Romulus takes place after the events of Scott's first film, Alien (1979), and also seems to have taken a page from the director's Blade Runner (1982), with its opening scenes of the dark, dank, overcrowded space mining colony of Jackson's Star, where we meet young Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her adopted android brother, Andy (David Jonsson).
After learning that her mining lease has been brutally extended by the all-powerful Weyland-Yutani corporation, Rain hits the road with her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) and his friends to a decommissioned space station in orbit. There, they hope to retrieve some cryopods to use and flee to the distant planet of Yvaga, far from the clutches of Weyland-Yutani. It turns out that space station was decommissioned for a very good reason…
Despite some deft scenes of suspense, Romulus still faces the same challenge that every Alien film has had to confront since James Cameron's Aliens (1986): how to recapture the awe and terror that the xenomorph originally elicited in viewers.
Scott’s subsequent prequels, Prometheus (2012) and the aforementioned Covenant, went in a more philosophical direction, ditching the jump scares in favor of a general sense of existential unease, taking the subtext of the earlier films and making it fascinatingly explicit. But those latter films largely failed as genre efforts; they were too weird to get audiences excited for more installments, though I’d love to see Scott (who produced this new one) finish his trilogy someday.
Romulus's task, therefore, is to give us something more straightforward, and the fact that it takes place right after the original film suggests a reboot of some sort. Does it deliver? Its aliens are largely functional shadows with little of the first film's relentless discomfort or the second's multiplying terror.
Alien: Romulus is entertaining enough, but it's also instantly forgettable, something I don't think I've ever said about any other Alien movie, good or bad.
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