It’s back to basics for the Alien film franchise: Alien: Romulus hits theatres worldwide this week and director Fede Alvarez is hoping to follow in the footsteps of Ridley Scott, who launched the saga in 1979.
In an interview with AFP, Alvarez explained how he was forever marked by the series’ early chapters as a kid growing up in Uruguay.
After Scott, James Cameron (Aliens, 1986), David Fincher (Alien 3, 1992) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Alien Resurrection, 1997), Disney has entrusted this instalment to Alvarez, who is far less known.
Scott rebooted the franchise in the 2010s with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, and is still one of the producers.
Alvarez, whose previous films include Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe — deems the first two Alien instalments as “fundamental” to his work and for cinema in general.
Romulus— which takes place almost entirely within the confines of a drifting spaceship — is set at the time of the first films, when teams of space travellers discover, in deadly fashion, the existence of xenomorphs, formidable extraterrestrials.
“There’s a scene in the 1986 film where we see a bunch of children and young people running around a space station. I thought, ‘What is it going to be like for these kids when they grow up?’,” wonders the director, who is now based in Hollywood.
The film is also meant to bring back the gore and horror of the first film.
Alvarez faithfully reproduces the familiar motifs and scenes, including the emblematic hatching of the parasitic alien in the body of its human host.
The 46-year-old filmmaker also revisits the visual style of Scott, whom he calls “one of the great masters of the genre”.
“It’s not so much a desire to go back, but simply the fact that as a filmmaker, I want to practice as I learned to do,” he explains, particularly his decision to film without “too many green screens” — a technique allowing visual effects to be added in post-production.
Alvarez immersed himself in the “futurism of the 1980s”, with mythical specimens of Alien controlled by teams of puppeteers.
“Technically, it’s a very ambitious film,” he says. “Generating real emotion in people is the most difficult thing there is.”
And “when you decide to see this film, you know more or less what you want to expose yourself to. It’s like when you go on a roller coaster,” he explains, adding: “I like having that effect on people.”
In the tradition of Alien, which starred a young Sigourney Weaver as the hero Ellen Ripley, this film features Cailee Spaeny, who earned a Golden Globe nomination for her portrayal of Elvis Presley’s wife in the 2023 biopic Priscilla.
In Romulus, she plays an orphan, reduced to the state of quasi-slave on a sunless corner of the planet managed in a Blade Runner-style atmosphere by the private conglomerate Weyland-Yutani, which mines a toxic mineral there.
She doesn’t hesitate when a group of young rebels suggest that she try to escape to more hospitable skies.
The plan? Seize a spaceship that they think is abandoned, but really is inhabited by xenomorphs who have brutally murdered the crew.