Fede Alvarez is a decent rarity in the modern horror landscape, a throwback to the days in which Raimi protégés like himself and New French Extremity crossover artist Alexandre Aja commanded box office attention by making the exact opposite of whatever was popular at the time. An example: Aja (who was a Craven-Raimi hybrid, given that he’s worked with both) made stylish and brutal updates to The Hills Have Eyes series, finding a middle ground between the PG-13 horror that was driving Bush-era audiences wild and “torture porn,” which had message board horror nerds stoked up on blood-and-guts raving about it to their boys on the BBS. Alvarez made his debut in the early days of the “elevated horror” fad, in which writers rediscovered the genre and began to think critically about it in a way they hadn’t since the ‘70s, provided that a horror movie looked nice and didn’t seem like it was meant for losers, like mainstream audiences or gorehounds. And, owing to that iconoclasm, he found success with nasty fucking movies like his Evil Dead remake and the Don’t Breathe films, which ratcheted up the ick factor to the point that one was forced to acknowledge two truths. The first is that the gross nature of his work isn’t wholly sadistic – there’s a lot more there than in your average Hostel rip-off, which is why his Evil Dead is so solid. Second, his movies are artfully constructed in ways other than the striking visual effects work. This second aspect is why his latest film, Alien: Romulus, is the best pound-for-pound film in the franchise since Jim Cameron pulled Ripley out of cryosleep.
Them’s fightin’ words to a decent segment of the mainline Alien franchise’s fans, who might be Alien3 purists worshipping at the alter of David Fincher artistry despite everything wrong with that picture or Scott prequel fans who believe the critics had it wrong (more on that in a second) or if they’re genuinely depraved, think that Jean-Pierre Jeunet was really onto something with Resurrection (and God help you if that’s the case). Yet, except for Fincher, whose attempts were hampered by producer interference, each filmmaker worked their specific style and artistry into the franchise’s framework. The tonal gulf between Scott and Cameron’s initial films in the series is its greatest asset and makes the whole enterprise somewhat unique in our IP protectionist culture: it accommodates different stylistic and thematic interpretations of its DNA. Scott’s return to the franchise in 2012 with Prometheus proves this, as he didn’t feel beholden to what he did in ’79 and pursued his modern interests – the bitter rending of cinematic culture and the attempts by culture and critics to define his legacy – to their logical ends. One of the reviews I regret the most (believe it or not, it does happen) is the take I penned on Covenant in 2017. I think it’s not a great Alien film, but I think it’s a fantastic late-period Scott movie once I got clued into what Sir Ridley started cooking in the ‘10s, especially after the passing of his brother Tony. His taking a knife to the canvas he helped build is its kind of artistic expression, and I respect the hell out of it.
Alvarez is no exception, but he finds a middle ground that accommodates his and his audience’s interests, similar to what Cameron did in ’86. It isn’t a complete tonal shift in that way – this is probably the most legitimate horror experience that the series has produced since the first installment – but it’s a swell merging of Scott’s tonal command, Cameron’s kineticism, and Alvarez’s Raimi-influenced camera movement and his willingness to get fucking gross. Romulus lifts the main throughline of Don’t Breathe for its plot, but Alvarez finds an intelligent way to make it work within the dystopian hellscape of the Weyland-Yutani-owned universe. It’s a heist-gone-wrong movie, following a group of miners from a perpetually-cloud covered planet as they break into one of the company’s space stations, which somehow drifted into their Saturn-like world’s orbit. They’re not looking to steal real valuables – trade secrets, money, experimental formulae – but instead, they’re after the cryopods, which will enable them to survive the nine-year journey across the galaxy to a pastoral world outside of the company’s influence. They have a cargo hauler they’ve commandeered, the skill and know-how to extract the pods and the fuel they need to ensure they’ll make it there, and the desperation to see it through. The group’s defacto leader, wannabe Space-Marine Tyler (Archie Renaux), reaches out to our protagonist, Rain (Cailee Spaney), for two reasons. The first is that he loves her, and the second is because she has the one thing they’re missing: an android.
Before her parents died from off-world black lung, her father programmed an older synth to watch over her, and so she’s been stuck with Andy (David Jonnson, who walks away with the film), a dad-joke spouting pseudo-older brother who, as she’s grown up, has started to resemble a much younger sibling. Imagine Bishop with Lance Hendrikson’s calculating intelligence replaced by a benign and earnest love. You’d have Andy to a T. Her contract – more indentured servitude than anything else — with Weyland-Yutani has been extended for another decade, and she’s being moved to the mines from her top-side job, which means they’ve signed her death warrant. It should seem like everything should be great: her one-twoo-lub is here to take her to the place she’s literally dreamed about, after all. But she cares about Andy so much that she’s almost willing to work another ten years so that he doesn’t have to get deactivated once they get to the Free Worlds at the end of their trek. Andy tells her to do it – he is there to “do what’s best for her,” after all – so they head off to the station, slowly drifting toward the planet’s rings. They have roughly 30 hours to unload the cargo before it collides with the rock-and-ice and is sanded down to metal shavings. But, of course, this isn’t Star Wars, and things aren’t going to work out well for anyone without a lot of horrific suffering along the way. They know nothing about the station – a science platform with two divisions named Romulus and Remus – or what it was used for, why it drifted into their planet’s orbit, or what cargo from a space hauler it picked up before things went wrong. They think it’s abandoned when it’s really a mass grave.
What follows puts into motion a Rube Goldberg machine comprised of human fuck-ups when faced with two opposing inhuman forces: The Xenomorphs, shown here in all of their stages of development, and the Weyland-Yutani corporation, represented in the station’s sole synthetic survivor (it is a genuine misstep that Alvarez bowed to the whims of whatever Disney suit told him to use the same tech that brought Peter Cushing back from the dead, because it’s both ethically unflattering and the effects haven’t improved in the nine years since Rogue One hit). A module from his neck gives Andy a BIOS update, which saves the crew from a few real pickles but endows him with the Prime Directives that caused Ash to sacrifice the Nostromo for the good of the company’s bottom line. This Flowers for Algernon plotline is the film’s secondary conflict beyond the general need for these characters to survive. It’s an effective one: Jonnson is fiercely effective as both a benign force (previously seen in Rye Lane, in which he was also a standout) and a smooth-voiced corporate sociopath, and Spaney is at her best as a performer when she’s given real emotional and moral conflicts to process. While her friends are undergoing devastating physical transformations and sustaining gory wounds, she’s watching her pseudo-brother undergo mental changes that render him unrecognizable to her and accumulating traumas that will likely haunt her for the rest of her life, regardless of whether she makes it to her dream world. It’s incredibly compelling, and Alveraz uses it as a smart intellectual counterweight to the primal dread he stokes in the audience every time a character makes what might be a seemingly insignificant choice or notices something off in their environment.
This causality makes Romulus the successful thrill ride that it is – every single bad thing that happens to our characters is directly related to one of their actions, like a D&D session in which every character is rolling an absurdly high number of ones, aside from that one person who happens to hit tens every once in a while and might make it through to the end of the playthrough. This is usually not something to write home about – this is, after all, just the hallmark of a well-plotted film, though Romulus is exceptionally good at rewarding your attention to the most minor things – but in the era of vibes-based horror, it feels like Alvarez is walking down Mount Sinai with stone tablets containing screenwriting tips straight from George A. Romero himself and demanding that people melt their golden statues of Ari Aster. This, perhaps, is Alverez’s real success, beyond proving that one can make an Alien movie without following the Ripley or Weyland dynasties and indulge the audience’s curiosity about what the lives of others in this universe might look like. He could have made this movie just as scary and well-constructed without an ounce of ick or gore to be found, and it would still be the third-best film in the franchise simply because an ounce of care was put into its development. This wouldn’t even need to be an Alien film to be a damn solid movie, but the production design is treated with the same amount of care and attention, with a near-seamless merger of practical and digital effects. Alvarez relishes exploring this universe and luxuriating in its retro-futuristic aesthetic.
But the great thing is, compared to what you might think a Fede Alvarez Alien movie might look like, Alien: Romulus feels pretty restrained. By the 100-minute mark, you might feel decently disappointed, given what his name on the poster promises. Then the last 20 minutes hit, and Alvarez unlocks some brand-new fears for you, full of imagery that will haunt your fucking dreams for the next few months. It rocks.