The franchise’s return to basics with practical effects, a tight knit group of hot twenty-somethings, and quippy dialogue makes for two hours of mindless fun. For scheduling reasons Friend and I were seated on both ends of a young couple and girl was VERY screamy, which made the whole experience of seeing this movie all the more perfect. I had read some early reviews of Romulus came in with the general feeling that everyone really liked Cailee Spaeny (because, of course) and everyone agreed that there was a lot of yuck and ickkkkk, which sounded pretty awesome. To that end, just about everything in the trailer (and Friend agrees in a way) is set to throw you off the scent of what makes this movie so fun to watch. It plays with the homages to previous films in the franchise while also serving up its own critiques of the departure from what was essentially an escape sci-fi horror film from the 70s with a nascent mega super action star. The beginning in which Rain and her brother Andy (David Jonsson), an AI that stutters and
Reading and reminiscing about what I liked about the other five(?) movies in the franchise gave me some helpful ways of thinking about what makes an Alien movie so great. The Alien vs Predator movies are monster mashup movies which either feel retro if you were old enough to see those same tropes in the 70s or prescient if you’re young enough to have only seen it in the creation of the MCU and DCU. I resaw Alien in 4k a few months ago to see if it held up as much as I remember, huddled over my little laptop in the darkness six years ago on some sleepless night and it totally, totally does in all the best ways. I had forgotten (!) that there was a “soft reboot” of the franchise with Joss Whedon at the helm when I was a teenager, starring a cloned Sigorney and one Winona Ryder, which apparently was too talky and jokey for the tone of the originals? Romulus falls on the spectrum of serious to slapstick as kind of a knee slapper? It’s full of bad dad jokes from start to finish, the gallows humor fits kind of perfectly into the viewing experience of an audience that has sat through nearly ten hours of face huggers and mama Xenomorphs, chronically low-adrenaline because our reserves have been tapped out and jump scares of soft, wet crabs with thick throat proboscises doesn’t do it for us anymore.
Prometheus delved more into the character sketch of the artificial persons element of the original stories while also playing with the metatheater of Lawrence of Arabia, something to balance the CGI artistry by laying it on the backbone of Michael Fassbender re-performing a master performance of his own. I always like when a movie can make you like a different movie even more just by pulling at certain threads and emphasizing the things you can fall in love with about a story. It’s that way for Bestie with Me and Earl and the Dying Girl:
And there’s a lot of that spirit in JJ Abrams Super 8, in the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things, in Colin Meloy’s The Stars Did Wander Darkling, even in Bestie’s other favorite Locke and Key on Netflix, which is absolutely in love with movie making in the second season. Romulus doesn’t attach itself to any media outside of Alien, but six movies in it has so much material over the decades to reference that it feels satisfying when you actually recognize the face of a corpse on the ground or the interface of a machine you’ve seen a couple movies back or even some stupid line that’s been repeated in every successive film because it HAS to be. In that sense Romulus feels like a love letter but not necessarily a breakup note.
Anytime the little facehugger I’m raising goes to the movies, it always stops in front of the massive cardboard standup for this movie and repeats what I said when I first saw it, “A SPIDER IS HUGGING HER FACE” completely matter-of-fact, even a little joy, and I wonder if I’ve permanently damaged the individual, just begun a slow cascade of issues that’s going to boil over some day in an therapist session, or if she’s really going to like watching these with me on a wet crow day in ten years, but I really do think this film has something for everyone.
