Alien: Romulus

 

I've viewed the Alien franchise (excluding the crossovers with Predator) as an extended metaphor about how human vanity and greed can be supplanted by virtue and grit. It has also been a HUGE "you go, girl" to female empowerment, while rewriting the script on tension and viscera and gore.

Fede Alvarez's Alien: Romulus tracks along with the first three films in the series, especially, with corporate scheming being the villain and the skeletal anger machines that gestate inside of human hosts being the tools to galactic domination.

In this sequel, scrappy young orphan Rain, a wonderful Cailee Spaeny, is trapped on a dark mining planet with her brother Andy -- a masterful David Jonsson who, frankly, owns this picture. Andy is an android programmed by Rain's father to be her guardian.

After being denied permission to leave the planet, having completed her required number of hours in mines, Rain joins with a band of young renegades -- Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu -- who have spotted a damaged space station, the Romulus of the title, in the planet's orbit. They figure the station is carrying enough fuel to get them off the planet and to a better life where there is sunshine. They need Andy's machinery to make it all happen.

Problems with the pirating excursion present themselves almost immediately, with multiple disastrous threats just ticks of the clock away. The most pressing threat is the orbiting station's steady descent into the planet's asteroid rings and sure destruction. Added to this, of course, is the discovery of a hive of hungry, hungry aliens in the ship's inner chambers.

Alvarez, whom I first noticed for his excellent home-invasion thriller "Don't Breathe," has directed a film with three distinct acts. The opening exposition is smartly crafted so that audiences can overlook the thievery at the core of the narrative and see the scheme as getting back at The Man -- the soulless, grubby human counterpart to the snapping creatures on board.

The second act ratchets up the tension and the stakes as the team lands on the damaged station and discovers there is "life" on board, other than the reptilian monsters hibernating within -- a pretty neat narrative link to Ripley Scott's Alien (1979).

The third act raises the stakes on the existential threat even further, saying the alien enemy lies within us.

It's a great ride, with Alvarez using all of the cinematic tools at his disposal to create both claustrophobia and isolation in the battle and the chase, but also the intimacy of connections across the vastness of space -- represented most clearly and, yes, lovingly by Rain and Andy's devotion to each another.

Some might take issue -- as I did a bit -- with the story's infantilizing of Andy, who is Black, as a boy in a grown man's body. A charitable reading of the final moments of the film suggests Alvarez understands this and will "fix it" in the next picture -- which there surely will be.