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The seventh film in the Alien franchise is by far the worst of the litter, featuring a juvenile cast lacking any charisma who lead us through a tediously dull pastiche of the series’ greatest hits. Alien: Romulus reeks of young adult fan fiction, littered with shameless, overt homages to every Alien movie that preceded it — hoping those ‘member berries’ — to use a South Park term — would sustain audiences through its utterly generic, paint-by-numbers screenplay.
Cailee Spaeny stars — I hate to even use that word, since stars shine and the child-sized Spaeny never so much as glimmers — in the new film, directed by Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe), who is a far more competent filmmaker than some of his film choices would suggest. Anyway, Spaeny joins a team of other Goonies rejects to board a derelict space station where — you guessed it — facehuggers and aliens lie in wait to suck their faces and turn them into alien baby mamas. There are fussy exposition points connecting Romulus to Ridley Scott’s original film, and tidy little ties to Scott’s more recent prequels Prometheus and Covenant, but none of this matters in the least. These connections don’t mean anything. They have no bearing on Romulus‘s tired formula storytelling. They’re just window dressing to try and distract you from how pointless the film is.
The only sliver of humanity to support the audience’s emotional engagement in this turd-burger is Spaeny’s relationship with her adopted brother Andy (David Jonsson), but since he’s an android whose programming is changed part-way into the movie, that sliver of emotional engagement is nuked — leaving us with nothing. There’s no reason to care about these imbecilic, tropey, dull-as-dishwater characters. I was bored to tears through this film. Why can’t characters under the age of 30 be the least bit compelling in movies today? Why can’t they feel like real, grounded, developed people? I fear it’s because people under 30 are more like zombies than human beings today, and that poor facsimiles of human beings is the best they can ever be — but I digress.
Director Alvarez conjures two or three interesting moments in the entire film. One involves dodging acidic alien blood in a zero-gravity environment. The other is a nasty climactic birth scene and ensuing battle with the mutant progeny — but really, we’ve already seen these things done better in Alien: Resurrection and Prometheus. And like James Cameron’s Aliens, Romulus has a surprise second climax. The problem is, I was so ready for the credits to roll that I didn’t want another twenty minutes of this movie. The best thrills are in that final twenty minutes, but it’s too little, too late. I had already checked out of this crapfest. And trying to say anything nice about Alien: Romulus is like looking into the toilet bowl to see if you can spot any shiny corn kernels in the dump you just dropped.
With young and boring Archie Renaux (who?), young and boring Isabela Merced (who?), young and boring Spike Fearn (who?), and young and boring Aileen Wu as the obligatory too-cool-for-school Asian chick. The film also shamelessly resurrects the late great Ian Holm via unconvincing, A.I.-assisted visual effects for a unnecessary supporting role in the film.
Oscar Nomination: Best Visual Effects