Omigod the xeno-genitals!
Alien: Romulus is about crotch-goblin aliens attacking poor, futuristic teens who only have wits and great skin on their side. It’s weird, because it seems that acne medicine is the only technology that’s advanced in the future. Otherwise, the film is full of fuzzy, tiny, analog CRT screens, people smoking non-electronic, fire-based filtered cigarettes (there’s a lovely disclaimer at the end that says the studio was not paid to advertise cigarettes, so they’re just advertising cigarettes for free) and a ton of unlabeled push buttons.
But also: this is a concisely fun film. The pacing is incredible. There’s enough plot for four ordinary movies, and with 20 minutes till the end they introduce a huge twist that could have been saved for a sequel but then they finish it and introduce the sequel twist and you’re like, “How can they end here when I still don’t understand all the alien wieners and vulvae?”
There are so many. Dan O’Bannon, who wrote the franchise-launching Alien, said that movie was about men’s fear of impregnation. True enough. So in A:R, which features callbacks to all the other Alien movies, director/writer Fede Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues try to include as much hoo-ha and wee-wee-oriented monster modeling as possible.
There’s a horrifyingly accurate alien vulva that spouts out a penis-headed creature. There’s the horseshoe crab-style alien from the first movie, but in A:R its throat-invading stomach-cock is easily twice as long and penile. There’s even an alien with prominent, upside-down Y-shaped genitals in its nether-region. This is, throughout the entire series of Alien movies, the only time you see a xenomorph with its naughty bits in its crotch.
The pudendae are, of course, not the deciding factor in the quality of the film, but they do show a basic sense of creativity lacking in so many of the non-Ridley-Scott Alien flicks.
Let’s say there are three sorts of Alien movies: the ones like Alien which are subtle, scary, filmed with a great sense of shadow and light, and never descend into pointless gun-and-run set pieces. Then there’s Aliens, which is basically an action film shot like a 1980s sitcom with characters who are loud and stupid. I know people love it, but it’s like loving cotton candy: it’s not good for your teeth. Then there are the total misses, like Alien Resurrection, which looks like it was edited together from another, unfinished movie by someone with terminal ADHD and a pirated copy of Final Cut Pro.
Alien: Romulus is sort of a mashup of the first two movies, combining smart writing with strong action. Unlike the shoot-and-shout mania of Aliens, when the main characters of Romulus (including Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Aileen Wu, and Spike Fearn) make dumb choices it makes sense because they’re teenagers, not a highly trained elite military unit.
Plus, the lighting and cinematography (by Galo Olivares) are exquisite, nearly up to par with Alien or the bizarre Prometheus. There’s a moment when the scared teens and their friendly killer robot finally get out of the dank, shadowy parts of a derelict spaceship and enter a sparklingly bright, white, sanitary room, and it’s just genius. It’s lighting as storytelling. It works.
That’s largely because Álvarez knows how to pace a movie. It starts a bit, but by no means unpleasantly, slowly. Then things speed up slightly: plot points come faster. The stakes are raised. Then, wait, things speed up more. Then more. Plot points come so fast that you’re like, “Didn’t you want to save some of these ideas for the next four films?” But no! They don’t cheat you like that. They give you everything they’ve got all at once, and in the right order!
Which means a few corners are cut. The scared teens turn the gravity on and off in the station a bunch of times — and for plot purposes, I guess, “no gravity” means things instantly float to the middle of whatever room they’re in. Also, one of the central motifs of the film involves the danger of their space vessel passing through a planet’s rings. But, like, that’s not a huge danger. Sure, you could hit something, but the densest planetary rings known are about 3% solid matter and the rest is empty space. And again, in the way technology hasn’t advanced much in Aliens: Romulus, maybe it went backwards, because in 2016 we lowly 21st century idiots flew an unmanned craft right through Saturn’s rings without even scratching it. Like, it’s so easy that the species who brought you flat-eartherism, chemtrail conspiracy theories and Skibidi Toilet pulled it off.
But whatever. You can’t let science bother you when watching science fiction. Instead, you could be bothered by some terrible soundtrack moments from composer Benjamin Wallfisch. Like the horrible, crescendo-ing minor-7th chord, sung by a chorus of altos, that occurs when you’re already feeling all you need to feel because the movie did that thing where “images” and “story” produced tension. The worst music is in the end when you get one of those hopeful/eerie, overly loud ascending triumphal chord progressions that declares “this is the end…or is it?!” In space, no one is supposed to hear you scream, so next time have the chorus do their part in a vacuum.
But! Seriously! There isn’t way too much of that music, and the movie is enthralling, which really does come down to the creative but well-justified twists and turns. All the things that would seem like dumb luck in other movies are carefully foreshadowed here, so, for example, when a bunch of baddies are offed by a big piece of machinery, we’ve already been introduced to that big piece of machinery without being lamely clued in to the fact that it’ll be a weapon.
Things like that happen repeatedly: each new moment makes sense, builds on what came before, and there are no battles or set pieces that fail to advance the story. It’s all plot and character driven. Contrast that to the sort of gun battles you see in John Wick movies or chase sequences from low-end, car-franchise films designed so an audience starved of violence for six minutes can satiate itself with murders and explosions.
Huge props to Álvarez for forging thoughtful, carefully photographed excitement that makes you pay attention and rewards you with thrills that don’t insult your intelligence. This is what popcorn movies should be. Just, you know, with a teensy bit less of the trite, over-loud music telling the viewer what to feel.
