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ROMULUS may have founded Rome but, as they say, Rome wasn’t built in a day. The Alien franchise too has certainly sweated its way here, nearly 50 years after Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripey first encountered extraterrestrial form in the iconic 1979 film. There have been ups and downs, but those messy, hungry, hunting aliens have not shown any loss of appetite.
It all comes down to our appetite then, for similar mayhem. With Ridley Scott, the OG director of the OG film, in the producer’s chair, Alien: Romulus certainly grabs our attention. Director Alvarez, who is also the co-writer and is a surprise choice for this big-ticket reboot that has names like Scott and James Cameron associated with it, preps the setting nicely. There is a conscious call to move away from the mid-career protagonists of the earlier films to boys and girls in their 20s this time, with the child-like Spaeny leading the pack.
However, Alien: Romulus succumbs eventually to that commonest of crimes: where a bark will do, it bites; where teeth will do, it snarls; where one big monster is enough, it has thousands; and where one scene of a creature crawling its way out of a human conveys the point, it has two.
There is kill, and then there is overkill.
Still, when it begins, Alien: Romulus has promise. Rain (Spaeny) and the android whom she considers her brother, Andy (Jonsson), inhabit a dreary, dusty, dark planet called Jackson where the corporates who run the show are working them to death. Humans are assigned bunk-like quarters, provided assembly-line food and warned against diseases, before being thrown into their assignments to fulfill their required work hours. When anyone meets those hours, the company simply changes the rules.
Rain, who dreams of returning to a planet where she can at least see a sun, realises this even as she is still mourning her parents who died of diseases caught working in mines, and looking after Andy who doesn’t have the social skills needed to survive such a place.
The desolation of Jackson is striking, its dingy market milling with worn, weary crowds reminiscent of Blade Runner.
But, soon enough – with surprisingly no one in the ever-watchful company noticing – Rain and Andy have taken off into space with her group of friends to try and dock onto a decommissioned spaceship they have discovered is floating overhead. The idea is to use the spaceship to travel to a planet where the sun shines – and much more, one presumes.
If you have seen any of the previous eight Alien films – including sequels, prequels and mid-quels – you will know what likely awaits humankind on a mysteriously deserted spaceship.
Again, Alvarez takes his sweet time getting there, and it is a welcome suspense. You may wonder how the youths engaged in jobs like farming and mining on their planet are so well-versed in the whereabouts of a spaceship, but who knows? Maybe it is one of the bonuses of living on a distant planet in the distant future.
Both the vessel on which Rain and the others take off and the spaceship where they dock are rundown, rusted, barely lit vehicles, carrying the whiff of Jackson with them. They are also a maze. Somehow, the group has no difficulty with that, and it also keeps the audience off-kilter, wondering what to expect next.
But then the aliens come, and then they keep coming and coming, grabbing faces, slobbering acid, wandering corridors. Spaeny has too slender shoulders to carry the film on her own, though she is not bad, while there is only so much Jonsson can do when expected to act robot-like or dumb (he is no Michael Fassbender to pull off Alice: Prometheus or Covenant). The others are mostly mere fodder, which is fairly obvious from the start.
The most stomach-curdling aspect of the film does not even involve aliens, of any kind, including those born from the combined DNA of humans and them. It is the film’s decision to resurrect an actor from the first Alien. Not only is the actor now deceased, the film uses him in a manner that is, suffice to say, less than elegant.
Director: Fede Alvarez
Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu
Rating: 3 stars
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