Film Review - Alien : Romulus

In a return to Cinema after a 5 week hiatus (way too expensive in north america), I allowed myself a double dose of summer blockbuster action, without really going into with any expectations … thankfully. It wasn’t until leaving Deadpool on the second night that I realized what many of these movies had become : a platform (but more on that later).

Review - Alien : Romulus

In the beginning …

I was never a huge Alien fan growing up and to be honest the first time I actually watched the original in one go from start to finish was as an adult, so I never grew up with the Alien (or Predator) hype for that matter, nor was I ever a purist. When I did see the original, I loved it.

There is such a masterful art of ambiance in that movie, and one of the main keys to that tension and ambiance is how sparsely we see the xenomorph. The less we see it directly the more it has time to grown in our mind and become threatening, to the point of a suffocating sense of invincibility, which makes Ripley’s vitory at the end all the more cathartic and powerful.

I never cared much for James Cameron’s Aliens, it’s a great actoin flick, but it’s just that, an action flick, which is not what I want to go to this franchise for. I honestly didnt mind Alien Ressurection so much; it was just weird and wacky enough and heck it was J.P. Jeunet so i’m up for anything from that guy!

While Prometheus was a frustaing mixed bag of gorgeous visuals and ideas and terrible pacing and characterisation, I think it has grown on me over time. And Alience Covenant… well, what can I say. Hot mess doesnt even begin to cover it.

So, it was with very little expectation that I went to see Alien : Romulus, and only thanks to my 20 euro/month limitless movie card.

I enjoyed the movie …

I’ll give it its props : this movie was much better than I had thought. It has a knowledge of the universe of Alien and a certain love for it. It goes for the right look, for the right feel. And the people in it dont make one dumb choice after another (looking at you Prometheus, with what has got to be the dumbest band of scientists ever assembled on film!). It does a LOT of references to various elements of the previous films. A bit too much if you ask me, to the point of it feeling a bit like fan service, like it’s checking boxes on all the greatest hits of the past movies.

And yet …

And yet … when it’s all over, it just feel all so … banal. What a terrible thing to not be impressed by such a spectacle. The sets look so good, and so faithful to the original 1979 flick, the lighting and the xenomorphs … and how the action builds up … and how everythign we referenced earlier comes to some use later … and blah blah …

Sorry about that ! But therein lies the problem. What made the original Alien so good was the scarcity of the big bad. What made the one xenomorph so scary was that the whole crew tried everythign that they had and failed, outsmarted at every turn, unable to find any weapon capable of beating it! And then, now, we’re at the point where we’re killing a whole nest of what feels like hundreds of xenomorphs with one machine gun. Man, that just makes those evil xenomorphs just all that much more … banal! … sigh.

Doesn’t this happen so damn often though? I remember feeling the same thing with the second season of Stranger Things : you spend a whole season barely able to kill one doggamn demigorgon and then by the end of season two you’re fighting hordes of them and knocking them one after another? Really? I guess that’s what makes sequels tough huh… unless you’re James Cameron makign T2 I guess.

And then there’s the other issue …

And So here is the other thought that intantly came to my mind as I left the cinema :

This feels so much like what happened with *Star Wars*!!

Let me explain : Prometheus (and Covenant) are flawed films (soooo many flaws!) but it really felt like Ridley Scott was trying somethign new there.

He knew that there was no point in just going back and doing a fifth movie with a heroine running away from a xenomorph. He was pivoting, asking new questions, while staying in the same universe. He was turning to the other key elements of this same universe : those shifty androids and that dodgy corporation.

And let’s be honest, I dont think he did a particularly good job of it, but he tried. He didnt want to retread the same old paths and just give fans more of the same. And then Disney bought the studio that owend Alien and brought in a new director, who gave us a great Alien movie, with all the stuff every fan likes, and then you left the cinema and felt … meh.

And this feels so much like what poor ol’ Georgie Lucas tried to do with The Prequels in the early 2000s, isn’t it? They were a disaster and I personally felt that sadness after viewing each one at that time. And yet after the excitment of the Disney trilogy over the past few years and the mounting disappointment after episode 7 and the scandalous joke that was Rise of Skywalker, the effectively killed it all for me.

In hindsight, I have much more appreciation for what Lucas was trying to do with the prequels, something new, not just a rehash of the greatest hits of episodes 4-6, but something new. He wanted to bring some depth. The execution was terrible, and that’s been more than well document everywhere else, but at least it wasnt the messy schlock that the Disney sequels turned out to be, just a series of self referential jokes, direction transpositions of old storylines, of old lines, of old jokes, until there was nothing of true substance left. ! (Here i will make an exception, becuase i really liked The last Jedi, so deal with it).

And so here we are. Yet another enjoyable moment at the cinema, where the story of what i just watched is forgotten by the time i’m back out of the metro and goign home. There have been way too many of those these past years …

(wow, ok, i defintely was not planning on writing this much about this silly movie! My apologies. )

Featured Photo: Elliott, my plant, Paris, France || f/1.8 || 1/3200s || ISO100 || 50 mm || Nikon D7200 || 2021