MAJOR SPOILERS FOR ALIEN: ROMULUS BELOW. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK
Alien: Romulus should be a victory for everyone involved in the production. Fede Alvarez, director of the 2013 Evil Dead remake and Don’t Breath, gets to cement his status as one of horror’s top directors. Sir Ridley Scott, for all the complaints about Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, clearly knows how to steward this Alien franchise. The performances from Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson should make stars out of them.
Alien: Romulus is a good entry in the storied science fiction horror series (The Beat positively reviewed it). Alvarez and frequent collaborator Rodo Sayagues created a love letter to all of the movies in this series. The film brings an environmentalist angle to the themes of ‘capitalism gone amuck’ that drive the series. Once again it’s lower class workers totally at the mercy of a corporate entity uncaring about their well-being as long as it makes them money.
It’s also a visually stunning film. Alvarez always exceeded at moody visuals and crafting tense scenes, which makes him a perfect fit for an Alien film. Romulus though allows him to explore moments of genuine wonder. When the spaceship Corbelan rises above a planet and heroine Rain Carradine (Spaeny) sees a sun for the first time after living in darkness her whole life, it’s a moment of beauty. The icy rings that surround the Jackson’s Star colony look incredible as they destroy whatever comes into contact with them.
Alvarez and his production design team took great pains to make the visuals follow the “cassette futurism” of the original and James Cameron’s sequel. There’s a junky, plastic, and analog quality to the technology in this film, set between Alien and Aliens, befitting the characters lower class background. It’s a far cry from the high definition aesthetic beauty of the scientists and terra formers of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
Additionally, Alvarez has used social media to highlight the various practical effects seen in the film. Videos of Alvarez controlling RC facehuggers running around wildly or animatronic xenomorphs on camera rigs so that they move with lightning speed have made the rounds. When the chestburster erupts from Aileen Wu’s doomed pilot Navarro, it’s a truly gruesome affair.
All of the above, then, makes the decision to create of a deep fake digital zombie in this film such an odd, discordant choice. About half an hour into the film, we meet the station’s android science officer Rook. Rook is digitally created to look like the late Sir Ian Holm, who famously played Ash in the original film. Rook is in the film for maybe ten minutes, but in all of those 10 minutes he looks like a character from an Alien video game.
While meant to be a tribute to the actor, it only highlights how wrong this choice was to begin with. Sir Ian Holm was one of the all time great character actors. He could dissolve into a role completely and bring his characters to life in surprising ways. Holm’s performance as Ash is one of the greatest in any of the movies.
Holm builds Ash as a character with layers upon layers of deception; deceiving the Nostromo crew that he’s human, that he’s on their side, and of course, that he can contain this creature. Ash is the true villain of Alien, not the monster, a true representation of the banality of evil. He constantly observes the other characters and eventually the creature he’s been sent to capture. When the film reveals he’s a robot, the revelation still retains the ability to shock new viewers even today. This a performance that constantly reveals new things over multiple viewings.
Bringing a late actor back as a digital zombie never works. While there’s precedent in the series for duplicates of robots, those are played by their original actors. No amount of digital trickery can account for an actor’s choice made in the moment or how they react to the other actors around them. There’s a psychology to Ash that this shade can’t possess even if there is a stand-in doing actual acting.
With all of the promotion of practical effects, why not use make up or special effects to recreate the role if it was so necessary? There’s precedence with make-up work as well. Effects wizard Rick Baker turned Martin Landau into the long dead Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood. Why not go the route taken in Alien 3 with an animatronic version of the character, especially since the character is mostly melted anyways?
Why use Holm at all? Why not let Jonsson, whose performance as Andy is truly one of the film’s highlights, do double duty? His transformation from bumbling, damaged fool into cold, calculating observer after an upgrade is a phenomenal piece of physical acting. If anyone has the chops to pull off both the sympathetic Andy and a literal corporate drone, it’s him. For a film that pays tribute to every film in the franchise, this would have been a great nod to the Walter/David dynamic in Alien: Covenant.
It should be said that this was a choice made by Alvarez, approved by Scott, and given the blessing of Holm’s family. There’s a particular logic behind resurrecting Ash for this film given that it takes place between Alien and Aliens. Ash, along with HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey and the Terminator, continues to be a symbol of our fears of technology turning against us. Once again, viewers have an Alien movie where capitalistic greed outweighs the common good.
But Alien: Romulus is meant to be a new way forward for this long running franchise. Resurrecting a dead actor through digital means to provide a bit of fan service does both the film and the craft of acting a disservice. It never works in the multiple times it has worked in Star Wars. This film resurrects the scares of the original and that’s all it needed to do.
