Weyland-Yutani Presents

It feels like 20th Century Studios (formerly 20th Century Fox) simply doesn’t understand what to do with the Alien franchise. I’d say they don’t know what to do with the whole of the Aliens v PredatorOriginally two separate franchises, the Alien and Predator series came together first in a series of comics and video games before, finally, Fox Studios merged them together is the Alien v Predator film franchise. franchise, but the studio did release Prey in 2022, one of the best damn Predator movies ever made, so there’s clearly someone somewhere that gets that killer aliens killing humans real good has appeal. The issue is that the Alien portion of the franchise has been struggling for decades with no clear vision and no sensible way to bring it back into the light.

Every time a new film is announced, someone somewhere has to ask, “will this be the film to bring the franchise back to glory?” The question that really should be asked, though, is, “what does a good Alien sequel look like?” Unlike many franchises, which struggle to ever recapture the magic of their first film with a sequel, Alien has the perfect follow-up: Aliens. James Cameron deserves all the credit possible for looking at the first film and then saying, “yeah, we’re not going to do that again.” Instead of just another retread of Alien, his sequel goes in a drastically different direction, keeping the horrifying magic of the creatures without doing another simple shock-and-splatter creature feature. He made a war film set in the Alien universe and it was so brilliant that no sequel has ever managed to touch that film for power and quality.

Sequels since have gone the route of trying to recapture the magic of the first film. Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection take the “crew trapped on a ship with (an) alien(s)” concept and redone it over and over, always to lesser effect. Ridley Scott tried to do something else with Prometheus but only managed to make a dumber, less interesting prequel out of what should have been a high-concept story. And then there’s Alien vs. Predator, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, and Alien: Covenant, three of the dumbest entries the series has ever developed. None of these movies knew what shape a proper sequel should take.

When the trailers for Alien: Romulus came out, there was hope. It featured a new for the series director, Fede Álvarez (of Evil Dead and Don’t Breath fame), a new cast of characters, and a seeming back-to-basics approach that wasn’t just going to retread the first film all over again. And, credit where it’s due, the first half of the film is actually a compelling story about stupid people going to a derelict ship and accidentally unleashing the very creatures that are going to spell their own demise. Unfortunately, right around the halfway mark the film stops, changes into something else, and never manages to recapture that initial glory. It takes what could have been a really interesting take on the Alien legacy and, instead, crafts just another insipid entry for the franchise. It’s a complete waste.

Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is a young, orphaned miner working for Weyland-Yutani on the colony at Jackson’s Star. Her day consists of fulfilling the hours of her contract (which keeps increasing by decree from her corporate overlords) and taking care of her android “brother”, Andy (David Jonnson), when all she really wants is to escape Jackson’s Star and head to the colony at Yvaga, outside the control of Weyland-Yutani. She gets a chance, though, when her ex-boyfriend, Tyler (Archie Renaux), invites her along with his crew on an old shipping hauler to fly along to a derelict ship, steal a few cryo-pods, and get ready for a long flight out to Yvaga. They just need Andy, a decommissioned Weyland-Yutani droid, to help them get onto the ship.

Of course, once they’re on the ship, the troubles don’t stop there. The cryo-pods the team plans to liberate are low on fuel, so the guys have to head deeper into the ship to find extra cryo-liquid. They find a solid source in a classified lab, but when they steal the juice they end up setting off the security systems and also shutting down the cryo system in the lab. That, in turn, wakes up the creatures that were stored in cryo-sleep and, well, we can see where this is going. One of the crew gets impregnated with an alien, they all freak out and try to save her, the thing bursts out of her chest and suddenly we’re in a whole new ballgame where the crew is being stalked and killed by the very creatures they unleashed. Getting back to the ship with the cryo-fuel is only the first problem. Getting out alive may be too much for this crew to handle.

I don’t feel bad spoiling any of that portion of the story because all of it is basically revealed in the trailers for the film. What I will say is that this section of the film is where the story is at its best. There is a clear line of cause and effect, dirty deeds getting comeuppance as the characters feel the consequences of their own actions. Once the aliens are unleashed, and the odds quickly escalate against the crew, the film builds to an absolutely fantastic crescendo. You can feel the energy, the thrills, and it’s all legitimately creepy, scary, and delicious.

And then the film fucks it all up. Right about the part where you feel like you know where the film is going, where the heroes are going to have to fight for their life to break through the hordes of chestbursters and larvae and adult xenomorphs, instead the film stops, quite literally stops, so it can explain the whole plot of the film to us. It’s not about this plucky crew of scavengers trying to get to a new planet to make a better world. Oh no, it’s about some big, complex, other storyline that wasn’t hinted at before this and then, suddenly, we’re on that story instead, dealing with all of it. It drains all the suspense out of the film and we never really get back to it.

Clearly I don’t want to spoil anything here (instead saving that for a follow-up spoiler article), but the whole back half of the film feels like Ridley Scott came in and said, “now that we have a good start, here’s what I actually want to see from an Alien film.” Ever since Scott came back to the franchise things have felt off. He had a different story in mind for the series and every film has been something weird and not at all related to what we originally knew. Different can be good, but not the way Scott has been doing it. Álvarez had a vision for this film, and you can feel that in the first half of the movie. But once the needs of franchise storytelling kick in – the desire to tie up other plot threads from other films, the need to make a sequel, the cash-grab forcing of references to other movies – the whole project falls apart.

It’s a pity, too, because that first half is actually pretty good. The film boasts solid performances from its whole cast, and there are enough interesting ideas laid out in the early film that I would have liked to see how those performers could have handled the movie we thought we were going to get. The atmosphere is moody and dark, the creature effects are solid, and everything feels like it got the love and care that a good Alien movie needed. If we could have avoided the mid-film break leading to, “and now for something completely different,” this could have been a stellar, A-plus film.

There is just something so mercenary and sleazy about the back half of this film. The first chunk really does tell an interesting version of an Alien film, with characters having no clue what’s coming and they struggle against overwhelming odds. This is a dynamic, fresh little thriller with a group of heroes getting picked off one-by-one. That’s the kind of film this franchise needs. It needs that jolt of energy as the aliens take out the crew and we get to gleefully enjoy the carnage. We’ll never be able to recapture the shock and awe of the original film, all because the audience knows what’s coming now, but it shouldn’t be hard to at least create a film that enjoys the idea of “stupid people go where they shouldn’t, get killed by aliens because of their own actions.” That’s a film that, you’d think, would write itself.

The back half of this film proves otherwise. It’s a tired, poorly written, weak rehash of ideas and themes we’ve seen before, in much better films that knew what they were doing. Nothing that comes after the mid-film break is as good as what came in the first half, and it’s just an absolute tragedy. It ruins a fantastic film and turns it into another soulless Alien sequel. Frankly, we’ve already had enough of those from Fox and now Disney and 20th Century Studios that I don’t feel like we need anymore.

I thought that Prometheus and then Alien: Covenant made a perfect case for why we should just let this franchise die. Disney, of course, doesn’t let any franchise go off into that good night, so naturally they’d resurrect it. But instead of making something fresh and cool and interesting like Prey we got… this. It’s a sad, wasted mess of a film and, once again, it makes the case for why we don’t need any more films in this franchise past the first two. Yes, this film is doing well in theaters, and yes we’ll probably get more sequels now. But if Alien: Romulus tells us anything it’s that the people in charge of this franchise don’t have a clue what they’re doing… and haven’t for decades.