Alien: Romulus
A group of young people (Cailee Spaeny, Isabela Merced, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu), stuck on a sunless mining colony on a different planet, hatch an ambitious plan to steal a ship and leave. In space they must fight for survival.
I’ll just get my critiques out of the way first. The cast is great but struggles with a pretty bland script, and it was perhaps a mistake making them all roughly the same age. There are no real stand-out characters or particularly interesting interactions between them and they all have to bounce off the one unique character among them - an android.
More broadly the screenplay is also pretty flimsy at times, enough for it to be a sore point. It seems happy to do some paint-by-numbers storytelling and some scenes don’t really seem to add much to the plot or towards character development, it’s just there for the thrill. Well that’s OK but it’s also not always that thrilling.
Otherwise though the good stuff is really good. There’s a strong reliance on practical effects that delicately falls back on CGI when needed. This makes Romulus something new, but also something really familiar to the old Alien movies (and perhaps older sci-fi in general). The set design is so good, weathered and tactile kind of like Star Wars but more grounded in some sort of useful reality. It really connects the characters to their environment and as an audience makes you feel involved too. At some points the exposition for how stuff works and what they are trying to do is achieved purely through shots of the ship and its controls - nobody has to explain anything.
Perhaps this is a back-handed compliment but there wasn’t enough of the opening world they lived in, the mining colony. A dystopian sci-fi city/planet teeming with miserable life and detail. It was so well rendered that when they leave (quite early in the film), I wasn’t ready to go and wanted to explore it more.
Alien: Romulus is by no means perfect but its hands-on approach to film-making, great world-building and artful cinematography have to be applauded.