Alien: Romulus Tried Too Hard To Be an Alien Movie
You can see the gears turning in every scene, and feel the film dutifully avoiding, well, alienation, the unknown, the discomfiting.
But this bond also is a retread, inspired by characters Ellen Ripley and Bishop in Aliens, and David and Meredith Vickers in Prometheus. Romulus is ultimately a film in which familiarity is the prime directive. Alvarez has said so himself: “If Alien was a band, then we wanted this to be the concert where we play all the hits and then a few more new songs, so they go, ‘Wow, that’s pretty good!’”
It’s not. You can see the gears turning in every scene, and feel the film dutifully avoiding, well, alienation, the unknown, the discomfiting. In some sense, this orthodoxy might be protective. “I love all of those movies. I didn’t want to omit or ignore any of them when it comes to connections at a story level, character level, technology level and creature level,” Alvarez has said, embracing the series’ less-revered entries. Linking them all together through reams of references, in this sense, is an act of recovery.
That’s sweet, I guess, but not especially curious. Great sequels use the groundwork laid by their forebears to build up, out, away, in some new direction. Those that traffic in the familiar, like, say, Aliens, 10 Cloverfield Lane, or Prey, use that recognition to play with viewers’ perceptions. Those films are exciting because they refract rather than repeat, going left when you expect them to go right. Nostalgia can do so much more than appease and flatter. It can misdirect, it can subvert, it can nauseate. But in the I.P. era, filmmakers, studios, and audiences ask it only to comfort. Isn’t that the opposite of horror?
