Alien Romulus

Space, infinite, cold, silent, but not empty, for in the remote Zeta Reticuli system a darkened Weyland Yutani vessel moves, seeking the last known location of the USCSS Nostromo, missing for twenty years since it made an unscheduled landing on one of the moons of an unnamed gas giant planet in that distant sector; amongst the wreckage a object is found of apparently biomechanical origin, a cocoon brought aboard for preservation and study.

On Jackson’s Star Mining Colony, Rain Carradine dreams of sunsets she can never see, the surface of the planet located sixty-five light years from Earth perpetually shrouded by thick clouds as the atmospheric processor slowly changes it to an ostensibly habitable world, yet every colony has its quirks, her parents both having died in the mines from elements of the toxic environment which have not yet been adequately cleaned up.

Her friend Tyler coming to her with a possible means of escape from their punitive contracts, a derelict ship is approaching the planet and may have cryostasis chambers aboard; with his own ship, the Corbelan, and Rain’s adopted brother, synthetic person Andy, he hopes they can gain access and leave the system along with his sister Kay, cousin Bjorn and his pilot girlfriend Navarro, but on approach they realise it is actually an abandoned WeYu station divided into two units, Remus, where they have docked, and Romulus, their destination.

The Alien series having lain dormant for fifteen years between Alien Resurrection and the first prequel released in 2012, Prometheus, stunningly designed, technically well realised and commercially successful, it was at best a mixed bag of disappointments and muddled plotting which despite its title failed to rekindle the excitement of the undeniable science fiction horror classics of Ridley Scott’s original Alien of 1978 and James Cameron’s Aliens of 1986, David Fincher’s Alien 3 of 1992 only receiving its due when radically re-edited in 2003.

Scott following Prometheus with Covenant in 2017, trying to address the failings of the former while also tell its own story and only ending up more helplessly compromised with diminishing success, the proposed continuation was left drifting and a new direction taken by Fede Álvarez, director of Don’t Breathe and Evil Dead, though in fact his script co-written with Rodo Sayagues borrows heavily from what has gone before but wisely they have paid close attention and learned from previous failures, making Alien Romulus without doubt the best film in the sequence in thirty years.

Starring Civil War’s Cailee Spaeny as Rain and Rye Lane’s David Jonsson as glitchy but happy-to-help Andy, they are the core of the film with Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn and Aileen Wu largely functional and swiftly disposable as Tyler, Kay, Bjorn and Navarro, but where the film excels is in the borderline obsessional production and sound design which physically ties it to the original film with a solid, sensory reality of interfaces, displays, logos, uniforms, portals and endless corridors illuminated only by emergency lighting or the fluorescent layer which designates the proximity of the hive.

The previous films having already established a less-than-rigorous adherence to continuity, the egg secreted aboard the Sulaco among the most obvious, the latest deviations should be taken as a frustrating but necessary shorthand to move the story forward, and Romulus is to be appreciated in the revisions included of previous missteps, “Prometheus fire” tying it to the endeavours of the Engineers and adding nuance to the machinations of “the company,” perhaps not redeeming their reputation but reducing their evil to lower rather than upper case, and also in the hybrid, more monstrous and disturbing than the shambling newborn of Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Resurrection in its deranged distortion of humanity.

Yet even if it inevitably concludes with a countdown before the detonation, Alien Romulus is more than just a greatest hits package with terrifying swarms of parasites, zero-gravity xenomorph confrontations and the resultant floating acidic Coriolis cloud bringing new elements and fresh fear to a game which has now been played in seven films released in six decades from five directors, all inspired by the ideas of two men, Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett, their living nightmare of bodies violated and transformed still effective when woken screaming in a new era.

Alien Romulus is currently on general release and also screening in IMAX

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