The summer movie season is sputtering to a close, but “Alien” fans have a new movie with their favorite toothy, acid-for-blood outer-space xenomorph.
The results are mixed in “Alien: Romulus”, which takes place after the events of the original 1979 film.
The setting is a mining colony, run by those soulless dirtbags of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. The colony has no sun, and the workers, supposedly under contract, are basically slaves for life.
A small group of twenty-somethings steal a vehicle to make contact with an orbiting derelict space station, where they hope to scavenge equipment in order to escape to another planet.
The central characters of the group are Rain (played by Cailie Spaeny) and her adoptive brother Andy (played by David Jonsson.) He’s actually a “synthetic”, programmed by Rain’s late father to be her childhood companion and protector. He’s also stocked with an endless repertoire of terrible “dad” jokes.
The group quickly discovers the space station (divided into two halves titled Romulus and Remus) is what’s left of a failed expedition that pursued the Alien, booted by Ripley from the freighter Nostromo out into zero gravity. All that remains is a cluster of incubating monsters. It’s no surprise when one of the young explorers gets a “Facehugger attack” on their bingo card.
Along the way, Andy also gets rebooted and upgraded, making him an effective leader, but also more cold-blooded. With his new programming, his loyalty is now to the company.
The director and co-writer of the film, Fede Alvarez, is effective with this story arc, and he nicely recreates the dirty, wet, worn-out industrial look that was an innovation with the first “Alien.”
But the latter half of the film relies too much on familiar slam-bang action, narrow escapes and tragic deaths, plot twists borrowed from previous Alien films, and confusion. (The fate of one character gets re-written about every 20 minutes.)
The cast is made up of unknown, just-getting-started actors. But one character from the original “Alien” returns — sort of — with special effects resurrecting an actor who’s been dead for a number of years.
“Alien: Romulus” has its strong points, but too much of it boldly goes where other writers have gone before.
In space, no one can hear you award three stars out of five.