Genre: Sci-Fi/Horror
Premise: A group of young poor workers on a remote moon hatch a plan to steal cryo-bays from an abandoned orbiting space station but run into some unexpected trouble once they get there.
About: Alien Romulus proved that the Alien franchise isn’t dead yet. It scored a 5 million dollar increase (41 million) over the opening weekend of the last Alien film, Alien Covenant, although it was 10 million shy of the last Alien film before that, Prometheus, which took in 51 million. The film was directed by Alien lover, Fede Alvarez, who wrote the script with longtime collaborator, Rodo Sayagues.
Writers: Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues
Details: 2 hours long
You know, I thought after Alien Covenant that the franchise was done. That movie was so so soooo very bad. The scene where robot Michael Fassbender nearly has sex with robot Michael Fassbender was the low point of the franchise, one I did not think it could recover from.
But Alien Romulus proves that audiences have a short memory and, as long as at least five years have passed, you can reboot anything.
Today’s movie reminds me that there isn’t just competition in the overall movie space for writers and directors, but that there’s this secret world of competition within franchises themselves. If the primary creators are no longer interested in making films for a particular franchise, studios hold “open calls” for creators to pitch their ideas.
I know so many people who want to make an Alien movie. And many of them have pitched their idea to 20th Century Fox. So when one of these ideas gets greenlit, it means that take beat out 100 other takes. You’re getting, what the studio believes, is the best version of Alien out there at the moment.
Now whether it’s ACTUALLY the best version is not up to the studio. It’s up to the audience. And I, in this very moment, am the audience. So I shall decide if they did a good job or not.
Rain, who looks 12 but who I think is 25, lives on some moon outpost with a bunch of other blue-collar workers barely scraping by. They’re all virtual slaves here and Rain lives with her brother, Andy, who’s a robot synthetic.
Rain’s old friends, led by her ex, Tyler, contact her and say they’ve got a beat on some cryo-bays up in an abandoned space station orbiting the moon. If they can get those bays, they can escape to a planet that actually has sunshine. The reason they need Rain is because her bro, Andy, is a Weyland-Yutani synthetic and the base is Weyland-Yutani. He can speak to it.
So off they go and head up to this station. Everything’s going all right at first but when they find the cryo-bays, they don’t have enough fuel in them. So now they need to find cryo-fuel. However, by turning the base back on, they’ve inadvertently restarted Weyland-Yutani’s alien program. So all these little face-huggers thaw out. And when the face-huggers see humans, they become aliens-in-heat. Of course, our crew has no idea what these things are and will have to learn the hard way.
Alien Romulus was a lot better than I thought it would be.
I say it all the time on this site: Every writer/creator gets in this business to remake their favorite movies. And there’s no question that Fede Alvarez loves Alien. He goes out of his way to capture the mood, look, and tone of that original film.
But there’s something I’ve learned over the years that’s been hard for me to accept. Which is that, no matter how much you love something, it’s impossible to mimic the original.
There have been many creators who love George Lucas’s Star Wars who have gotten a chance to contribute to that franchise. Yet, every one of those movies and shows lacks something. You can’t always put your finger on it. But there’s something about the unique mix of elements in a person’s head that makes them impossible to recapture.
You could even argue that the person THEMSELVES is unable to recapture them once they get older because, when you’re older, you’re no longer the same person. I tried to watch Attack of The Clones recently and it was so far removed from what made the original Star Wars great that it was downright depressing!
But we’re talking about Alien Romulus here. And look… you can tell if these movies are gonna work or not pretty much within the first 5 minutes. Those early scenes where the writer and director are setting up the characters tell you a lot. Cause characters are hard to get right. So if we come out of those wanting to follow the characters, the movie is going to work.
I liked Rain. I liked her situation. There’s an early scene where she’s finally gotten enough work hours to travel to a nicer planet but when she goes to claim her travel papers, they tell her the company is now requiring twice as many hours of service. So she’s got another five years on this rock. That alone made me want her to succeed.
I thought the use of such a young crew was an interesting choice. I don’t think it was the right move though, at least from a story perspective. There’s something about these lifers, who were in that first film, that made every scene feel lived-in. My guess for why these characters were so young was simply because the studio wanted to recruit new fans to the franchise. That and this is essentially a creature feature. Creature features work well with young casts. So that may have been how Alvarez justified it.
I noticed a unique thing while watching the latest Alien. Which is that, the fact that we all know aliens are coming later allows the script more time to develop characters.
Think about it. If everyone knows that our favorite aliens are coming, we’re going to be more patient. That patience allows the writer more leeway to set up his characters. That’s always the hardest thing to do in scripts because, usually, the reader doesn’t know what’s coming. So they’re impatient. Which means you have to rush through your character setups in an attempt to keep them turning the pages. But it’s a trap. Because, the less you set them up, the less we care about them. So a lot of writers will rush to the good stuff too fast, erroneously believing that, by doing so, they’re keeping the reader’s interest. But you have to make us care about the characters first and, whether you like it or not, that’s going to take time. It’s one of the trickiest balancing acts in screenwriting.
Because Fede accurately understood that we’d wait to see the infamous xenomorphs, he was able to use that first act to set Rain up, set Andy up, set their past up, set their future up, set some of the crew up, set up past relationships Rain had with them. It wasn’t perfect but it felt real enough that I was in.
Since all of that was properly set up, I enjoyed the second act, where they pay off a lot of those earlier character revelations.
HOWEVER.
Come on with that ending.
Come on. With that ending.
I understand that you’re trying to evolve the mythology. You want to make your own mark. But isn’t this the exact same mistake they made in Alien 3 (or was it 4)? They tried to create some alien-baby hybrid and it totally backfired. The creature design was nothing to write home about. Also, they had to stretch the plot and exposition earlier in order to make sense of why a baby is able to grow from 15 inches to 9 feet tall within 5 minutes. It made zero sense and was dumb. Which is too bad because, up until that point, I was very into this movie.
So, we’re going to split the difference here. Really good first and second acts. The climax fell apart. But a fun movie overall.
[ ] What the hell did I just watch?
[ ] wasn’t for me
[x] worth the price of admission
[ ] impressive
[ ] genius
What I learned: We often talk about the main character’s goal in a screenplay because that goal will motivate a large portion of the plot (Rain must get the cryo-bays). But there’s another goal all writers should be aware of which I call the “life goal.” The life goal is something that happens beyond the end of your story. And it’s something that gives your character more depth. In this case, Rain is trying to get this cryo-bay so she can have a new life. So she can live on a planet with a sun. Notice how that goal creates a larger scope for your hero and allows the reader to see beyond the here and now.
