The Black Campbell

Stop reading if you’re one of those people that “can’t watch a movie when you know what happens…” 

I’d like to say I’m a fan of the Alien franchise but that’s not wholly true. I loved the first movie, which I watched on HBO — oh, so long ago — while skipping school. I already knew what happened, as I’d read about it in Omni and read the comic book version. Still, you’re not really prepared for the chestburster scene, nor the surprise when Ash gets decapitated to a gout of what I’m told was milk (and which Ian Holm, supposedly, couldn’t stand but had to slobber out of his mouth for the scenes afterward.) (Oh, look — spoilers. And it didn’t ruin my enjoyment.)

I loved Aliens, which took the suspense and horror of the first movie and turned it into a roller coaster ride with more aliens and more action, but grounded in a good set of characters and a mother/daughter relation. The director’s cut has a two minute scene where we find out Ripley had missed her daughter’s entire life, and that she had just died a few months before Ripley is found. It creates an emotional through-line to Newt and why Ripley gloms onto her so passionately in the movie. (It also has the fantastic automated sentry gun scene that should have been kept, as well.)

But after that, Alien movies have been a steady exercise in disappointment. The less said about the third, the better. The third even makes the terrible Alien: Resurrectionlook good, or at least fun. The cloning thing to bring back a character is usually when you know a series is done, but it did give us a prototype in the pirate crew that if you squint looks a lot like another crew that the writer, Joss Wheedon, would give us later. I didn’t even bother to watch the Alien vs. Predator movies. Prometheus was an exercise in frustration — there was a good story in there, but the original Spaihts script got badly mauled by Damon Lindelhof. The only saving grace is Michael Fassbender’s David — one of the best movie villains of the last couple of decades — and the main reason to watch this movie. Covenant — again, a movie that could have been good, but bad writing with characters making obviously bad moves brings it down.

So I wasn’t expecting…anything…from Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus. The trailers looked good, but I’d been fooled before. I’d heard the director had done some good work with his other movies…but so had Ridley “Covenant” Scott. But I had also just quit my job and had a load of stress and time to burn off. I hit the opening matinee which was surprisingly well attended.

The story is simple and set between the original movie and Aliens. It revolves around a group of twenty-somethings who have been raised on a crappy colony world run by Weyland-Yutani Corporation, the bad guys for most of the series. The look and feel of the colony is top-notch. You can see that life on these “shake and bake” colonies is filled with back-breaking work, weird diseases from the terraforming process, and this one has a tidally locked world where they never see the sun.

The lead character, Rain (Cailee Spaeny), has finished her indenture with the company, but because there’s a large number of their folks dying, she gets involuntarily extended. It’s obviously, she’s only getting out feet-first. She is joined by her adoptive brother, Andy — a salvaged Weyland android who is twitchy, filled with bad dad jokes from her father, and who has one directive: do what’s best for Rain. He is planned stunningly well by David Jonsson, who I’ve never heard of, but expect we’ll be seeing more of. She gets an opportunity to get the hell out when an ex-boyfriend, Tyler, and his crew of miscreants including his pregnanat girlfriend Kay (only really there for a later body horror moment), his brother Bjorn (the android hating douche), Navarro, a twitchy pilot that you know is going to be the one that loses her shit when things go bad — and they will swiftly.

The crew have found out there’s an old, abandoned Weyland ship (later, they realize a space station) in a decaying orbit over the colony. They’ve got 36 hours to pop up, steal a bunch of cryo-pods and coolant for the trip to another, decent, colony a few years over the way. So far, so good. They need her because Andy is a Weyland machine and should be able to get them past the security systems. There’s the set-up.

The movie is beautiful to look at and once they get to the station, with its Nostromoaesthetic, I was on board for the ride. The sounds of the console and equipment, the look of the hatches and corridors blends Alien and Aliens seamlessly. They manage to break in, find out the station’s gravity is offline but cycles every certain number of minutes (used later), and they get the place mostly up and running. They find the cyropods — that’s good. They don’t have enough coolant to get them to the next colony — that’s bad. So, they go looking for more coolant and find mysteries: there’s weird damage that the audience known is from the acid blood of the eponymous xenomorph. There’s security lockouts that they can’t get past to find out what’s going on, but there’s a damaged android. They try to fire it up but it’s hostile, so they short it out.

They manage to find coolant in a red light-bathed laboratory, but when they pull the tanks, they disable the cyro that been keeping dozen…hundreds of facehuggers out cold (so to speak). Mistake #1. Security locks out the room, leaving Tyler and Bjorn trapped. Rain and the others need better security clearance, so they take disabled android’s OS chip, and plug it into Andy to get higher access. Mistake #2: now, Andy has uploaded security, better software that makes him stop acting like Lennie from Of Mice and Men into a confident, cool, and efficient “artificial person”. This includes a new directive — to do what’s best for the company.

By the time they can get the hatch open to get Tyler and Bjorn out, the facehuggers are on the loose. Here again, Alvarez and Stan Winston’s special effects team, knock it out of the park with animatronic facehuggers that could run and jump, although others are CGI’d. Facehuggers were always creepy, but here they’re terrifying. Of course, one of the crew get impregnated. This is Navarro, who through the rising tension is doing a lot of praying and freaking out. So it’s in character when they learn from the “dead” android, Rook, that she’s most likley infected with a chestburster. 

And here’s where people start to complain about the fan service in the film), a version of Ash that uses CGI to recreate Ian Holm over an actor’s face. The voice is an AI-cooked combo of Holm and Daniel Betts, who did the initial performance. The voice is well done, the face is just into the uncanny valley, but I’ll admit I didn’t mind this enough to ruin what was a — so far — a well-paced, acted, and written movie. Yes, he used some of the lines from the movie. Again, it’s not bad enough to take me out of the movie — save for one uttered by Andy near the end.

Mistake #3: Navarro freaks out and with Bjorn makes a break for their ship, with Andy in close pursuit with the intent — it seems — of killing her before the monster inside can come to fruition. Kay, who had been left on the ship feeling morning sickness, tries to aid Navarro but it’s chest burstin’ time. Unfortunately, Navarro had been decoupling the ship from the Romulus station and in her death throes kicks off the engines, smacking into the station for the inevitable bit of pyrotechnics. The ship had knocked the station into a faster decay and it will hit the ring system of teh planet in less than an hour. Now, the first bit of bad writing. Conveniently, the ship scraps along the station doing damage, but winds up in another hanger bay on the other side of the station. Better would have been to see the ship go boom and the rest have to get to a shuttle or ship still docked on the other side of the station. This is the first strike the movie gets in my book.

The rest of the movie is the last three trying to get past the army of facehuggers in the station to their ship, and Bjorn and Key dealing with the “baby” Navarro chest bore. Of course, there’s been hibernating xenos from when the station has crew that will come into play near the end. There’s the “can we trust Andy anymore” angst and moments where we can see the struggle between protecting the “company and Rain. Jonsson really is the best part of the movie. There’s even the black goo from Prometheus— we find out this was the real goal of the company, not the xenomorphs who are more of a side project. The goo is the key to improving the human species so they can actually survive in space. (Humans have been doing badly everywhere, we learn…) Supposedly, the goo can heal creatures at accelerated rates, like we see with the accelerated life cycle of the xenos. (I’m simplifying — but it’s a scene that, for me, redeemed some of the material from Prometheus.) It also gives the company a bigger reason, other than “alien=good weapon” evil of the other movies; here, there’s at least some level of good intention that makes W-Y less a caricature of the “evil corporation” and gives a move nuanced, realistic set of motives.

So that’s the first two acts and most of the set-up for the when they big chaps show up. There’s some really good stuff in here, and they pull from all of the movies to try and weave things together. Are they successful? For the most part. The folks that complain about the fan service, like Critical Drinker — whom I usually tend to agree with — have some valid points. but ultimately, to me, this felt like a love letter to the series from a real fan. Another gamer I know said the fan service felt like he was watching a really good night of role playing in an Alien RPG. I tend to agree there.

So the good: it looks great, sounds great, and the creature effects are top notch. We even get a new awful thing at the end. the acting is generally good, but Saeny and Jonsson are quite good. With one huge exception, the characters do some dumb things but not the usual “we need to get to the next action scene” dumb of modern movies; these are scared kids working on limited understanding of what they’ve up against, or from pure expediency. (I can’t count on fingers and toes the number of times I’ve done something stupid out of expediency or lack of knowledge.) That one exception is the “we need to get to the new bad guy” dumb.

The bad: the use of Holm might disturb those that are on an anti-AI or use of dead actors’ likeness kick. I thought we could have gotten the same utility out of another “evil” android…or hell, give us a version of David. I can always watch Fassbender do some acting. The one dumb move by a character is truly, mind-numbingly stupid and while it sets up the last face-off; I think this is almost enough to take me out of the pic. The use of lines from the other movies — “get away from her…” for instance were a bit forced, but the audience seemed to love it. Sometimes, fan service is appreciated. The ship conveniently crashing into a hanger bay was, for me, the most egregious moment in the movie.

So is it worth it? I had a blast. I found the pacing and suspense well executed, the look and feel of the piece screams Alien. The creature effects were fantastic. There’s some truly great action set pieces involving zero-gee and acid blood. If I put it on my scale of “should you see it” I’d say it’s a full price, but not quite IMAX money. Definitely a cheaper matinee.

If you like the Alien franchise, you’re gonna love it. If you’re like me, and you think everything save the first two and David from Prometheus are dreck, you’ll most likely be pleasantly surprised. If you’re a nit-picker; the third act is gonna piss you off. If I had to place this in the best to worst of the series, I’d say it’s a solid #3 behind the first two. Hell, even Covenant is better than Alien 3, which should follow Willow the TV series into Disney’s memory hole.

My is it worth it scale: top being “full price in the theater”, “a matinee”, “rent it at home”, to “borrow or stream it”, and lastly “avoid like the plague”.