The Dark Herald Recommends – Alien: Romulus
It’s an incredible irony that the greatest science fiction horror movie of all time started life as a comedy.
Dan O’Bannon’s first script, shot with his friend John Carpenter, was the cult classic Dark Star. It’s about a scout ship on a 20 year mission that looks for “unstable planets” then destroys them with an AI controlled super bomb. The crew spends three years in cryosleep between missions, (sound familiar?) One of the characters, Sergeant Pinback has a pet alien that he doesn’t really like anymore and the alien feels the same way. The alien gets out of the ship’s hold and Pinback has to find it, Carpenter shot one scene from a low angle where Pinback is slowly walking down a hall looking back and forth trying to find his rogue pet. There is a surprising amount of dread in that scene. Enough so that Dan O’Bannon had to ask himself, what if I played that scene straight?
The eventual result was Alien. A movie franchise that Ridley Scott now has an overbearing control over. While it would not have been the classic it is if Roger Corman had shot it (that almost happened BTW), Scott is now given far too much credit for a classic film where he was but one component that produced the whole. He became the final inheritor of a tontine of success.
Alien: Romulus is the 9th film in the Alien franchise, and I’m afraid it shows.
The first act was excellent. I thought I was going to be watching a good movie for a few minutes.
This film is being billed as Gen-Z’s Alien, meaning they all want to quit their jobs and run off. Rain and her retarded android Andy live on a Weyland Yutani mining colony. The colonists are little more then slaves to Evil Co. Rain’s parents died of lung cancer from working in the mines, she was too young to work there herself and had just reached the required 12,000 hours labor to get off the colony. However, since WY is more evil than ever, her required labor hours were bumped up to 24,000 and she is being reassigned to the mines. Effectively a death sentence.
Her ex, Tyler, shows up and invites her to a meeting with his friends. They work on a ship that has the range to make it to another planet not owned by Weyland but no cryopods, so of course the company isn’t worried about them taking off with it. They can’t survive long enough to get away, so they have nowhere to go.
However, the Five Little Indians have found a derelict space station in a decaying orbit. They can’t get into it but Andy the special needs android can. Andy was a decommissioned Weyland Yutani synthetic that was reactivated by Rain’s parents to take care of her when they found out they were terminally ill. Andy is very much film-coded as cognitively impaired. Rain keeps calling him her brother.*
They go up to the station, Andy gets them in. Then we find out that Rain was going to have to abandon Andy because the colony they are going to will not allow a Weyland Yutani android on the premises, Rain is broken up about this but Andy stoically takes the line of, “I’ll do what’s best for Rain.”
They find the cryopods. Now we have our first hiccup. There is only enough “cryofuel” to power them for 3 years and it will take 9 to get to the new colony.
Okay, so why the hell did Ripley’s pod work for 70 freaking years? It was a lore breaking contrivance that wasn’t well thought out.
They have to go into a part of the station to get the fuel that Andy can’t access. However, they find another damaged android and download his OS into Andy.
Reformatting Andy’s hard drive was all it took to make him super smart again. The facehuggers get loose and one of the Five Little Indians is down with chest pregnancy. They don’t know what to do, so Andy suggests reactivating the broken down android.
Alien: Romulus has been okay up until now. To be truthful, better than okay. It’s been a really good movie up to that point. It got the aesthetics right. A cast in their twenties is more typical for horror than the one the Nostromo had, and the tension provided by the elements dread, fear and shock had been properly managed. The first act was good.
And it’s all over as soon as we see the other android’s face. It belongs to the late Sir Ian Holm. Gentle reminder, Bilbo has been dead since June of 2020. It’s all downhill from here.
Dan O’Bannon gleefully admits he stole from everyone to create his script for Alien. Thing from Another Planet was about working men being chased through a claustrophobic environment by an alien. Forbidden Planet had a scene where the starship receives a warning telling them not to land. The alien skeleton came from the classic Italian horror film Terrore Nello Spazio. The story Junkyard by Simak inspired the room full of alien eggs. Good old EC Comics is where the notion of Chest Burster came from.
O’Bannon took all of these diverse elements from a wide variety of classic science fiction horror stories to create his own classic.
From this point on Alien: Romulus does the opposite. It dredges the entire 50 year history of the Alien franchise to haul up as many scenes from the other eight movies as possible, staple them together and call it an original film.
There is not one scene from then on that doesn’t have a referent from another Alien movie. What few original elements there are, are pretty damn stupid. For example, the station’s elevator doesn’t work if the artificial gravity gets turned off. That one had people in the audience audibly groaning.
Resurrecting Ash from the first alien film was the most offensive. Ian Holm is dead and Ash was not some character that was intrinsically tied to the other films in lore and canon. They just put in an AI asset for memberberry value. At that point you knew you were going to just be consuming homogenized entertainment content product.
Pulse rifles suddenly make an appearance because they were in another alien movie. At the end there is an Alien-Engineer hybrid to kill two birds with one memberberry. It got to the point where most of your entertainment involved guessing what scene was going to be ripped off next.
Andy says, “Stay away from her!”
Don’t say it! Don’t say it!
“You bitch!”
Damn it!
I’ll say this, most of the effects were exceptionally good, way better then what Marvel or LucasFilm has been able to deliver for years. Except for Sir Ian Holm. That mapping was garbage tier, it looked about as bad as MODAK from Antman 3. Indicating strongly that this was a last second edition and the effects crew only had a month to render it out.
I strongly suspect the first draft of the script was much better then what was eventually shot and it wouldn’t surprise me if Ridley Scott had insisted on a lot of it.
I will sum it all up by paraphrasing Robert Burnett, “It’s a competent tribute band of another band that is decades past its prime.”
However, there were people leaving the theater who seemed to have genuinely enjoyed it. If you think you’ll be one of them and enjoy the taste of memberberry pie then…
The Dark Herald Recommends with Reservations (5/10)
*I really need to do that Galloping Transhumanism post. This movie was loaded with it.
