Alien: Romulus is Ready Player One for the Alien universe

Fede Álvarez may have been the perfect director to revive the Alien film franchise. His film Alien: Romulus is incredibly well shot, with the camera prowling like a predator through every gorgeous corridor in the failing Romulus space station, building tension with every step the characters take. The problem is, he also happens to be the worst possible writer for the job. When it comes time for those characters to speak, the entire film falls apart and becomes a hollow imitation of the better films that came before it. It’s clear that Álvarez loves the Alien franchise. It just feels like he loves it a little too much.

You can feel Álvarez’s enthusiasm for the franchise at every moment of the film, but too often it comes across in the characters. Any semblance of unique personalities is stripped away and they’re turned into amorphous lumps that can be pieced together into the rough shape of previous Alien films. Alien: Romulus feels strangely like Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player Onewhere the characters worship pop culture so fanatically and thoroughly that their favorite shows, movies, and games are indistinguishable from their actual personalities. Likewise, none of Romulus‘ characters feel like believable people who could inhabit the Alien universe. They feel like twenty-somethings who obsessively watched Alien movies and were then transported to their favorite sci-fi setting.

Almost every other rule in Romulus is a reference to another film in the franchise, or feels self-consciously connected to the series’ past. More than once, a character almost literally turns to the camera to recite a catchphrase, as if in a reiteration of Stranger‘s memorable sentence “I can’t lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathy.” And each time, that line is delivered with a bizarre, atonal resonance that’s rooted in a reference to the Alien series as a product, not the film we’re actually watching.

Like Steven Spielberg’s Ready Player One film adaptation, Alien: Romulus looks great overall – and much better than the script deserves. Spielberg’s action sequences and sense of grandeur are not at their peak in Ready Player Onebut they are still present, especially when he The Appearance in one of the film’s final sequences. It’s exciting and visually arresting, but at best it still feels like a emptier version of a classic.

The same goes for Álvarez with Romulus. He shows tremendous skill in recreating the kind of dirty, smoky images that Ridley Scott’s Stranger and that of James Cameron Aliens so structured and beautiful. What’s stopping both Ready Player One And RomulusThe downside, however, is that their references are so completely and carefully constructed, compared to the original stories surrounding them, that the new material feels lifeless. Romulus‘version of this formula is much more successful than Ready Player One‘s, but the distracting sense of pure facsimile is still there. Worst of all, the best moments in both films are really just reminders of the better, more exciting films we’ve already seen.

Romulus‘ Familiar locations — drippy, underlit, industrial spaces, a dark and foreboding planetary surface, and so on — are plagued by this sense of bizarre, uncanny-valley imitation of life. So are the characters — none more so than protagonist Rain (Civil war co-star Cailee Spaeny). It’s clear that the starting point for Rain was Stranger‘s Ripley: a capable survivor and a fixture in the all-time canon of “cool” characters. But Ripley is cool in a way that is decidedly unmodern. She’s competent, but not a genius. She solves problems with luck and gut instinct as often as she does with wit. Most importantly, Ripley is a little bit mean. She’s clearly not interested in being nice, but she’s undeniably charming—both on paper and in Sigourney Weaver’s timeless performance.

Rain, however, is definitely cut from modern blockbuster cloth. She’s Rey Skywalker with a little R-rated blood on her face — another franchise protagonist who seems to have watched every movie in a franchise before joining. Rain is a super genius. She has a perfect answer for every problem that arises in Romuluswhether it’s mechanical, biological, military or otherwise. And we have no real explanation for it, other than “her father was smart.”

Everyone loves Rain. She’s kind, she’s capable, she has the answer to every question. She treats androids like people. She’s nice to everyone, even when they’re mean to her, and she’ll always try to save them from scary situations, no matter how much danger it puts her in. She’s, in other words, completely flawless and completely charmless.

Like so many other recent blockbuster leads, Rain feels like she’s been genetically engineered to be liked. That just leaves all her edges sanded and smoothed to avoid any roughness that audiences might find offensive. The side effect of all this smoothness is that it also eliminates any chance of a memorable sliver of that character getting under our skin and staying with us forever.

(Editorial note: Major spoilers ahead Alien: Romulusand for Stranger.)

But while Rain is a good-natured attempt to recapture the atmosphere of the past, Stranger‘s magic that doesn’t mix well with the mechanics of modern blockbusters, the CG ‘return’ of the late Ian Holm as a major Romulus character is franchise reverence at its most sinister and chillingly corporate.

Ian Holm’s character, Ash, is one of the most compelling and memorable elements of the original Stranger. This determined, bizarre science officer, eventually revealed to be a secret android, was sent by the mysterious Weyland-Yutani corporation to ensure that their best interests are always served, no matter the cost. He is a cold, careless, logic-driven machine who places potential profit above human lives, and he is willing to kill everyone aboard the spaceship Nostromo in the hopes that there is a way to make money off the Xenomorph. He is also Stranger‘s least subtle and most effective thematic device, letting us know that there are terrible costs to putting profit before humanity, in the future just as well as in the present.

That theme does not do Álvarez any good Alien: Romuluswhere he decided to use CGI to recreate Ian Holm’s face and voice from 1979, although the actor passed away in 2020. It’s clear that Álvarez is a fan of Holm’s performance in Strangerbut this act of non-consensual digital necromancy feels just as soulless, calculated, and profit-driven as Ash the android in the original film.

This digital resurrection is not unique to Romulusbut it feels more painful here. The digital Holm is not a quick posthumous cameo like the digital Harold Ramis in Ghostbusters: Afterlife; his new android character, Rook, pops up throughout the film. And each time, this particular comparison feels inescapable: the people behind this film valued profit for their company above all else, regardless of the human cost. That metaphor remains Romulusalso. Whether it’s Rain being stripped of any recognizable weakness or humanity or the cloying way recognizable lines and props are fed straight to camera, the entire film feels as artificial as the franchise’s androids.