Film reviews

In retrospect, the journey of the space xenomorph, drawn from the depths of the human subconscious in 1979 by Ridley Scott with the invaluable assistance of Swiss artist and designer HR Giger, is interesting in its variability. The original film represents the cornerstone of survival horror. The roomy, claustrophobic picture works very ingeniously with the industrial setting of the mining ship Nostromo and the space organism that hunts its crew.

James Cameron in 1986 via great resistance from part of the workers at the time find in the alien universe a piece of honest sea epic and war sci-fi, which added to the action movements without losing the terrible intensity. David Fincher boldly reimagined the series with a prison setting, where the xenomorph represents only one type of monstrosity. And Jean-Pierre Jeunet, in turn, controversially opened Aliens to a certain kind of grotesqueness and playfulness.

Despite the different genres and methods of management, the center of the narrative remained firm: Meet the strong astronaut Ellen Ripley with an organism that is extremely good at surviving in extreme conditions. It is one of the most difficult duels in the history of cinematography: a perfect killer against an initially defenseless woman who, over time, discovers her mother’s instinct and finally merges symbolically and genetically with the monster, to whom she is the only worthy opponent. Sigourney Weaver found in this character a completely unique combination of sensitivity and roughness, which allowed all the directors to survive to change and improve the place in different ways without losing the emotional and dramatic heart.

The importance of the Ripley factor was confirmed by Scott himself and his pair of Prometheus films. Without a main heroine, the mastermind of the series tried to make Alien a full-fledged mythology with a well-thought-out story about the origin and creation of the monster. The looser the delivery, the more outlandish the narrative path and the more colorful the details, the more the series strayed from its true DNA: an intimate and nuanced battle of human ingenuity against abject perfection. interesting attacker.

But now the xenomorph is returning home, to a frigid universe and claustrophobic industrial corridors where a group of vulnerable characters bend hard before him. Ridley Scott once again stepped down as producer and handed the reins to Fede Alvarez, a talented Uruguayan filmmaker with experience in remakes of cult horror films. From the depths of the woods of Tennessee in 2013, he summoned the Spirit of the Forest. The remake of the Sam Raimi classic was full of brutality, but not as much fun as the original.

Alvarez’s second, this time the author’s survival horror Death in the Dark, was far more similar. In it, a group of teenagers choose as a target to rob the house of a seemingly defenseless blind pensioner in a deserted suburb of Detroit. But a war veteran turns a smooth task into a crazy fight for survival inside a structure that hides a shameful secret.

Alien: Romulus, which Alvarez wrote with his collaborator and partner Rodo Sayagues, like Death in the Dark, uses an almost identical plot plan. A group of young people living on a colony owned by the Weyland-Youtani Corporation decide to solve their boredom by stealing a spaceship in orbit. What they don’t know is that the spaceship is actually a space station where the company transferred a rare find from the wreckage of the mining ship Nostromo, the ship in which he started in 1979. Instead of a blind pensioner, a colorful alien fauna that knows no mercy awaits the protagonists in the dark corridors.

So Alvarez tried to revamp the Alien while also returning to its roots. A handful of unsuspecting people work their way up the cosmic organism’s food chain, from crab hunters to the fearsome xenomorph, the ultimate hunter who knows no mercy. The homage to the original film is clear. Romulus completely respects the analog aesthetic of the late 70’s and does not try to modernize it in any way. Low-resolution convex screens, large buttons, an industrial aesthetic that has the germ of something organic in it – the film works as an intoxicating museum of Gigerian design, in which practical effects and models of spaceships are placed also involved. As a fan, it’s hard to resist the excitement of a forgotten nightmare coming back to life and yet not lacking in incredible beauty.

But once the biomechanical tinsel is stripped away, Alien: Romulus reveals its true origins. Although Fede Alvarez is a skilled director of horror scenes who knows how to work with the contact camera and the scene, he moves in a very narrow space as a creator. Almost every prominent scene of the film is just an adaptation of the most famous and successful iconic moments of the original films. Although there is no shortage of original ideas, these are only part of the structure of the narrative, which is derivative and, moreover, not very consistent.

Each of the four attack films had something special – number one was a twisted survival horror, number two a wonderful combination of an action film and a duel of two types of motherhood, number three a new type of vulnerability of the main character resistant to toxicity. the masculinity of the prison colony, number four grotesque mutations and a kind of perspective.

Romulus relies heavily on the relationship that is widely shown at the moment between man and artificial intelligence, which, however, was clearly shown in the first Alien. As an orphan, the main character Rain takes care of his “younger brother”, a defenseless android Andy, who, however, gets a major role in the struggle to survive in space. However, the duel between vulnerable humanity and machine pragmatism is far from being a sufficiently dramatic core of the film, which still needs to refer to its predecessors to defend its own meaning.

As a director, Fede Alvarez is at his most confident in the scenes where the fragile characters are at the mercy of the environment and the predatory organism. Moments of awareness and impending danger work mostly in undertones, otherwise Alien: Romulus feels torn to the point of instability. The birth of the monster happens in a sprint that will make you gasp after the careful tension of Scott’s first film. On the other hand, the action scenes lack the intensity and sense of rhythm of James Cameron.

But the biggest problem is still the Ripley factor. Yes, we can watch Cailee Spaeny as representative of Rain in a stunning top with a raised pulse rifle, but this only reinforces the feeling that the real driving force of the series has not been replaced by anything more than a statement with a bad sign. Fans of the series may feel satisfied that the xenomorph has been restored to its original reckless dignity, but unfortunately, the well of Romulus’ contribution is running dry.