We are quickly introduced to the characters, indentured slaves to Weyland-Yutani on a mining colony with 0 hours of sunlight and lots of non-xenomorph deaths. The company is the monster. But then we noticed the time and that the movie was 2 hours and had to pause.

The next night, started it earlier and... the glow was dimmed. Don't get me wrong, I really enjoyed the movie, but only for the briefest moment in time, I had recaptured my cinematic aura, the guy (no, not That Guy) who just is enraptured by the movie watching experience (ok, maybe a little That Guy) and was settling in for 2 hours of just smiling enjoyment. I mean, I knew what I was about to watch -- a teen slasher take on the Alien franchise but occasionally my brain just lets me go along entirely for the ride.

Just sliding right past the fact this post is/will-be dated as Tuesday? Letting someone see behind the curtain that you/we write these and back-date them?

I mostly got that this time? Mostly.

OK, our main character is Rain (Cailee Spaeny, Civil War), with her "brother" Andy (David Jonsson, Industry). Andy is a "synthetic person", aka a person shaped robot filled with milk. He's not a fully functioning synth, and has to be "reset" by Rain often; he presents as an intellectually underdeveloped adult. Rain and her family were "farmers" on a colony that is all about mining, and where the population is dying from numerous causes, including her parents. You get the feel Rain was born here, and as a young adult (teen? early twenties?) she has finally "worked off her hours/years" but the company needs bodies in the mines, and instantly re-ups her, adding five or six years to her contract.

She finds her friends have a plan. A couple of them run a cargo tug that carries containers of ore up to a ship in orbit, a ship probably much like the Nostromo from the original movie. In fact, the movie starts with a preamble act showing an automated small ship coming across the wreck of the Nostromo and extracting a chunk of ... something that has a xenomorph contained within. Anywayz, this tug crew picked up a signal in their last run, a signal for an abandoned Weyland-Yutani ship that will definitely have cryopods, which will definitely get them to an independent colony away from Wey-Yu, away from a life of slavery, and onto a planet with days & nights and warm sunlight on their faces. But first they have to get into it, and they know Andy will have that ability. But its dangerous, as if they are caught they will relinquish any chance they have of working off their contracts. You can tell Rain is not actually doing a good job of convincing herself to not do it, so she eventually agrees.

This opening preamble is just beautiful. From the initial scene of a black shape against the stars to the fly thru the window where we see a MU/TH/UR turn on with all its lights and clicking and whirring sounds, the retro future tech that the original movie presented so lovingly, to the anonymous scientists extracting the xeno with us knowing full well, "they're all gonna die."

Once onboard the not-a-ship-but-a-station the wash of immersion kind of reduced. I get it, the movie has to shift from world building to setting building, setting the scene for what this station was doing, and that it was all xeno all the time, and it, of course, all went wrong. There is supposed to be a lot of tension, as Alvarez was tasked with doing his Don't Breathe thing but with Alien and return us back to the original movie horror feel, but... I guess he was really tasked with a mishmash of all the movies, including the new ones around the Prometheus franchise? Requels these days are supposed to mush all the nostalgic bits into a new movie, but honestly, what I wanted was not the rest of the Alien franchise, what I wanted was the slow methodical pace of the first movie mashed with a teen slasher movie.

Minor note: Romulus refers to one half of the station itself. The kids arrive at the Remus side, and are presented with decorative motifs all over the place. Given the station has been ruined by xeno's running amuck we don't get to see how much the decorative nature of the ship was present. 

Still, I guess I enjoyed myself. It is all done rather well (that's been your go-to of late; vague and not clear; C-) and I definitely liked it better than I did the last two movies. 

Kent's view -- we agree.