We saw 20 tantalizing minutes of Alien: Romulus

Director Fede Álvarez was in Paris last week to tease his Alien. We were there.

On the stage of Pathé Beaugrenelle, Fede Alvarez looks very happy with himself, and rightly so: he has just directed the new film in the saga Alien, and the first images seem to have completely won over the audience of journalists present. The room caught its breath after four sequences, for around twenty minutes of footage, which seemed to encapsulate all of Fede's ambition – to make a Alien by the book, “go back to the first movie”as he explained in the Q&A sequence after the excerpts, “trying to explain why he was still so powerful”…After two prequels (Prometheus And Alien Covenant) shot by Ridley Scott himself, Alien: Romulus is again a prequel but more precisely an interquel, this time located between Alien, the 8th passenger And Aliens, the return. It's still not Alien 5 (remember, it was Neill Blomkamp's project), but it's “the Alien bonus by the director of the ultra bloody reboot ofevil Dead“. This Alien-there was also supposed to be released in streaming on Hulu before the distributor changed its mind and gave it the honor of a summer release.

Strange things

A group of six young friends want to get away from their original exoplanet (a world that looks, in the Alien atmosphere, ugly and rainy because of terraforming), and to do this, they decide to rob a space station apparently abandoned (the Romulus of the title). And guess what's inside? The first extract shows the group of friends taking off from the planet aboard a ship, and it's a pretty good first thing since the Alien canon showed landings, landings, breakthroughs in clouds heavy with storms to reach the hostile surface as fuck. Here, the heroes – including the essential Cailee Spaeny (Civil War) – come out of the atmosphere to discover, apparently for the first time in their lives, the sun, and it is a very beautiful scene (the photo is signed Galo Olivares, who assisted Alfonso Cuarón for the photo of Rome).

The second extract already brings them into the carcass of the Romulus. After a little looting session, they are confronted with the corpses of the crew, and above all with a horde of facehuggers emerging from storage tanks. New good idea: restore real danger to these filth, already very repulsive to begin with, but when the film gives them the advantage of numbers…

In the third excerpt, “this time it's war”, or rather it's time to break -Navarro (Aileen Wu), the pilot of the group, contaminated by an alien embryo, tries to flee to aboard their ship but it only serves to deplete the station's fuel stocks. It's time to place one of the money shots of the excellent trailer unveiled at the beginning of June, when the pilot scans herself using a portable X-ray machine and discovers the bug lodged in her thorax. Above all, it is an opportunity to Alien Romulus to show with a touch of cunning its “authentic” muscles, that is to say its effects of space models and bloody animatronics guaranteed to be vintage.

Finally, the last clip showed Tyler (Archie Renaux, seen in the series Shadow and Bone) trying to burn an alien egg by plunging an electric weapon into it. The thing inside didn't look happy, and it was already the end of the extracts as we moved on to a new teaser that was more classic than the first. But quite effective, like this sequence which showed that Fede Álvarez seemed to have perfectly grasped the grammar Alien without forgetting to inject discoveries, like this moment when Andy (David Jonsson, from the series Industry), the synthetic android, who reboots in the middle of an action scene and finds himself frozen in the middle of facehuggers… It seems that it will rather be up to Noah Hawley to break this grammar with his future series Alienwhich we imagine twisted in the taste of the creator of Legion.

“You will suffer more when you see them die”

If, during the presentation, it was stated that Romulus was “the seventh film in the saga” (forgetting in passing, and this is undoubtedly fair game, the two Alien Vs Predator of 2004 and 2007) and Fede was not reminded that he had already succeeded David Fincher (by directing Millennium 2 in 2018, a box office flop), we were able to measure that the mastery of grammarAlien by the filmmaker was not an appearance: he also seems to have perfectly known how to control his experience within a studio film. Normal than experience Millennium 2 seems to belong to another reality. Back on stage after the extracts, the director insisted on the importance of the group of young friends, at the heart ofAlien: Romulus : “By making them very sympathetic, like that, you will suffer more when you see them die.”, he joked. It is indeed an original idea in the franchise, which brought together space workers, galactic scientists, starship troopers trigger-happy – but never a group of friends who dream of leaving their stone lost in space.

That said, if Álvarez recognizes that the franchise Alien East “a franchise of filmmakers”he also underlined, in a somewhat paradoxical way, that he had to “take your ego out of the equation” and not to do “The Alien by Fede Álvarez”as there was the Alien by James Cameron, that of David Fincher and that of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. But, take his word for it, Fede did not suffer like Fincher or Jeunet: “I was given complete independence from the studio, and I'm Uruguayan: believe me, if it had gone wrong, I would tell you.”, he insisted, laughing. Before praising Ridley Scott, who was “very respectful” of his work, giving him the ability to write the screenplay (with his faithful sidekick Rodo Sayagues, with whom he co-wrote all his films except Millennium 2) and giving him great freedom of action. “Ridley was the type to say 'it's up to you' every time something was presented to him”Fede said. “For example, he might say to you, ‘this thing is shit, but it’s up to you’.”. The director of Blade Runner -and producer of this Romulus– above all would have given him crucial advice: “When in doubt, you should always raise the bar, never lower it” (“always elevate, never go down”). Which allows us to think that the end ofAlien: Romulus could as well surprise us as that of its evil Dead from 2013. A traumatic finale, where Álvarez had understood that it was necessary to push the meters to the maximum to remain in history. See you on August 14 at the exit of the theater to see in what state he will have left us.

Alien Romulus by Fede Álvarez, with Cailee Spaeny, Isabela Merced, David Jonsson… Released August 14