HOW FEDE ÁLVAREZ FUSED TWO MOVIES TO CREATE HIS IDEAL XENOMORPH STORY, ALIEN: ROMULUS
ALL THE ESSENTIAL INTEL, FROM HOLLYWOOD AND BEYOND
WHICH IS THE better film, James Cameron’s Aliens or Ridley Scott’s original? It’s an impossible debate to resolve and, according to Alien: Romulus writer/director Fede Álvarez, one that should never be had in the first place. “To ask an Alien fan to choose between them is a perverse question,” he insists. “So I thought, ‘How do I do both?’”
The answer is a film that takes place in the 57-year expanse between those first iconic movies, and one Álvarez has deliberately constructed to be a hybrid of the two —not just by blending the monster-in-the-house scares of the original with the frenetic action of its sequel, but by combining the settings and distinct aesthetics of both. Renaissance Station, where most of the film is set, is a bastardised construction made up of an older section, Remus, which has the spartan, sanitised decor of Alien, and a more recent module, Romulus, built with the gloomier, more technologically advanced feel of Cameron’s successor.
“There’s a moment where the characters are walking around areas familiar from the Nostromo,” says Álvarez. “Then they cross through that building and on the other side: boom! You’re in a hallway that looks like Hadley’s Hope [the colony from Aliens].”
The cross-pollination is reinforced by the feel of the film, with the first hour adopting the more deliberate, dread-laden atmosphere of Alien, before the action shifts from Remus to the titular Romulus and starts to lean closer to Aliens in both style and tempo. “Your subconscious is like, ‘Why am I feeling I’m in Aliens again?’ The [mood] is telling you that shit is about to get more actiony and intense.”
That the station’s modules are named after the famous twins from Roman mythology is no accident. Sibling relationships are the core of Álvarez’s story, most notably that of Cailee Spaeny’s Rain and her foster brother Andy (David Jonsson), one of the franchise’s lifelike (and periodically homicidal) synthetics. “When her father was dying, he left Andy to be a kind of caretaker. But Andy is a bit damaged and he’s an old model. So more than a surrogate father, he becomes a younger brother to her. And that was always the heart of the story: this relationship between the t
