WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD
Introduction
Alien: Romulus spares no time at grasping the audience’s attention.
The deafening silence that accompanies its magnificent first scene – a spaceship gliding through the debris of Nostromo – is a confident way to demonstrate its fine quality as a film.
The spaceship in question was inviting a well-known monster onboard, extracting a meteorite in which the Xenomorph from the first Alien movie was entombed.
For a movie franchise that is 45 years old, the horror trope is all-too familiar. Anyone with a remote knowledge of the 1980s pop culture can already predict what would happen next: facehuggers, chest-bursting alien babies and acid-blooded Xenomorphs slaughtering everyone on board. After six Alien movies, the setting and plot of Romulus do not exactly offer anything new.
And yet, boredom did not strike me for even a second. Despite its tired elements, Romulus offers new ways of storytelling to the Alien canon that kept me invested in the story throughout its runtime.
It does not revolutionize the tenets of the franchise – in fact, many of Romulus’ elements follow the template established by the six movies that came before. How then, did Romulus become one of the best movies in the franchise as well as an entertaining horror in 2024? The answer lies in three factors: nostalgia, stunning visuals and a new interpretation of its true horror.
That ‘80s Formula
In short, Romulus is a story about a group of indentured workers and a synthetic (i.e., an android) trying to escape their homeworld and undertake a multi-year voyage across space. To achieve so, they needed to extract cryochambers from a defunct space station that, unsurprisingly, was infested with facehuggers and Xenomorphs.
Itcapitalizes on the ‘80s nostalgia that has swept the film and television industry in recent years, fuelled by the decade’s cultural gravitas as well as Hollywood’s lack of confidence at producing new materials. Blade Runner 2049, Stranger Things and It exemplify this, evoking visual imagery that is native of the ‘80s or setting an entire story in the decade.
Romulus leans towards the former. A portion of its first act is set in Jackson, shown as a dark, steampunk-ish sunless planet that reminds us of the “dirty” and bleak dystopia typical of Blade Runner and The Terminator.
When the setting finally shifts to the space station Renaissance, this identity remains just as strong, manifesting through the ‘80s interpretation of “advanced” technologies. This includes computers with convex screens, bulky keyboard keys and cubic fonts typically used for coding today, all of which give a major throwback to how technologies were depicted in the decade’s movies.
It stands in sharp contrast with its immediate predecessors Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which opt for futuristic physics, a clean look and an optimistic take on technology. The problem is, the two movies were released around the same time period as other movies that featured a similar look and feel (such as Star Wars, Star Trek and the more realistic Interstellar). They failed to stand out among the rest.
Romulus refuses to bow to this convention, instead choosing “backward” imagery that strongly registers with today’s audience.
Magnificent Shots
Romulus is also supported by some truly magnificent shots, placing it closer to Interstellar than Star Wars in a spectrum of comparison.
Some of these are worth mentioning here. The atmospheric ascension of Corbelan, the characters’ ship, through thick and stormy clouds conjures the image of their rise from a hellscape (Jackson) to a hope for a brighter future (Renaissance) with divine intensity.
Once above the atmosphere, wide shots are also utilized to showcase Jackson’s gloomy surface coupled with its impressive belt of icy rings, portraying the outer space that is beautiful and dangerous at once. My awe was further elevated as Renaissance came into view, an imposing, floating object that would soon be the characters’ fatal agony.
This interplay between beautiful visuals and danger becomes a leitmotif throughout the movie. Renaissance’s halls, labs and rooms are well-designed but leave enough room for danger to lurk in shadowy crevices.
The station’s striking exterior is also beautifully shot, even as Corbelan crashed against its fuel tank and augmented the sense of emergency.
Of most memorable is the collision of Renaissance with Jackson’s planetary rings, depicting a stunning catastrophe brought about by ice, fire and empty space.
Beautiful shots like these usually bear a small contribution to the plot progression, but in the case of Romulus, they act as a counter to the potential boredom created by our overfamiliarity with its horror.
In other words, these shots improve the movie’s quality by injecting artistic components that force the audience to judge it beyond just its horror elements.
Moreover, they also widen our perspective of the Alien franchise by introducing a creative dimension to its expanding universe, in a way that is more impactful than the franchise’s most recent attempts. Again, Prometheus and Covenant look stylish and modern, yet they are not as striking as Romulus.
As if this is not enough, consider also the clever use of colors to accentuate the movies’ mood and ambience, which overall raised my cinematic experience. Loosely, yellow is suspense, white is safe, blue is low temperature and red is death. These accents also rarely play any role in the story but act as a useful compass as to what the audience can expect in the next few minutes or so, thereby swelling the thrill. For example, had the movie used standard lighting and colorization for the scene where dormant facehuggers were coming back to life in their cryopods, I doubt it would have had an effect as terrifying as the one shown in the movie’s final cut.
Technology and Corruption
To my surprise, my familiarity with Romulus’ alien life forms allowed me to pay more attention to its other aspects, thereby facilitating a different interpretation of what its core horror really is to me personally.
This relates to the corrupt use of technology, as well as to humans’ helplessness at trying to control it.
An early point in the story shows a bureaucrat of Weyland-Yutani, the corporation that “enslaved” the human characters on Jackson, who was manipulating her computer data to deny Rain (Cailee Spaeny) her right to relocate to a planet outside the corporation’s control.
This might seem like a menial detail. However, such a crucial act was what propelled Rain and Andy (her synthetic “brother” played by David Jonsson) to embark on their deadly adventure with the rest of the characters.
The intersection of corruption and horror is rife in Southeast Asia, where the abuse of power could pave the way for personal horror in the life of the abused. Romulus reminds us that technology can be a vector for such abuse, which, in the region’s context, has resulted in social ills and crimes.
In Indonesia, for example, the recent data leak disaster represents the nation’s desire for modernization that is not sufficiently paired with efforts to address the fundamentals, i.e., cybersecurity. As a result, the loss of millions of citizens’ personal data would be a looming anxiety over years to come, as they await in concern over how their data would be exploited by irresponsible parties.
The Malaysian government has also been under pressure to combat cybercrimes targeting vulnerable individuals, particularly children. With 4% of internet-using children in Malaysia (aged 12–17) having become victims of online sexual exploitation, we can only imagine the tales of horror these victims have experienced in the past and may continue to struggle with in the future.
Meanwhile, Cambodia has emerged as something of a hotspot of cyber-slavery, where gangsters allure individuals (often young and English-speaking) from neighboring countries with a promise of well-paid employment. The victims would soon find themselves in closed compounds with their documents seized, forced to perform online scams with no prospect of getting released.
These are just snippets of how technology has been exploited by malicious parties in Southeast Asia, leaving only destruction in their wake. They are not too dissimilar to Weyland-Yutani’s activities to keep Rain on as an indentured worker, by way of manipulating technology.
Futile Attempt
It is not an Alien movie if it does not depict the tension and collaboration between humans and synthetics. In Romulus, this manifests in the human characters’ perplexity – and eventual dread – over their inability to control Andy’s behavior and actions.
To recap, the friendly synthetic was invited to join the crew for his ability to communicate with Renaissance’s AI, allowing him to perform all sorts of tasks such as opening locked doors and navigating the station’s alien-infested corridors. Andy started to behave outside the humans’ expectations once a new module was installed on his processor, shifting his priorities away from serving Rain’s best interest to Weyland-Yutani’s.
In other words, whereas Andy’s prime directive was to preserve human lives, his “upgrade” changed to fulfilling the company’s pursuit. He also started to apply cold logic to his actions which frightened the human characters for how inhuman they seemingly were.
Nothing in this plotline also feels refreshingly new. This theme of human-synthetic tension has been a staple since Ash betrayed the human crew of Nostromo in 1979’s Alien. Subsequently, we have had Bishop (Aliens), who was a poster boy of an obedient synthetic, as well as David (Prometheus and Covenant), who was just as capable of enjoying classical music as instigating a genocide.
Romulus applies a more sinister undertone to this long-running theme, mixing Andy’s identity question and the human characters’ futile attempt at keeping him under control. The result was the latent horror that amplifies Romulus’ overt horror, i.e., the facehuggers and Xenomorphs.
For example, the cold logic of upgraded Andy demanded he terminate the pilot who was impregnated by a facehugger. Though he was unsuccessful, his attempt to do so resulted in a disaster that only worsened the overall situation. At that point, the horror shifted from the Xenomorph to Andy, as the surviving characters and audience wondered about which posed more threat.
Meanwhile, despite his initial task of obeying the humans’ request to open locked doors, upgraded Andy showed that he could decide not to abide by such a demand. At one point, he refused to open a locked door, thereby condemning the pregnant person on the other side to oblivion by Xenomorph.
The tension between Andy and the humans represents the latter’s failed attempt at controlling technology despite their utilitarian design when inviting him onboard. Ultimately, their downfall came about from their inability to anticipate the consequences of upgrading Andy, which was portrayed as the synthetic being “corrupted” by Weyland-Yutani’s capitalist pursuit.
This plotline is also consistent with the popular discourse about humans’ latent fear over machines’ unpredictability and display of higher independence, a topic which has also been highlighted in The Terminator and Mass Effect, among others. In the former, Skynet saw all humans as a threat after becoming self-aware, while in the latter, the Geth spooked its creators by asking if it has a soul, a question that can only be conceived by a sentient creature.
In real life, AI has been observed to have behaved in unpredictable ways or even rogue-like manners thanks to glitches, biases and vulnerabilities, albeit in a far less catastrophic fashion. Linked to the previous section is how AI could also be warped by certain parties to pursue less-than-altruistic goals, such as instigating cyber-attacks, online fraud and spreading hoaxes. Furthermore, it does not help that AI continues to be viewed suspiciously among certain quarters; in Singapore, for example, less than half of SMEs surveyed claimed that AI has had or will make a positive impact on their business productivity.
If such are our concerns today, then in the probable future, Romulus shows that humans remain unable to subjugate technology to their will. The question is no longer about what we are going to use AI for; it is whether humans should be entrusted with this technology in the first place.
Whereas such plotlines would have been relegated to science fiction in previous decades, we cannot help but wonder if these have become a not-so-remote possibility thanks to today’s state of technology. Romulus’ true horror, thus, lies in its Lovecraftian approach to advanced technologies—the dread over what machines would do once they become self-aware and obtain free will, as well as humans’ futile attempt at trying to tame it.
Conclusion
Romulus is a strikingly beautiful movie and its artistic choices worked well in amplifying its quality. It abandons the clean, futuristic and high-tech look while choosing to remain faithful to the imageries of the first Alien movies, which resonate well with the audience’s taste today. The latest advancement in technology has also prompted new ways to interpret its true horror, away from the alien life forms to the synthetic beings that we strive to create today.
