8.25.24 - Alien Romulus: Review
Wow, now that was a movie. As soon as the opening titles started I felt like I was in for a ride. (I'm a big fan of opening title sequences like this, and I feel that they used to be more common. They're very cinematic, like an overture.)
The Visuals
This movie was gorgeous. I watched it in digital IMAX and it was definitely worth it. The image is big and sharp. The colors are very pleasing to the eye, and I’m glad they left behind that cruddy blue gray look of Promethus and Covenant.
Instead, we get a pretty balanced color grade, with a lot of warmer tones and naturalistic skin——a color mix that works well with this handsome young cast.
I will say, for such a scary movie, the image was almost too nice on the eyes. The other movies, especially the newer ones, are disconcerting.
One thing I noticed about the grade was something I’ve noticed in some newer media in general, is that there’s this thing going on with the darks that I like, where some portion of the shadow range is is lifted and compressed, creating a smoother and flatter look. Look up the trailer to see what I mean. I think there are true blacks, but some parts of the range are pulled just above it into a silkier gray.
I think this almost approximates a filmic look, and is evocative of the original Alien, but I think that most releases of the original alien are still a bit more contrasty. Allegedly, they took a scan of a film print of Alien and did a side by side comparison when editing which would actually explain the look this move opted for.
Overall, this is a much less punchy, easy on the eyes grade. I think the movie that the colors reminded me most of was The Batman, both filmed on Arri Alexa cameras, but apparently this was shot on newer and smaller cameras.
However, unlike the Batman and some other newer movies, there is no muddying up of the frame with flares, or vignette, lens distortion, or shallow focus, everything here is very crisp and in deep focus, with the color grade creating a pleasing smoothness and flatness.
This worked well with the world they built: the set pieces and props were masterfully done, and you can see it all. This was a very immersive, textured world. Really top tier stuff. Not a lot of CG cruddiness here. It’s the sort of visual effects movies where you actually don’t think about the visual effects too much. Can’t stress how good this movie looks. From the little module that goes into the Andy’s neck, to the guns, to the devices around the Romulus lab, everything looks plausible, tangible, and interesting.
This is what makes my *one* visual complaint so visceral. The deepfake of Ian Holmes looks awful. It looks like Disney Star Wars Luke Skywalker. It’s fucking retarded. His lips never move right, the eyes are wrong. Its distracting. Even scenes where he’s on a screen, he looks wrong. What makes this infuriating is that Blade Runner 2049 proves this CAN be done properly, if you wanted to, and the situations his character are in feel less technically ambitious than what was required in Blade Runner. Like he just has to be a disembodied upper torso. They could have gotten him from one angle, for a little bit, done it really well, and it would have been a nice little cameo. But no, even with the extreme limitations of whatever bullshit facemorph app tier method they used, they flaunt this fascimele proudly for extended periods of time, do close ups, make him flail himself around——it’s so stupid.
What makes it even worse is that now to think of it, having him here isn’t even required by the plot. He doesn’t play Ash. And there’s no reason the synthetic he plays has to look like ash. Again, it’s retarded. This is where I could see Disney’s grubby fingerprints. Fuck them.
Other than that, the digital effects are competently done, I didn’t really think about them, which is good. The aliens all seemed very real and I wasn’t thinking about the effects too much, which was the point. It looked like very sophisticated puppetry, suitamation, etc. There were a few physical effects which were just disgusting in the best ways.
Overall however, the mix of the almost pleasing visual style and the mostly familiar alien designs means that this movie doesn’t really have a “scary” feel. I was interested the whole time, but I don’t think I was properly frightened until the very end. This is a good time to transition to a related but separate factor, which is the fear factor.
The Fear Factor
I don’t think this movie is terribly scary. It’s suspenseful, it’s gripping, the concepts are disturbing and creepy. But I can’t say I was scared a lot. It’s more of a horror action like Aliens was. There’s no “cosmic horror” element here——nothing like a Space Jockey moment or the existential angst of Prometheus.
Everything feels very grounded in a sense. Once shrouded in mystery, we have a good sense of what an off world colony is like, and it’s basically your typical sci fi cyberpunk dystopia. Nothing too insane. I imagined something a lot weirder and scarier from the references to these places in Blade Runner.
The Xenomorphs are just creatures being harvested for medical purposes by Weyland. I guess this movie just doesn’t allude to a bigger cosmic story the way the other ones do. Even the motivations of Weyland aren’t shrouded in mystery here, they’re very comprehensible. When you see the Space Jockey and that biological mothership in the first one, the imagination goes wild. The Xenomorphs feel extremely ancient and otherworldly. I don’t think they feel like that here. They are just scary monsters. Additionally, we don’t get the sense of being in “deep space.” Psychologically, you know the characters aren’t very far from civilization——the colony is right below them. They’re also on a human built space station——you never get a taste of the Giger weirdness in this movie. So overall, there is just less creepiness that pervades this movie.
A useful analogy I can make is this movie sort of feels like Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Its visuals and set design are evocative of the original film. But something about the whole setup make it feel less magical, less mysterious. It’s very digestible, there’s no grandeur.
Without that larger sense of scale and cosmic horror, this movie has to rely on more traditional horror movie thrills, like generous screaming, blood, successive time constraints, and jump scares. It does all of these and I think it does them very well. But maybe I’m easy to please.
The action is very fun, and very creative. It has this Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s stone or haunted house setup where they go through challenge after challenge in the ship, almost like an amusement park ride. I can see how it could feel a bit hokey, but I think it was fun and I was always thinking, Oh shit how are they gonna get out of this.
I was really struck by how novel and creative everything was. The sequence where they have to get through the gaggle of face huggers by maintaining their bodies alignment with the ambient temperature was thrilling. The use of zero gravity as a way to avoid the acid blood from going through the hull, and the resulting action sequence was really awesome. The time constraint posed early in the movie with the approach to the planets rings was also neat and added a sense of dread throughout.
Finally, I think the ending was extremely well done, and is a nice spin on what happened in the original Alien’s last sequences. Maybe I’m stupid, but I didn’t see the whole “offspring” thing coming, I thought everything was over, just like in the first Alien movie when Ripley is about to settle into her cryopod.
The ending is where I want to give the movie A LOT of credit. As I said earlier, I don’t think I was properly frightened until the end when the Offspring appeared. It is genuinely some of the most unnerving and upsetting creature design I have ever seen, and the jump scares were effective as hell. I was very offput when it started licking his mom and it seemed like . . . like it was trying to have sex with her. Just so so upsetting and disgusting and I feel like this movie needed just a bit more of that throughout.
The final action fight with the Offspring and detaching the vessel was also great. Dizzying, but great. Overall, this movie does the action part of action horror excellently, and it does the horror just competently, with some standout moments near the end.
The Storytelling
First, I’ll say that the movie is pretty tight, paced well, and never felt like a drag. I think it’s similar to Alien, but with a much different approach to the characters and dialogue, which I’ll discuss.
So, this movie suffers from what I think a lot of modern movies suffer from——it does a lot of spoon-feeding which doesn’t feel very cinematic. For example, in the beginning sequences on the colony, there’s this constant protest chant going on in the background that the workers are slaves, the company is a liar, etc. Establishes that Weyland Yutani is bad, that the main character’s situation is dire. Alright, typical sci fi exposition. Fine.
But it doesn’t stop? It’s repeated A LOT. When Rain is trying to leave, the movie takes pain to show you the dishonesty of the Weyland representative adding years to her contract and the whole system. The opening dialogue has this whole thing like “oh we owe them three months” or something. Then there’s the dialogue between the kids talking about their parents and wanting to leave so they won’t end up like them. Look, at some points this felt like Black Mirror tier exposition dialogue. That’s what I’m saying. I think that in this genre of Sci Fi, less is often more.
And it doesn’t stop there! The first act goes through IMMENSE lengths to establish that Bjorn hates Andy. There is a ludicrous amount of dialogue real estate dedicated to him being a dick to Andy, than a very on the nose explanation by Navarro as to why Bjorn hates synthetics. Ian Holme’s character has a very straightforward explanation for what the company’s intentions are. Andy directly states “my prime directive is now to do what’s best for the company.” Bjorn and Tyler explicitly state the plan to abandon Andy early on. Andy’s origins are declared clearly by one of the characters, just in case the audience was wondering. This sort of things goes on and one through the movie. It feels like TV. It’s not cinematic. The movie isn’t comfortable with letting some ambiguity hang around; there aren’t times where I’m guessing at different character’s intentions or anything, whether one of the friends will betray another. A spade is a spade.
I feel like this approach also made the movie’s vibe less menacing overall. When you think of young ensemble casts in the horror genre, I think what’s often really effective is a latent fear of betrayal, mistrust. Are these people really my friends? I’m thinking of Midsommar and others. It’s scary being in scary situations with people you want to trust but where circumstances reveal people’s untrustworthiness. This is a good transition to my next points.
The Actors and Characters
The best decision this movie makes is to have a young ensemble cast. It immediately separates it from the other Alien films, which have gruffer and older characters. You are primed to have more sympathy for younger attractive characters, which is why they are a mainstay in the horror genre. And the Alien franchise’s fusion of sexual anxiety and fear seems like it would work really well with a young ensemble cast.
Now, the mere selection of this kind of cast does wonders. I found them all interesting, pretty memorable, and likable. I didn’t want any of them to die. The setup of them just wanting to flee from wage slavery makes them sympathetic from the get go.
But overall, my main impression is of a missed opportunity. The casting of young attractive people does the heavy lifting, but there’s not enough initial setup to make us care about the characters (with the stark exception of Andy and Rain) even MORE. I feel like I should have felt more invested in the pregnant chick. Or everyone else.
They just dedicate a lot of real estate early on to hoky exposition than to creating interesting dynamics between the ensemble. They take a much lighter approach to that. It should be inverted. We can all intuit that Weyland is bad, that Bjorn doesn’t like Andy, with maybe a couple lines of dialogue. It takes a bit more time to understand the minute social politics and histories of an ensemble. It would have made the deaths more impactful. I’m thinking of how reality shows work——you need the audience to get invested before characters get voted off the island. Otherwise who the fuck cares.
Overall, however, the actors did a good enough job to make it “work.” No performance lagged. They all had a pretty good chemistry. But again, this is in the realm of competent rather than excellent work.
With ONE major exception: the relationship between Andy and Rain. This is the only thing in the movie that I think approaches “perfect.” The dialogue between them is amusing, the care they have for each other is palpable, the guilt Rain feels in nearly abandoning Andy is also something I felt deeply. Rain’s feeling of abandonment after Andy’s upgrade is also conveyed well. Their pairing carries the whole film.
I haven’t talked about Spaeny enough. She’s great. She’s likable in the way that Sigourney Weaver was likable, but because Spaeny is young and much more little the badass energy is a slower reveal. She starts off appearing like the little sister of the group but at the end she’s an action hero. I think it’s great. I loved her in Civil War and I can’t wait to see her I more movies.
The excellence of David Johnson’s and Cailee Spaeny’s work is enough to make it so that the acting in this movie, overall, should be pegged as EXCELLENT. Bravo.
The Verdict
This movie is great, but it has enough defects that prevent it from entering the category of a classic. I’m glad it exists. It was worth watching. I don’t know if I’ll ever make time to watch it again. Kind of like Spider-Man No Way Home or Avatar 2. I’ll probably take a friend to watch it in theaters a second time, but I’ll probably never watch it at home.
As far as later contributions to aging sci fi franchises go, Alien Romulus isn’t in the territory of the new Apes movies or anything. I don’t think it will breathe whole new life into the franchise or serve as the basis of a great new series. It’s probably more like Superman Returns at its best. Or Godzilla: 2000. A nice addition, one that many appreciate. But just a curiosity for the most part. At its worst it’s more like the Force Awakens—itself a fun and good movie, but also the beginning of a more corporate and cynical approach to a beloved IP. Hopefully it’s the former.
However, there is a very small chance that they could continue the story with Rain and Andy and do something very special. However, knowing Disney, I just doubt they’ll pull it off. So far they ruin everything they touch with enough time. Time will tell.