As the old tagline goes – in space, no one can here you scream.
But in the case of “Alien: Romulus,” everyone can hear you buy a ticket at the movie theater. The latest installment in the franchise that began with Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece racked up an impressive $41 million at the domestic box office over the weekend and already cleared $100 million globally. Clearly, there is still life in this franchise. And that is thanks largely to cowriter and director Fede Álvarez injecting new (acid) blood into the franchise.
Not that Álvarez’s “Alien,” which follows a group of younger characters (led by Cailee Spaeny) who are attempting to leave their dull lives on a mining planet by liberating some cryo-tubes and fuel cells from a derelict space station (only to find an altogether unpleasant lifeform living on said space station), was ever a sure thing.
Mild spoilers for “Alien: Romulus” follow.
Álvarez said that after “Don’t Breathe,” his 2016 home invasion thriller, he got a meeting with Scott Free, Scott’s production company. “At that point, I had made two movies and both had worked really well. And someone said, ‘You get to that point, you can really do whatever you want. If you could do anything, what would you do?’” Álvarez remembered. He quickly replied: “Well, I would do ‘Alien.’ It’s been the one I have always wanted to do. No questions asked.” At the time, however, Scott was prepping “Alien: Covenant,” part of a planned trilogy of prequel films that began with “Prometheus.”
Sill, someone from Scott Free pressed Álvarez on what his take would be. “And I told him, from the top of my head, what I wanted to see as a fan, which is the guiding principle as a director — what you want to make is what I want to see,” Álvarez told TheWrap. Still, that pitch “hung in the air” over the year.
After Disney purchased the 21st Century assets from Fox in 2019, “Alien” became a priority once again. Steve Asbell, president of production at 20th Century, called Álvarez and asked him some questions: “Is it true that you once pitched an ‘Alien’ movie?” and then, “Can I hear it?” the filmmaker recalled. “I told him what I had in mind. And he asked me if I want to write and direct it. And I was like, ‘Yeah, f–k yeah.’ And here we are.”
Essential to Álvarez’s pitch — and something that carried through to the final movie — was the relationship between Rain (Spaeny) and her surrogate brother Andy (David Jonsson), an android that Rain’s father programmed to be her surrogate brother. “How that relationship was going to work when you put them under the pressure of this ‘Alien’ movie, that was always the big idea that I didn’t want to show or talk about,” he explained. He didn’t want to put any of the characters’ dynamics in the trailer, either; he wanted it to be something that audiences discover.
Recently, Álvarez ran across the one-pager that he wrote for Ridley. He said that he loved it at the time and was amazed that it was “pretty faithful” to the movie that is now in theaters.
He doesn’t remember if it was in that one-pager or not, but another big idea that Álvarez had at the beginning that still remains is the idea that the movie will serve as a bridge between the first “Alien” and James Cameron’s sequel “Aliens.” The movie starts with a science crew retrieving the alien creature from the first film, now fossilized in a meteorite. And the space station Renaissance has two halves — Remus and Romulus. Remus is very much in the aesthetic of “Alien,” while “Romulus” feels very “Aliens” (the music even changes).
“I did know that it needed to look like the original films. That retro-futurism was something that I was interested in, that I didn’t want holographic s–t floating around or anything like that,” Álvarez added. He wanted chunky square monitors, clicky keyboards and “all this stuff that warms our hearts.” But he stressed that “it’s not just for us who are of that generation that grew up with those movies.” “It’s also to give it to the new audience that will discover those things that they don’t see all time and they will love it,” he said. He compares it to watching Quentin Tarantino movies in the 1990s with his father saying, “What’s new with this?” His father knew all of the exploitation movies from the 1970s that Tarantino was riffing on, but for Álvarez, as he said, “It’s all new to me.” He had no knowledge of those earlier movies, but Tarantino sparked an interest.
“I think once in a while, it’s good for directors to bring back the passion of the cinema they loved when they were teenagers and bring it to your new audience. And I’m pretty confident it’s going to be a new audience that finds all this as fascinating as we do, from a different perspective,” the director said.
But did Álvarez feel guilty for making a new “Alien” movie when the trilogy Scott had wanted to make with the “Prometheus” films has seemingly stalled out? “I did. And originally, my first intention, which we might figure out a way to do if we get to make another after this, is to merge them,” Álvarez noted (and, truth be told, there is a surprising amount of “Prometheus” nestled within “Alien: Romulus”). “I think that’s what I want to see. I never liked the idea that something got suspended and some stories were not really finished. And I think he really wants to also find a conclusion to some of the stuff he started with ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Covenant.’ But I’m one that wants to make sure that everything builds up to one big finale.”
As to whether or not we’ll see that big finale, well, we’ll have to wait to see what the second weekend’s numbers are…
“Alien: Romulus” is in theaters now.