Foreigner has been Disney-fied. It hasn’t been toned down or toned down for younger audiences. It has instead been tweaked and adapted by the studio to appease executives, under the clear, deeply misguided mandate of camouflaging a product “for the fans” in service of the company. That mandate includes, but isn’t limited to: 1. inclusion of at least one recognizable character or characters; 2. if the actor responsible for that character is deceased, a tacky CGI replica is substituted in their place. (Nobody dies at Disney, and if they do, hopefully they’ll keep working long after they’ve decomposed.) Let’s add: 3. catchphrases and callbacks, whether unmotivated or illogical, are de rigueur; 4. all of the above is doctrine because market research shows they increase the CinemaScore by half a note or more.
It is a grim, inhospitable environment where corporate interests can give way to horrific monstrosities, and those just trying to escape the stranglehold of capitalism do their best to survive. In a way, Fede Alvarez’ Alien: Romulus is perhaps the Foreigner Film so far. It is nothing new to play in other people’s sandboxes, the evil Dead Helmer is, at first glance, an encouraging addition to the sci-fi horror franchise. Like the original, 2017 Alien: Covenant––an underrated highlight of these films––was at its peak when it combined its headier ideas with gleefully malicious cynicism toward its human subjects. Alvarez has the same kind of evil streak in him, and much of Romulus’ The mandatory fanservice smells of carefully selected battles to start with the tricky stuff.
Alien: RomulusThe objectives are simple, the script flows smoothly. Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her adopted, obsolete android brother Andy (David Jonsson) are desperate to escape their mining colony and are recruited to loot a nearby abandoned space station and facilitate the interstellar exodus. This abandoned post is on a collision course with the colony’s asteroid belt, and so the clock is ticking on their mission as they must deal with more face-hugging and chest-bursting than they bargained for. It’s a gripping story. The how and why of it all isn’t given away; Alvarez is obviously most interested in the carnage of the what. Lacking in thematic subtlety or dimensionality outside of Rain and Andy, Alien: Romulus compensates with a killer instinct that he uses with cringe-inducing glee. The ensemble doesn’t feature a Yaphet Kotto, a Bill Paxton or a Michael Wincott, and that kind of charisma is sorely missed, but Spaeny is an impressive anchor amid a handful of inventive scenes – one of which suggests that Fede Alvarez has probably seen the 1992 film (and is clearly enjoying it). sneakers.
If you dare to develop innovations instead of adapting them, Romulus manages to deliver some of the series’ most jarring images. But those pesky corporate directives can’t be ignored. Innovation or not, you have to jingle keys to cater to a diehard segment of the audience (that may not even exist). The result is the forced return of an old character, one of the most egregious digital resurrections of an actor from a studio with a monstrous track record in this regard. It’s an obvious decision from above, made all the more obvious when you consider how many narrative ways around it there are, and in doing so, scores an early own goal that plagues an otherwise unencumbered narrative.
The downside of this character for the film also depends on how much you get from angry Xenomorphs. Despite this unfortunate pitfall for a consistently entertaining Foreigner film, Fede Alvarez’s evil concoctions are worthy deviations from a directive that is otherwise, in the words of Weyland and Yutani, “what’s best for the company.”
Alien: Romulus opens on Friday, August 16th.
