One would think after Ridley Scott’s planned prequel of Alien petered out with 2017’s Alien: Covenant, there’d be no where left in space for the final woman standing franchise to go.
However, Don’t Breathe horror-meister Fede Alvarez has proven with Alien: Romulus, opening this coming weekend, that many can still hear you scream in space.
Similar to how Tony Gilroy expanded upon the early roots of Star Wars with Andor and Rogue One, Alvarez thrusts us into a deeper dive of a future proletariat society’s inner workings and how spaceship laborers are pawns in a world where a faceless ‘man’ is poisoning them with science. More specifically, somebody is hatching this virus, err aliens which are devouring humans.
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But beyond story, Alvarez has some jaw-dropping visuals we’ve never seen before in previous Alien movies — including architect Scott’s.
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The Uruguayan filmmaker tells us on the latest episode of Crew Call about his inspirations here in Romulus: “I hope people connect with it because it’s such a third world story. That’s where I’m from. If you’re born in the third world, that’s your reality for good, for bad, you’re always going to do good when you grow up.”
“So, the narrative of young people that are born in the place that they feel is the wrong place, where things feel like they’re collapsing around them, and they just want to get out of there, they should look at their parents and look, ‘I don’t want to end up like them.’ That’s a very third world reality.”
Alvarez also shares that he pitched his version of Alien to then Scott Free President Michael Schaefer when Neill Blomkamp’s version fell apart. That take would have seen the return of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, Michael Biehn’s Hicks, an older Newt against new Xenomorphs in a jungle setting with mercenary factions and vicious new synthetic androids. Alvarez’s installment would take place between the original 1979 Scott movie and James Cameron’s 1986 part two. The gist? A friendship between a human and synthetic, played respectively by Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson. Everyone knows synthetics always spell trouble with a capital ‘T’ in an Alien movie and Alvarez’s m.o. was to play on audiences’ prejudices against such androids. Previously, Michael Fassbender played the latest cryptic synthetic in Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
We also talk to Alvarez, who once auditioned Spaeny for a previous movie, about the actress’ onscreen je ne sais quoi. Of late, she’s on a hot streak with Priscilla, Civil War and the upcoming Rian Johnson Knives Out mystery, Wake Up Dead Man, that rivals that of Florence Pugh pre-Covid with such titles as Fighting With My Family, Midsommar, Little Woman and Black Widow.
Alien Romulus is head toward a $75M global opening this weekend at the box office.
Our chat is below: