Life on Jackson’s Star Mining Colony is rough. Everyone is there in basic indentured servitude to the Wayland Yutani corporation and the terms to fulfill their contracts are subject to change and always in the corporation’s favor. When a group of friends, led by Cailee Spaeny, figure out that there is a way to escape the colony and head out to a nearby world not under the corporation’s control, they jump at the chance. It involves stealing some cryosleep technology from an abandoned space station one of them has discovered in orbit around the mining world. But since this is an Alien film, when they arrive on the station they discover that it has been deserted for a very specific and deadly reason.
At this point nearly four and a half decades and now seven films into the Alien franchise, audiences should know what to expect. A group of space-faring folks – be they explorers, scientists or just average blue-collar joes – encounters one or more of the deadly alien killing machine xenomorphs and are subsequently hunted down Ten Little Indians-style as they try to escape. How well the films work ultimately comes down to how well the human characters are established before all the mayhem starts. Solid characterization in the first half-hour or so of these films will go a long way in getting the audience invested and rooting for them to survive, while making the impact of those who don’t more powerful.
And with Alien: Romulus, director Fede Alvarez very clearly understands the assignment here. He has an almost preternatural ability to draw out the suspense as our young protagonists try to make their way off the Romulus space station without losing anymore of their number. Alvarez previously helmed the back-to-basics 2013 franchise reboot Evil Dead, where he demonstrated an ability to distill that film series’s iconic horror elements out and remix them into something that feels fresh and also familiar at the same time.
Alvarez does similar work here. He knows what works best and serves up a big helping of what makes the Alien franchise work, the monsters in the dark. As the human protagonists come up with new ways to hopefully stop the attacks from the face-huggers and full-grown xenomorphs that we haven’t seen before, Alvarez undercuts their ingenuity and drops them into newer jeopardy. And for a good chunk of the film, he seems content to give audiences the scary thrill-ride that is at the core of the Alien franchise appeal. However, around the midway point, he does inject lore elements from some of the more recent films that does through a curve ball or two into the narrative. This culminates in a third act reveal that could divide audiences along lines parallel to the division over a similar reveal in a previous film.
One Alien element that sometimes gets overlooked in fan discussions is the role that the Wayland Yutani corporation plays. They are often responsible, either directly or indirectly, placing the various groups of characters into the path of the xenomorphs, often because they wish to find a way to profit from what could be learned by studying the alien killing machines. Alvarez explores that a bit by offering up a visual parallel between the overcast and rainy darkness of the mining colony and the under lit and shadowy interiors of the space station. Both hide monsters. On the space station it’s the xenomorphs, but on the mining colony it’s Wayland Yutani itself; a soulless creature that doesn’t care for the lives of the indentured servants who work to establish the colony. Both are equally deadly to those who fall under their gaze and both are so terribly hard to escape.
