2024-08-16 03:01:00
Alien: Romulus 7 points
United States/United Kingdom, 2023
Address: Fede Alvarez
Script: Rodo Sayagues and Fede Alvarez.
Duration: 119 minutes
Interpreters: Cailee Spaney, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu and Ian Holm.
Premiere: Available in theaters.
If there is something the saga shares Alien with the alien creature that occupies the center of its universe, is its practically invulnerable character. A solidity that in the span of 45 years allowed it to go through up and down cycles, going from the most absolute success to resounding commercial failures, without altering its symbolic strength in the field of popular culture. Each of its stages concludes giving the impression that the closure will be definitive, however it always returns. In fact, the premiere of Alien: Romulusdirected by the successful Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarezrepresents the fourth return of a saga that, with this one, already has a total of eight installments of the most diverse kinds.
And Alien: Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997) marked the lowest point of the original saga, after two formidable first installments and a third that represented a fall of several steps, the xenomorph (pseudoscientific name by which the creature is known) managed to return. And in an ultra-popular version. It was in the double delivery of Alien vs. Predator, crossover A galactic film with a comic book soul and a fan’s wet dream, which pitted two of the most beloved aliens in the history of cinema against each other on screen. But if for a first-class product a descent to B-class can be an unrecoverable stumble, This franchise proved that nothing is impossible for it. Under the guidance of his mentor, the British Ridley Scott, the saga returned to the big leagues to go in search of an origin in the diptych Prometheus (2012) + Alien: Covenant (2017), whose approach was not generally well received, although the author considers them valuable contributions.
After having opened and exhausted several narrative lines, with Romulus The saga proposes a very high-risk play: imagine a story that wedges itself between the two most successful installments of the series, Alien, the eighth passenger (Scott, 1979) y Aliens (James Cameron, 1986). That is to say, he avoids all contact with the elements of the chronology that failed to maintain the level of the first two, in order to dare to engage in direct dialogue with those that mark the peaks of this long journey. The daring was successful for several reasons.
From an aesthetic point of view, Alvarez replicates the artistic conception of the original filmrecreating a technological universe that almost half a century ago seemed legitimately futuristic, but that today, after the furious development of digital technology, seems closer to steampunk than anything else. It even dares to flirt in the film’s overture with the imaginary that Scott himself created in the no less mythical Blade Runnerjust three years after Alien, playing with the affinity of these parallel universes.
The great contributions that Romulus comes from the narrative side, trying return the saga to the path of the most popular cinema, in the best senseOn the one hand, it resolutely departs from the religious and grandiloquent profile that Scott gave to Prometheus y Covenant. On the other hand, it appropriates a very classic structure within the most basic horror cinema. Here the protagonists are neither military nor scientists prepared to face a threat, but a group of young people getting into trouble. Thus, Álvarez transfers to space the logic of a story that could easily take place in a haunted cabin and be starred by a small group of university students, even replicating the archetypes that are usually represented in them. A return to the basics that Álvarez knows very well, but carried out with enough intelligence not to reveal the trick and allow the Phoenix to rise once again from its ashes.