When I was around second grade or so, I would visit the library. They had VHS section full of movies you could check out. I was instantly drawn to one; it was a simple title, a photo of an ominous looking egg, and a promise of space/sci-fi goodness. Starting then, and for years to come (while I was glued to the screen for the V miniseries), I would constantly ask my parents to get it. (They declined.)

I didn’t actually see ALIEN until much later. My introduction to the series was seeing the TV-movie version of ALIENS when on vacation, and I was hooked.

In a long ago comment thread, on a now-defunct website, I made a joke about the “Alien/Predator cinematic universe”, which thankfully has not actually caught on as a real term. But I’ve seen all of them, even the terrible ones (you do NOT have to see THE PREDATOR or AVP: REQUIEM, trust me.)

So when ALIEN: ROMULUS came to theaters, I was going to be there opening night. In the leadup, some of the hype was that it was back to the basics after Ridley Scott’s thematic experiments in PROMETHEUS and ALIEN: COVENANT. As someone who still uses Weyland-Yutani as the stock fake company name, I am a prime target for whatever callbacks, tie-ins, and easter eggs they might throw in.

Well, Fede Álvarez definitely delivered on that front. And, wow, did it make it worse.

WARNING: This post contains spoilers about ALIEN: ROMULUS (and the rest of the series)

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When leaving the theater, I described it to my kid (who hadn’t seen any of the prior entries) as “three Alien movies in a blender”. In retrospect, it’s more like a sandwich or a remix.

This doesn’t have to be a bad thing. There’s only so many ways to swing “an unprepared group stumbles into a situation with the alien and gets in over their heads”. But ROMULUS would keep coming back to “hey, remember this” lines, scenes, and references, in a way that rather than drawing me into the film, would draw me out.

Let’s talk about the layers of that sandwich.

ALIEN #

The first ⅓ to ½ of the movie is the ALIEN story beats section:

• introduce your working class crew
• they make a discovery and one gets infected
• there’s a conundrum about quarantine
• the xenomorph is born and starts picking them off

Before I went to the theater, I had posted about what may be in it.

Hoping for a Wierzbowski cameo.

— Bill Nottingham (@notting.bsky.social) Aug 16, 2024 at 9:31 PM

To be clear, this was a joke. You don’t need to repeat characters to tell a good story. But the people behind ALIEN: ROMULUS thought differently.

Immediately, we have to discuss the Ash Rook of it all. ROMULUS brings back a digital version of Ian Holm to act as an antagonist, as the science officer dedicated to the experiments with the xenomorph on behalf of the company.

There’s nothing wrong with going back to the well of the sinister company man (or synthetic, as the case may be); it’s a through-line of the series. But to go whole-hog and devote the majority of non-crew screen time to a digital simulacrum of a prior character, and having them retread lines like “you have my sympathies”, doesn’t immerse you. It’s distracting.

Beyond that, there’s the raw ethics of basing this all on Ian Holm, who is, y’know, dead. I hope that his estate is at least getting payment and royalties for this. Even if you try and say that this is a metaphor for the company squeezing you for profit even after death, just… don’t. There are plenty of middle-aged British actors who can do a new version of a malevolent android that won’t distract the viewer, and won’t cross an ethics red line. Use them!

ALIENS #

We then move to the ALIENS section of the story.

• gotta fight a bunch of them to escape
• going back for your family under time pressure of imminent destruction
• escape via the elevator

Here, Álvarez moves away from wholesale importing of a character. Instead, it’s wholesale appropriation of scenes, shots, and lines.

We don’t just give the characters the M41-A pulse rifle, we recreate the entire scene where Hicks teaches Ripley how to use it, shooting from the same angles.

We don’t just have a lot of scenes where our heroine climbs up and down the installation, we zoom in to show the Reeboks.

And then, there’s the line. “Get away from her, you bitch!” was an iconic moment in ALIENS. Here, it’s painful - I was not the only one in the theater who groaned.

Among the ways it hurts:

• It’s not even cleanly quoted, it’s weirdly split into two lines
• It’s feels out of character for the dad-joke sporting Andy
• In ALIENS, for better or worse, the name calling is directed at a female, matriarchal counterpart to the main character. Here, it’s just another drone.

You certainly can do line callbacks without being too goofy. Staying in-universe, in PREY we get “if it bleeds, we can kill it”. But we get it in context, in character, in a quieter moment where any distraction won’t deflate the tension of the moment. ROMULUS doesn’t follow any of those rules.

ALIEN: RESURRECTION (with a slice of PROMETHEUS) #

Finally, we end on the fourth movie in the series. (I guess Álvarez wasn’t a fan of ALIEN³.)

• we birth a weird goo-influenced hybrid
• it kills its mother
• we use the acid to author its demise

Generally, the design in ALIEN: ROMULUS is great. It cribs from the other movies in a good way to build an environment that feels at home in the series.

And yet, for the final climax, the creature design threw me off again. I’m sure there was more discussion and more thought, than just “let’s re-do the Newborn, and cross it with the Engineer from Prometheus”. But that’s what the end product looked like to me, and again, rather than being a “oh, that’s clever”, it plays as “oh, we’re doing the end of RESURRECTION now.”

Etc. #

That’s just the major highlights of “hey, remember this”; there’s plenty more whether it’s bringing back ALIEN’s blue mist, doing a scene where the heroine nervously suits up in her PJs, and so on.

Nostalgia done well… #

Nostalgic references to earlier media doesn’t have to hurt.

An interesting contrast to this in a very different sort of movie comes in an earlier 2024 film, Jane Schoenbrun’s I SAW THE TV GLOW. (Watch it, it’s excellent.) In TV GLOW, there are oodles of references and easter eggs to 90s/00s TV like BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER. But it doesn’t distract from the overall theme, mood, or experience of the film, because:

• the references aren’t in the filming itself
• the references are used to set a mood
• when it comes time for the real dramatic tension and moments, they drop away

It’s nostalgia used well, to put you in a place and a mindset, which the movie then draws you out of to a new space.

Going back to the aforementioned PREY, it’s similar: there’s a line or two in a quiet point, and if you are deeply invested in the lore, you may recognize a pistol. It doesn’t bleed into the shots, or the plot: they tell a new story, with new beats and new themes, despite it being with familiar trappings.

But not here… #

Contrastingly, in ROMULUS, the constant references and structure based on older films feels like a crutch. Every few minutes the shots, the lines, and the plot come back to hit series veterans over the head with “hey, remember this?”. And it hurts the overall experience.

Clearly in ROMULUS the idea was that by bringing in these references, shots, and easter eggs from earlier films that they could pull viewer’s good feelings from those films.

But that’s the trap of nostalgia. In drawing the viewer to associate their goodwill of older work, you run the risk of drawing attention away from what you are doing.

Sometimes this is because of lack of confidence in your storytelling. Everyone has seen the sitcom that by season 7 falls back on characters spouting catchphrases because they can’t think of a new story to tell.

Opportunity lost #

The dispiriting part of this is that that doesn’t need to be the case in ROMULUS. Despite all of what I wrote above, there’s a good movie here.

While not as concerned as some of the other series films with a message, there is a metaphor there on Romulus/Remus compared to a more healthy sibling relationship. Film Crit Hulk goes into detail on this better than I could, so read that.

The key performances are great. There is a great underlying story and great performances in Andy’s devotion to Rain, the unfortunate tweaks of the ‘upgrade’, and returning to his roots. That stands in contrast to COVENANT which seems only interested in David.

At no point in ROMULUS am I staring at the characters as they do completely nonsensical things in service of the plot moving from point A to point B. (helllooooooooo, PROMETHEUS)

As noted, the technical design is top notch, and at nearly every point there’s a great sense of where all the characters are, where they need to get, and what the need to do next, compared to the “wait, there’s an underwater part of a space station???” of RESURRECTION.

There are a number of excellent set pieces, from the silent passage sneak attempt, to the zero-G fight and escape, to the crash into the planet’s rings. It’s great enough that I am happily ignoring the astrophysics voice in my head of “that’s not how rings work!”

That’s what ends up disappointing about ALIEN: ROMULUS. It feels like the team didn’t have the confidence in doing their own thing, so they fell back on constant references to the past. And the final product shows that if they did just strike out on their own convictions, it could have been drastically improved.

Oh well, there’s always the next one. I’ll be there.

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Stray observations on refrigerator logic #

Plot holes in general aren't really a thing that often. If a "wait, what?" doesn't occur to you until the next day when you're standing at the refrigerator, well, then it's not a hole that affected the film.

That doesn’t mean you don’t still eventually have those refrigerator logic moments. In this case:

If, as Rook stated, they picked up the xenomorph from the Nostromo wreckage, studied it, but then it wreaked havoc on the station and everyone died, that raises the following questions:

• where did all the frozen facehuggers come from?
• if Weyland-Yutani did the work to search the Nostromo wreckage, why would they not come back to Romulus/Remus after they lost contact?