Alien: Romulus

Hard to believe they could make an Alien movie worse than Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. This franchise has been creatively bankrupt since back before we started using the term "franchise" to describe movie series. But Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Álvarez (director of the 2013 sequel/remake of Evil Dead and the terrific 2016 horror thriller Don't Breathe) and his regular co-writer Rodo Sayagues have managed to make this most unimaginative retread into a big hit film. It makes it hard to take seriously the industry concerns about AI eventually replacing screenwriters, technicians, and even directors when crap like this becomes one of the year's big movies, scoring decent to enthusiastic reviews from critics and audiences. This is literally everything AI-generated movies will be.

Álvarez and Sayagues follow the standard legasequel formula of taking the best and most distinctive elements from the first four Alien movies and mash them up into something that feels familiar yet different. But, just like an algorithm, they don't seem to have the slightest idea why those elements they've "learned on" worked so well the first time. Alien: Romulus kinda looks and sounds like Alien and Aliens, borrows several key narrative beats from those magnificent pictures, and the next two less successful installments in the series, Alien³ and Alien Resurrection, but it never feels scary, mysterious, intelligent, or, most crucial of all, human. It also looks like shit and is poorly edited (pretty good sound design, though).

Making the key mistake of many sequels, Alien: Romulus dispenses with the specifics of the mythology created in the original films in order to accelerate the pace and build surprises that make sense only if you just kinda vaguely remember the terrifying details from the first movies. For instance, the Xenomorph's complex and fascinating reproduction system, in which a queen lays big leathery eggs that later hatch a crablike "face-hugger" that assaults a host organism, attaching itself to the face and forcing a phallic tube down the throat to impregnate them while also keeping them alive for hours during the incubation period in which the real monster grows in the host's body. All that business with the queen and the eggs doesn't fit in this rapid-fire picture, so Álvarez and Sayagues come up with the idea that the corpse from the original alien from Alien never fully died, despite floating in the vacuum of space for hundreds of years, and was able to generate hundreds of face-huggers on its own. What a time saver!

The frighteningly organic way the face-hugger once had to linger on the person's face for hours during the gestation period also doesn't fit in this movie because this movie starts its ticking clock very early on, so... I don't know—fifteen or twenty minutes is all we need to grow the alien, right? The scary parts are when the face-hugger rapes the person and then when the baby alien bursts through their chest, right? Well no. The gestation period is every bit as scary. That was not only where the mystery was, but it was also the most understandably unsettling biological aspect. However, since this is the umpteenth sequel, there is no mystery to mine, so the filmmakers dispense of that slow, waiting-around stuff so they can get to the action. This begs the question, why not dispense with this whole uninspired sequel and just go back and watch the great Alien or Aliens again? I assure you. It will be 1000 times more satisfying, even if you've watched them both over and over again.

Movies like this seem to want viewers to recall the vastly superior films they are poorly xeroxing because they are filled with endless Easter Eggs and callbacks to the earlier pictures—with many of the same beats, shots, lines of iconic dialogue, and uncanny CIG-rendered reincarnations of dead actors from those films. It would be one thing if these new films did something new with these iconic ideas, images, and character tropes, as both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant tried to do. Perhaps it is because so many people (like me) complained about how insipid and pretentious those prequel attempts were that Ridley Scott and Walter Hill (the last surviving of the three original Brandywine producers who made the Alien films) decided to turn their series over to younger filmmakers who can essentially make fan-fiction movies from now on. But it is all the more disheartening that Álvarez and his team have copied the absolute worst aspect of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant—stupid characters that you actively want to get killed so the movie can end.

So much of what made the first two Alien pictures such masterpieces and so endlessly influential were their incredible characters. They fit into certain types—jaded blue-collar laborers, eager young marines, money-centered company men, and so on—but each had a distinctive personality, and every course of action they took seemed well-reasoned, logical, or at least human. Sometimes, we hated them for the decisions they made, but we never thought they were making ridiculous choices. The deeply relatable humanity of these characters was every bit as vital to the success of those movies as their timeless special effects and terrifying, disturbing, sexually charged imagery and themes.

The young miners of this latest installment are every bit as stupid and not credible as people in their situation as the adolescent-minded space explorers of the previous two films. Those characters behaved much more like contestants on a reality show, engaging in petty squabbles as if egged on by producers, even though they were face to face with unfathomable environments, situations, and monsters. This latest bunch, we're told, have spent most or all of their lives virtually imprisoned on a sunless planet and underground mine, yet the amount of time they spend trying to figure anything out is preposterously quick. These young people hatch a plan to steal a small ship and fly to an abandoned space station in orbit above their world to steal cryostasis equipment that will enable them to make the nine-year journey to an idyllic planet. We're meant to believe that almost every aspect of their plan would have worked were it not for the aliens on board the station. But these kids are so dumb, inexperienced, and cavalier that they would probably be dead within five minutes of boarding the station, long before any aliens show up. In a good version of this movie, the process of getting to the ship and obtaining the cryo gear would seem almost as dangerous and scary as the later alien encounters. But no, these goofs advance through the required story beats with incredible speed and efficiency, with the giant space station easily traversable in a matter of minutes.

Worse, the things that are meant to make them feel human and relatable feel, again, like how AI would render "human characters." In Aliens, Sigonry Waver's Ripley doesn't trust Lance Henrickson's android character because she's had such a bad experience with the android in the first movie. In this film, one of the characters is given the same prejudice. But, unlike Ripley, his dislike of androids is 90 percent of his entire personality, and he seems to have no grasp of how vital the synthetic member of their team is to achieving the group's objectives and keeping everyone alive.

Just as ChatGPT might, Álvarez and Sayagues have come up with a way to use the old Philosophy 101 scenario of The Trolley Problem, where you are faced with the ethical dilemma of being able to throw a switch that would cause the death of a small number of people to prevent a larger number of deaths. However, the way this dilemma is ultimately put into action renders it devoid of any connection to humanity. In the original Alien, Ripley makes the seemingly cold but logical decision to follow standard quarantine procedure and not allow her fellow crew members back on board the ship right away after one of them has been attacked by a face-hugger. Her orders are overridden by the science officer, Ash, for what we initially assume are humanitarian reasons but turn out to be the opposite.

Ripley's actions result (at least in one cut of the film) in her getting slapped by Lambert, a crew member she had refused entry. In this movie, a similar but intensified situation occurs where one of our group of protagonists is trapped with a giant alien behind a sealed door with a glass window. The human characters on the other side of the door beg their android to open the door to save their friend, but the android doesn't because he knows it will mean the death of everyone. For this action, the android gets a slap from the one character who has always treated him as a human. The scene is so absurd that it's hard to believe human beings wrote it. Because in the situation as shot, NO HUMAN BEING WOULD OPEN THAT DOOR! I don't care who's on the other side with the alien—your spouse, your child, or your best friend—you're not opening that door and letting the alien get you. And certainly, once you see have fast the alien snatches your friend away, you ain't slapping the guy who didn't open the door. You are grateful that he was the only one in the room with the power to make that choice.

Perhaps this scene didn't seem so absurd on the page. Maybe there was a way to shoot it that would have given it more of the prolonged detention of the scene in the original Alien. Still, this movie isn't interested in creating extended human situations of indecision, complex problem-solving, legitimate differences of opinion, and dread. It is only interested in moving the story forward quickly, delivering jump scares, and showcasing meaningless interpersonal conflict in which one character is clearly right and the other is completely irrational. These narrow objectives illuminate another thing that the human filmmakers who seem to replicate what AI would do if making an Alien movie completely miss about what made the first films so compelling. They are slow films.

In space, no one can hear you scream. Also in space, shit takes a long-ass time—it's hard to even get into a small shuttle, leave the main spaceship, and land on a planet. One of the reasons why people often describe Alien as the most exciting movie in which nothing happens for the first hour is because that film credibly makes it seem like most complex tasks take hours and require a huge amount of coordinated effort. I wouldn't fault these younger filmmakers for not wanting to spend so much time with all the hardware and the complex processes of operating inside a derelict spacecraft if only they understood that that time is where you can best give your characters dimension and relatable human traits. If they had known this, perhaps they could have devised a fresh new way of conveying the characters' thoughts, feelings, and personalities other than just having everyone shout that stuff at each other. If a mystery-horror-sci-fi film doesn't have the luxury of building mystery, suspense, excitement, and dread through the established tools of its given milieu because all the tools in this particular toolbox have already been used, either you find new tools or you don't tell the same basic story again.

The one new idea Álvarez and Sayagues come up with is a way for the characters to get around the problem that the aliens have concentrated acid for blood. This detail has always meant that blowing the creatures up can have dire consequences, like compromising the ship's hull or burning through the skin, bones, and internal organs of the person who shoots them. In zero gravity, however, the blood won't necessarily splatter all over the place. Of course, it would still splatter out all over the place; it just wouldn't fall directly to the floor. I can think of a number of cool ways the filmmakers could have explored this good idea, but none of them are attempted. And the way artificial gravity and its lack thereof is depicted in this movie is laughable.

I never saw either of the Alien vs. Predator movies because I couldn't imagine anything worthwhile coming from such a dumb video-game-and-comic book-inspired commercial franchise crossover. But now that I've seen Alien: Romulus, it's difficult to assume those pictures could be any worse than this half-assed theme park rollercoaster ride of a movie, in which too much unfolds in muddy darkness, and the stuff we do get to see go rushing by looks sloppy and silly. What a waste.