NO RIPLEY, BELIEVE IT OR NOT
Back in 1979, when director Ridley Scott first sprang his sci-fi horror film on an unsuspecting public, no one could know that eventually it would spawn a cottage industry, or as much a cottage industry as ever has existed in Hollywood, save maybe for “Star Wars.”
The first film received a mixed reaction from critics on release, but in the years that followed, a host of sequels did, too. Still, the original eventually was embraced by sci-fi and horror fans as a modern classic and even was chosen to be preserved by the National Film Registry in 2002.
The late film critic Roger Ebert, in his review, noted that the actors in Alien were older than was typical in the science fiction genre and that made the characters more convincing.
Now we have yet another sequel. “Romulus,” the title of which refers to a chamber on a space freighter, had to be entertaining to justify the enormous expense of its astonishing special effects but also carry the saga forward. And it does that, but with mixed success.
To begin with, when a studio production with an “Alien” pedigree is populated with largely unknown actors, you know where the money was spent. It wasn’t on salaries to be sure.
In that vein, “Romulus” borrows heavily from the plots of so many young adult horror films where the “call is coming from inside the house.” I mean, you mix a cast of young actors with a predator, alien or human, and you immediately know where the story is going. Because, thanks to movie villains like Freddy Krueger, we’ve seen it all before.
The only question is, how many of them will die?
The first “Alien” movie killed off everyone but Science Officer Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, and her roles in subsequent iterations made her a star.
There’s no such guarantee among the actors in this version, because there’s very little character development. They’re human fodder for the alien creature. But that’s okay because spectacle is everything.
One of the smartest things the screenwriters did was to give the young crew an added dimension of peril. Their spaceship, populated by hundreds of skittering face-huggers, is on a trajectory to collide with the rings of what I took to be Saturn.
So even if the crew, shrinking in number, manages to thwart the alien creatures, they still have to avoid being smashed to bits on a rocky carpet of space flotsam. Talk about a time crunch!
“Romulus” is a worthy addition to the Alien franchise, but it remains to be seen if the moviegoing public will continue to support a narrative with the beating heart, not of Ripley, but repetition.