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| Alien: Romulus Poster. |
I watched Alien: Romulus at the cinema last night, and enjoyed it. There were lots of jump scares and it gave me that somewhat unnerving feeling that I was being watched as I walked home from the show. I did pick the slightly longer but better lit route option deliberately.
The film is very well done and is a homage to what has gone before; the director has deliberately used the same shots, sound design and even lines (although delivered slightly differently) from previous ventures into this dystopian future to make the film. There are echoes of Alien, Aliens, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant throughout. I think the station also draws on the Alien: Isolation video game, but I've not played enough of that to be certain how much. There's a direct link back to Alien.
The set up is well done and feels like it could have come straight from the roleplaying game. The protagonists are all young people who are on a perpetually dark Weyland-Yutani mining colony, and you see the impact of the indenture that people service to 'start a new life in the off-world colonies'. I deliberately echo Blade Runner there, because I think this is the first film that has made me feel that they could be the same universe. I could easily imagine Elon Musk running operations like this; increasing peoples indentured hours on a whim and trapping them as labour. It's been done before and I'm sure it will be done again if the Billionaire rich start setting up colonies off world in the future. I can't see a philanthropic way forward in most cases.
The movie is very much a heist gone bad; the group discover an abandoned Weyland-Yutani station drifting into orbit and on course to impact the rings of their planet. As they have the means (several of them run a cargo haulier for the company which is FTL capable but has no cryopods) they decide to board the vessel and rob the means to escape the planet.
The main protagonist - Raine - is asked to help; she's a friend of the others but more importantly, she has a Weyland-Yutani synthetic who should be able to access through the security of the station. The synthetic, Andy, is defective and had been scrapped, but was salvaged and repaired by Raine's father to look after her. He is protective, tells bad dad jokes (I took notes), and comes across as quite vulnerable as his motor controls are damaged.
Things quickly escalate and the ending leaves lots of possibilities for follow up.
I enjoyed this a lot; it avoids the flaws of some of the other sequels, but lacks some of their ambition. I'd still love to see the final film in the Prometheus / Covenant sequence, but realise that's likely never to happen. Alien: Romulus is superior fan-service. You know what you're getting and it's very well executed. It shows more of the setting and interlinks back to past work effectively.
Recommended.
25 August 2024
Film Trailer poster: By Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures - IMP Awards, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76404631
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