The teen-themed horror of "Alien: Romulus"

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As of 2024, there are nine titles swirling around the Alien saga (it would be ten if we counted Ciro Ippolito's apocryphal 1980 sequel, but we deliberately choose not to). The universe has been explored from various angles: the canonical sequel, which passed from hand to hand to other directors - the third launched David Fincher's career, although he disowns it - the prequel that tried to explain the birth of the xenomorphs (and of all human beings, as well as the meaning of creation), and the crossovers, where Ridley Scott's aliens faced off against John McTiernan's Predators, in their first clash under the direction of Paul W. S. Anderson. The themes have been many, often varied, but always under the hegemony of the unbeatable force of the creatures born from the minds of Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett. So is Alien: Romulus, which is temporally placed between the first and second chapters, telling a side and independent story composed of an all-young cast. The protagonist is Rain Carradine, the very successful Cailee Spaney, whom we also saw last year in Priscilla and Civil War, this time alongside David Jonsson (protagonist of the indie Rye Lane) and Archie Renaux (in Netflix's Shadow and Bone series) on a self-rescue mission that, as is customary in the saga, will end in a bloodbath. The characters in Fede Alvarez's film, who had already tried (and failed) to reboot another franchise with The Girl in the Spider’s Web, are prisoners on a planet that does not allow them to depart for better places, where they can finally see the light of day. Hoping to change a desperate situation, the protagonists intercept a wreck that could be useful to them. Reach it, set the course, and hibernate for the next nine years: an easy plan to follow, if not for one of the most terrifying threats in the universe waiting for them.

As if resetting the nearly decade-long work of the prequels Prometheus and Covenant, not wanting to nullify it, but simply choosing to take a different direction and leave the automaton David (played by a masterful Michael Fassbender) to his delusions, Alien: Romulus immediately gives the feeling of wanting to establish itself as a bridge between present and past. We sense it from the opening scene. Immersed in space, a spaceship comes into view as the camera inspects its outer surface. No noise, there's only the muffled silence of a place where nothing else is within earshot. After all, “In space, no one can hear you scream” was the best tagline of the 1979 sci-fi work, which continued to resonate as much as its success and the iconic status of the protagonist Ripley, the unstoppable Sigourney Weaver. The rest of the structure of Alien: Romulus proceeds in the most conventional way possible, for a franchise revival operation that certainly does not need to be re-discovered, although the intention of a teen-oriented narrative can be seen as trying to attract the attention of a new audience approaching the saga. Throughout the film, after preparing everything for the journey, the characters and viewers find themselves on a ship that, in addition to a possible escape route, also carries an unexpected danger for the spaceship's occupants, but very familiar to those watching from outside. And so it will be for the rest of the movie. While the protagonists are constantly surprised by the atrocities happening around them, those safe in the cinema seat will find the characters' fates seemingly already inevitably sealed, unfolding exactly as expected.

The perception is of being faced with a work that has done a good job with the bare minimum. Forget the mind-bending tests of the previous two films (Prometheus in 2012 and Covenant in 2017), which, although not unanimously appreciated, provided theses, essays, and reflections that helped fuel the story of Alien for another decade, Romulus has less theory and more practice. It has a certain creative flair, at least just enough. The brainteasers about xenomorphs are thus diminished, as is the question of where they come from and how to fight them, even though the film tries to explain it to some extent. But at the base, for the structure of the work, well-tested solutions are adopted, for an enjoyable blockbuster – for genre lovers – that never really peaks.

A film that knows how to scare in some parts, where the action is frantic and the tragic fates of the characters respectfully adhere to a certain consistency. Yet its precise adequacy and the intention not to get its hands dirty end up making its reception sterile, as well as less polarizing, unlike the debates sparked by Scott's Prometheus experiments, with the robot in Alien: Romulus only caring to define itself as "artificial person" and nothing more. Nothing shocking, then. Nor anything unusual or controversial. The film is a great Alien product and, as such, deserves to be remembered. But that silence at the beginning was perhaps ominous: a title that remains a nomad lost in the cinematography of a saga that has rewritten the boundaries of the cosmos and that, instead of expanding it, quickly opens and closes a window, just long enough for another story.