Going back to the basics and infusing young blood with raw emotions and impeccable visual treatment – Alien: Romulus is as good as you have relentlessly heard it to be. It’s all there – and even if you haven’t seen any of the previous Alien movies, going in to watch what’s touted to be a horror thriller, would still leave you blown away for all the right reasons.
We are in the vicinity of the space station again, where a group of teens are being teenagers trying to escape a mining planet. The only way to do it is to obtain cryo pods from the station to head to Yvaga, a much better planet, apparently. It ain’t happening so easily, is it?
Our not-so-beloved slimy, gory, screeching and vicious-looking creatures are back to obtain humans one by one resulting in beautiful carnage.
You know the tropes and you know that our protagonist Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is gonna be a certain survivor even if others don’t make it but to be able to carve a narrative that literally and actually justifies the phrase, ‘edge-of-your-seat’ is just divine.
We have a genre specialist, Fedé Alvarez here, who directs this bloodbath of a different kind, and you see why he is hired to do the job. The visuals of this film could have easily been in any $200 million film and you would have been marvelling at what they can achieve with technology. But Alvarez, with VFX supervisor, Eric Barba and cinematographer, Galo Olivares has managed to create excellence in less than half of that aforementioned number.
The world-building is spectacular and it is further assisted by gut-wrenching sound design that penetrates into your mind and makes you feel those screams, squeals and slime. I’ll say that the death metal treatment to it does get a tad overpowering but that’s about it. The human component is never compromised as the question of leaving behind a person, who is your friend when it is about survival is the delicious recipe of a conflicted moral compass that has you invested as well. It helps that the young blood in this film have understood the assignment so well and the entire ensemble does their job brilliantly, especially Spaeny – this lady is a revelation the more and more we see of her.
Furthermore, there are callbacks to the original Alien films as this is set right between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986), especially focusing on digitally re-creating an actor who is now deceased – something that seems bewildering initially but keeps making more sense as the plot goes on. There is enough terminology here to be completely losing the plot especially when you listen to ‘xenomorph’ and a million other words and logic to the story but none of those matter because that is a tactic adapted by the makers to somehow confuse you so that you don’t care about the loopholes and barrier in logistics of the storyline.
Make no mistake, the gore is immense and in incredible graphic detail and while it is meant to make you uncomfortable, it keeps getting inconsequential the more you watch it.
The one drawback that the film suffers is how towards the nearing climax, the rising tension seems stretched and overly reliant on those foreseen hero moments but you understand the need for it to an extent. The other set pieces, the atmosphere, the sets, and this dystopian space world are so fascinating and bewitching, that you don’t care much about the other loose ends after a point in time.
If this is how a franchise can be reborn without any conscious effort to revamp or revitalise it while staying original and still giving an ode to its predecessors – please make more of it.
Pro Tip: Have your food and beverages in the first half of the film as you might find it difficult to do that as the action takes over.
Alien: Romulus releases in theaters on August 23.