Alien: Romulus, Attack of the Clone [critique]

Far from Ridley Scott's experiments with his own saga, Fede Álvarez delivers an artificial best of the best ideas from the Alien franchise.

It's almost biology. In the life cycle of a franchise, we always arrive at this moment: return to the sources, to the fundamentals, promise the public “the best movie since the first”. Alien: Romulus is one of those. In this case, since it is an Alien, it is a question of promising “the best film since the first two” since Alien: Romuluschronologically located between Alien, the 8th passenger And Aliens, the returnwants to rise to their level. In fact, throughout Romulus, we will rather find ourselves thinking that we would do better to watch the films of Ridley Scott and James Cameron again, as Fede Álvarez accumulates explicit winks, literal quotes, the most obvious things from the first two Alien -not forgetting a lot of Blade Runnerand a hint ofAlien 3 And Prometheuswhile we're at it. So much so that we even wonder if there is even one original idea left in the holds of this Romulus ? That would be a bit unfair: first of all, there is this initial idea, that of a group of young people working class heroes stuck on a terrible mining planet, dreaming of the sun of elsewhere, looking for their ticket out on an abandoned space station. Young actresses and actors, gifted, hard-working and sympathetic, already experienced (Cailee Spaeny, Isabella Merced, David Jonsson already have XP to spare), thrown into a film Alienbut then by the book : a closed-door setting, dirty beasts, diegetic countdowns (when an impact is announced in ten minutes, it means that it will take place in ten minutes of footage, as in Aliens), hostile space. And the name of the heroes' ship is called the Corbelan : this is the name of one of the characters in Joseph Conrad's novel Nostromo.

Oh, nothing is missing. Not a dark corridor, not a neon, not a retro cathode screen, not a light button: the entire graphic charter of Alien is there, sometimes magnificent (the spatial visions are impressive, like the appearance of the sun above the clouds interrupted by the arrival of the station, 2024 rereading of the Nostromo standing out on the planet), scrupulously copied. Without this copy, this replicant in short, is not itself a principle of cinema. Alien: Romulus is designed as a pixel art game for fans of retrogaming. By remapping evil Dead In 2013, Álvarez played the card of serious excess, a nice paradox that worked through its intransigence. The paradox that poses Romuluswithout ever trying to solve it, is different. Coming to Paris at the end of June to present 20 minutes of his film, Álvarez stressed that the frankness Alien East “a filmmakers' franchise”while claiming that he had to “take your ego out of the equation” and not to do “Fede Alvarez's Alien”. The mission is accomplished: Fede has done his Alien as it should be, in the rules. “In the best interest of the Company”as the villain of the film repeats over and over again, a character who reconnects the film with the first Alienusing the entire toolbox of the 1979 classic to build itself. Indeed, no ego in this. Even when the film reels off cult lines fromAliens, the return (“I prefer the term 'artificial person' myself”, “don't touch her, bitch!”literally quoted for the sole purpose of making fans and critics scream), he does not pose as a creator. In short, not like Luca Guadagnino, who trumpeted at the time: “the director of Suspiriait's me !”

Where Prometheus And Alien: Covenant was strange replicantsexperimental objects that were both failed and exciting, where Ridley Scott reinvested the Alien franchise, dialoguing with his own mythology, showing the clichés to better strip them down, at the risk of implosion. Scott's artistic flair, with the genetic prologue or the self-autopsy of Noomi Rapace in Prometheusthe global genocide of Covenantwas considered a form of biological experimentation. At the end of Romulusthere is a semblance of experimentation – but one that evokes precisely those of Ridley Scott's unloved sequels. Even the music gets involved: The Rhinegold Wagner's score, used in Romulus, was already used in Covenant, while fragments of Gregson-Williams' score for Prometheus. So, Romulus does not really have the value of an experiment, but rather that of a fan film, neat, sometimes effective, but without ego, without vision. Ultimate biological detail (wink? pirouette? at this stage, we don't know much about it), we learn in the film the Latin name given to the creature's DNA: Plagiarism. But in the best interest of the Company.