ALIEN: ROMULUS (2024)
Watching prequels and sequels, especially when they're often another 'soft reboot' type affair, feels like a sort of Groundhog Day scenario these days. Nobody wants to do anything creative to avoid commercial disappointment and the results are all too often a case of Déjà vu. Remember the pulse rifle? Remember the Company? Remember dead actors now being portrayed by nightmarish deepfake technology? So despite the mythological images conjured up by the title this is more Alien: Reheated rather than anything deeper. It might look and sound pretty good but the surface level window dressing hides another hollow and mostly recycled effort.
The opening shot alone gives away what's in store as a Weyland Yutani probe investigates the wreckage of a certain M-class star-freighter. The Prometheus films before this took some swings (and mostly misses) but this time the film-makers are digging up the remains of past successes to try and sell this as a new adventure. Which to be fair initially seems to be the case as mine worker Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her android 'brother' Andy (David Jonsson) try to escape corporate servitude. But beyond some attempts at world building in the first act there's not much else going on in terms of a more complicated plot or characterisation.
The rest of the cast are all just expendable slasher movie victims, some who are more annoying than others, but none who are memorable or even very likeable. One hates androids, one is pregnant, one is bald, and that's about it really. The world weariness and the camaraderie of the Nostromo crew is missing entirely which is odd considering how much being is borrowed from prior instalments. Here they have to pretend to like one another just long enough for Andy to access an abandoned space station where cryogenic sleeping capsules can be found. With these aboard the gang can escape to another planet and start a new life; what could be simpler?
A lot of the narrative is glossed over so they can get aboard the derelict and find out what horrors lurk inside. Nobody ever explains why Andy, a defective android that isn't in the Company service, can access security. Nobody explains where air traffic control is and why some kind of local law enforcement isn't already investigating. It's odd that there are no twists and turns to suggest that this is a scheme to lure desperate workers to their doom. Rain and her comrades are just allowed to do what they want, which is strange when they're being manipulated to work themselves into an early grave in the mines. But a thin script that doesn't hold up to scrutiny is just one of the problems here.
Aboard the station the characters face all the expected perils as they act like dumb teenagers and cause more problems than they solve. Most of the set pieces, and the special effects used, are pretty good, but the lack of internal logic is always a problem. One of them uses a radio after being told they need to be silent, one meets a hostile life-form and refuses to quarantine themselves, one grabs a fuel pod full of liquid nitrogen and is surprised that it's cold. In fairness this was always a series where panic caused irrational behaviour, but too often it's at its worst here. So instead of being a back-to-basics creature feature it's an occasionally tense but often frustrating thrill ride.
The most genuinely annoying parts are those elements which have been regurgitated from the whole franchise like so much alien goop. Perhaps it was studio mandated but perhaps the writers were just too in love with call-backs and references. It starts with props and set dressing before it devolves into actual scenes and quotes from previous films. The creepy CGI death-masks found in Rogue One and its ilk are back and they still look atrocious. Which is embarrassing when such elements add nothing to the overall plot. They even include moments from Alien: Resurrection and Prometheus in a bizarre effort to tick all the boxes.
Which means the film as a whole has a rather considerable identity crisis. Is it trying to be a stand-alone monster movie or is it trying to bridge the gap between films made in 1979 and 2012? It might have done both if more self-control or subtlety was employed, but as it stands it's really neither one thing or the other. The attempts to create a hybrid with so much mutant DNA have ironically failed and caused a good looking but mostly sloppy final product. Individual sequences like gravity defying action scenes and gruesome moments of body horror are occasionally interesting by themselves, but the rest is a strangely dull pseudo-remake that doesn't have much of a reason to exist.
2/5
BONUS REVIEW
THE FIRST OMEN (2024)
The main one is that the plot is more Rosemary's Baby than The Omen. They've got the likes of Ralph Ineson as Father Brennan (Patrick Troughton previously) keeping his Irish accent but changing his character entirely. They've got an evil cult bringing the anti-Christ into the world but changed its motives. Even the nature of Damien's birth has been changed just so this film can exist, betraying a financial rather than a creative endeavour. The bright spot is protagonist Margaret (Nell Tiger Free) doing a great job as a troubled woman trying to find a place to belong by working in an Catholic orphanage after a troubled childhood.
Her story is compelling and it's all nicely shot, but again it's an odd thing this exists at all as it struggles to have an identity of its own. To avoid having characters say too much dialogue from 1976 it's full of moments taken from other horror films, with everything from Possession to Gozu being referenced. As a result there's a yet more gruesome body horror although the film is marred by modern jump scares and nightmare sequence fake-outs. It succeeds more than yet another Alien feature by focusing on ideas about a personal crisis of faith and a paranoid conspiracy, but it's still very uneven. Which in a way is more of a let down; with some tweaks it could be more than the sum of these parts.
3/5
