Fede Álvarez has a question for Total Film: “Which do you prefer, Alien or Aliens?”But before TF can limit itself to responding with a well-rehearsed discourse (“Objectively?Or are they impeccable masterpieces. Subjectively? Aliens all day, honey!”), Álvarez shows that this is a speculation that makes sense. “I think it’s a perverse question,” the outspoken Uruguayan filmmaker said on Zoom last April. “You’ll never face that choice. “
Alien: Romulus is your answer to this “evil question” of apples and oranges. He describes the film as “a multi-layered amalgamation of extraterrestrial beings and extraterrestrial beings,” everything from the environmental design to the speed and how Giger’s specific criteria creature behaves. go back the bestiary used on Romulus exists on a spectrum from shadow to smoldering. From the emotions of Alien to the muscular and adrenalized emotions of Aliens.
“Every day we were like, ‘What movie are we going to do today?'” says star Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla, Civil War), who has the unenviable task of following Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley as the new face of the series, while the xeno-lead killer has been in a 57-year-old nonviolent hypersleep for twenty years. Are we extraterrestrial beings or extraterrestrial beings?What are we going to channel today?’ Because they have a very different tone. “
The idea of combining two outstanding and divergent classics is promoted to the point that it is unexpected that no one else has the idea of doing so in a maximum of 40 years. The following sequels possibly have a lot to recommend, but it’s hard to argue with the fact that the Alien videos peaked with the first two installments. And while the Ridley Scott-directed prequels are overly ambitious, the abandonment of interstellar horror toward more philosophical, horror-tinged sci-fi epics has left enough room for a stripped-down vision. -below return to Alien in its maximum primitive form.
This article was first published in Total Film 353 magazine. You can purchase a copy here.
“That’s what I’m missing, in a way,” says Alvarez, who has an impressive way of reinventing horror classics, having directed 2013’s cruel Evil Dead remake. Not that there’s rarely much horror in Prometheus and Covenant, but they are not horror movies. The first, above all, is a natural horror film. As Ridley says, he sought it out. making The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in space. That’s what he was looking for: to see the xenomorph again, but in the framework of an authentic horror film. ”
Following the good fortune of his horror mystery Don’t Breathe, Alvarez found himself informally presenting that vision to Scott’s production company, Scott Free, in 2017, at a town hall meeting with the legendary filmmaker. Drawn to the concept of an Alien movie. With a new team of xenovictims on standby, Scott and 20th Century Studios recruited Alvarez and their mutual collaborator Rodo Sayagues to begin work on the script for Romulo several years later, in October 2021.
On his mood board, the writing procedure was a photo of Spaeny, who would go on to play Rain Carradine. Speaking from her Los Angeles home, where framed movie posters adorn the walls, adding an Alien quad bike across the street from the couch. Spaeny recalls an early, formative experience with Scott’s classic. “I have an early memory of what happened in space on a Saturday morning, and my dad looked at it and I thought, ‘Oh, yeah. What is it about?'”
I wanted to see the xenomorph again, but within the framework of a real horror movie.
Spaeny said, widening his smile. And then came the Chestburster scene, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, I can’t see this. ‘It’s very traumatic. But then I slowly came back and took a look. . . Spaeny’s experience largely mirrors that of his co-stars, most of whom (prepare to feel like the parched shell of a Space Jockey) weren’t born when the fourth installment was released. , Alien: Resurrection, hit theaters in 1997, so we’re catching up on the series several years later. For Alvarez, the concept of centering the story on the show’s twenty-something first team came from one of the first scenes in the special edition of Aliens in which Hadley’s Hope is seen before fall, with youngsters playing in the hallways and riding Weyland-Yutani tricycles.
“I thought, ‘Wow, what would it be like for those kids to grow up in a terraforming colony that still wishes 50 years were habitable?’You will probably take on the same task as your parents. Álvarez asks. Maybe it’s because I’m from Uruguay and the idea of growing up in a position where you know how far you can go, and the things that happen there, and the things that will never get there. been in contact with those characters. “
There is a lack of hope in Jackson’s Star, a “shaken and cooked” mining colony in Weyland-Yutani, wrapped in a perpetual night at the far end of the planet, because there is (yet) no environment that eliminates solar radiation. In his entire life, Rain, 20, has never noticed the light of the herbs. “We want to give that back to the workers,” Spaeny says. We look for the core of the construction, where the children come from, to be as authentic as possible. “
Rain’s ex-boyfriend, Tyler (Archie Renaux) and Bjorn (Spike Fearn), work in the mines and have a better explanation for why than giving up their useless lives. A lifeline arrives in the form of a dejected Weyland-Yutani space station, the Renaissance, which orbits close to Jackson’s star, offering the possibility of an outlet for any enterprising scavenger. Key to this project is Bjorn’s sister Navarro (Aileen Wu), the technically talented pilot of his rusty bucket sent Corbelan IV, and Tyler’s “beloved” sister, Kay (Isabela Merced).
“They’re looking to make their future a little better than it seems on their home planet,” says Merced, who directed James Gunn’s Superman (where she will appear as Hawkgirl) and the second season of The Last. of Us will arrive in 2025. “Everyone has this desperation to find a better place. It makes it even more provocative and sad when the movie ends like all the Alien movies end. . . “
Rain and his surrogate brother Andy, also known as ND-255, are also along for the ride. Andy, an “artificial person,” as Bishop would say, is the closest thing to Rain’s circle of relatives after the death of his parents. Their brotherly bond, and the question of whether there can be true familial love between a human and an android, is the emotional core of the film according to Álvarez, and is tested in the most excessive cases during the face-hug, outburst of the chest. The hell of the pharyngeal jaws inevitably breaks loose aboard the Renaissance. “In the first case, Ripley clearly does not accept synthetics,” says Spaeny. “And it’s the other way around, my character does everything he can to protect [Andy], because that’s his only family circle. “
“We seek to give it back to the workers. . . We wanted the center to be authentic”
“It’s pretty good, actually,” adds David Jonsson, the Rye Lane and Industry star who makes his studio debut with Romulus. “It’s a real first [for the series]. It adds a coming-of-age story. With Alien, you meet space, you meet aliens, and you have to kill them or they’ll kill you. Whereas with this glorious brother and sister to sister relationship “There’s a lot to play for. “
Like Alien’s Ash, Andy is a few transistors away from a circuit board. In a first scene seen through TF, the synthesizer freezes in the middle of a facehugger attack, making it both a disadvantage and an advantage. Jonsson first auditioned for a “smaller role” before he was introduced to the role of Andy, and he didn’t take the call of duty lightly. “I’m not going to lie to you, man. It’s intimidating,” says Jonsson, who follows Ian Holm (Alien), Lance Henriksen (Aliens and Alien3), Winona Ryder (Alien: Resurrection) and Michael. Fassbender (Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) as the last artificial in the series. “It feels like we have status on the shoulders of giants. But I understand why I’m here. There’s a real scoop with my artificial. All those actors are brilliant at focusing on the smallest details, and I think Fede really gave me “The opportunity to do it and I hope it comes to fruition. “
Being on the shoulders of giants may not apply better to Spaeny, for whom Ripley was of great importance. “I repeated its functionality for months. I’m hopeful that something will leak out,” Spaeny says. “But I was never intimidated. This role is not written for a woman, so there is genuine freedom. And because Sigourney injected herself completely into it, it allows any other woman who enters it that honesty of never feeling as strange as the weight or tension of betting on a female protagonist.
Spaeny allowed himself to channel his inner Ripley in at least one scene: the moment of the alien homage seen in the film’s first trailer in which Rain descends from a forklift while charging a proto-gun pulse. You have to crouch. You just say, “Okay. Get those leaf blowers ready!I’m going to achieve that goal as slowly as possible,” he says with a laugh. “I don’t feel so good, but it certainly looks good!”
Filming from March to early July 2023 at Budapest’s Origo studios, in the same colossal settings as Dune, Poor Things and Blade Runner 2049, Álvarez had an express vision of how to make Alien: Romulus, a vision that had no compatibility. necessarily with the way studio films are made today. “As a director, you have to choose your battles, and those are the battles he chose to fight,” Spaeny says. “It was, ‘I need it to be as practical as possible. I need to film in chronological order. And I need the same craftsmen, artists and puppeteers from previous films. ‘”
“We did everything we could to create a world that excited me,” says Álvarez, the first volley of a monologue of barely 10 minutes, such is his fondness for the pragmatic production of the film, starting with the length of the film. interconnected sets. ” My films are a kind of theme park for actors,” he explains. “Because I try to create as many sets as possible, [attached] together, so you can walk through them for a long time, and there are no blue screens. Everything is a real delight for the actors. I hope this translates into the delight of the audience.
Alongside production designer Naaman Marshall, Alvarez envisioned a sophisticated transition between the distinctive aesthetics of Alien and Aliens (from the used retrofuture of Nostromo to the bloodless industrialism of Hadley’s Hope) as the film moves between the dual structures that make up the set. Renaissance Space Station: Romulus and Remus. And speaking of the gigantic Renaissance, even this one was built for real. “We asked Ian Hunter, who worked on Total Recall and Interstellar, to build all the spaceships,” Alvarez smiles. “He is one of the last wonderful miniature masters. What you see in the trailer is an ILM shot, but hand-built by Ian Hunter, digitized and turned into a CG element. So it still has that touch of homemade texture. “
Get ready for Alien: Romulus with our guide on how to watch Alien videos in order.
But nowhere is Alvarez’s commitment to “being practical whenever possible” more evident than in the film’s menagerie of acid-blooded animals, where the director states that “all the creatures were built and painted. ” “Edgy Ninja” allowing for a fully CG xeno, Alvarez assembled a dream team of collaborators, adding Shane Mahan and Alec Gillis, special effects veterans who worked on Aliens earlier in their careers. To handle all the paints at a reduced price, Alvarez split the paints: Mahan’s Legacy Effects was responsible for all the xenomorph-related issues, Gillis’s Studio Gillis painted the Chestburster and Egg effects, and Richard Taylor’s Studio Gillis painted the Chestburster and Egg effects. The Weta Workshop team was responsible for the design of the facehuggers and the manufacturing of the weapons.
“We had an R. C. that hugged the face and you could drive,” Alvarez recalls with a smile. “I can just scare other people away. You’d see it coming and it seems so genuine: it was the scariest of all time. [laughs] We also had an animatronic xenomorph, Shane built the Queen on extraterrestrial beings and said, half-jokingly, “This time we’ll get it right because for all those years, he’s been thinking about the things he could have done. “better with the Queen and the fact that it didn’t work. “
Admitting that “it’s a lot less difficult to just throw a tennis ball, and other people can’t say it’s CGI,” Alvarez, who has a background in visual effects and had no qualms about employing CGI where he would get a better shot. – insisted on the practice of “close interactions” where “nothing beats the genuine. “The animatronic generation has also evolved exponentially since the mid-’80s, meaning that the mechanical xenomorph “can do a lot of things, it can move quickly,” according to Alvarez, who also hints at invisible creatures to come.
“There are other things I can’t tell you about because it would be a spoiler, and in fact, that’s what I’m most proud of,” he jokes. “There’s something about the film that, even today, is the best. I’ve noticed it and it’s a component of creature effects. Every time I see it in the movie, at most it makes you think it’s CG because it’s so available. But this is not the case. It is one hundred percent practical. “
“You can definitely say goodbye to a 12A. If you try it to scare people, then you scare them. “
Sometimes the answers were pleasantly old-school. “We also had a guy in a suit,” Álvarez says proudly. “You know, the guy in the suit works perfectly well and we needed him. There was even a time when we had a little creature that we needed to do something. I thought it would be wonderful for a stop-motion animation, and we brought in Phil Tippett to do it and Phil was excited to do it. “
When CGI was mandatory “for scope reasons,” shots were painstakingly designed to be consistent with the film’s tangible special effects. “We made sure that the CG was constructed in a way that was practical, so that the creatures moved more like an animatronic creature than a CG creature,” Alvarez notes. The director insists that it is necessary to go “further” in this way, even at the cost of a much more complicated and technical filming, in the service of a delight in which the audience’s immersion is never broken.
“When you watch the movie, you deserve to never wake up from the dream,” says Álvarez. “You deserve to be in a spaceship, surrounded by these creatures, and for everything to feel real, and for there to be nothing that takes you away from it and makes you think, ‘This is going to have to be fake. ‘ That’s definitely the goal. “
For the cast, the presence of facehuggers, epef breakers, and xenomorphs in global settings might not have helped lessen their tension levels, but it did result in a much more visceral and faster shoot. “Fede insisted that we feel the whole spectrum of fear,” Merced recalls. “Actually, I don’t think the feeling of seeing a xenomorph in the user and up close like that has ever disappeared. It surprised you every time and sent shivers down your spine. The main points are so incredible. “
“In my opinion, when you look at Jurassic Park, Alien or Tremors, that tangible puppet in there brings the movie to life,” says Spaeny. “And maybe it’s just me, from an actor’s point of view. But I hope that enthusiasts literally understand why Fede fought for this and that this makes a difference. “
Alvarez also returned to the Alien playbook in another very important aspect: the design of the xenomorph, which is almost entirely consistent with H. R. ‘s iconic biomechanical vision. Giger. Even the bulbous head that James Cameron got rid of in Aliens has been recovered. “It’s pretty faithful,” Alvarez says. We are looking to return the designs to the original concept. We are embracing the biomechanical facets of creatures that were once abandoned. There’s something about it that I find desirable and scarier than if it were just a biological creature.
In addition to “seeking to really embrace the original concepts as much as possible,” Álvarez sought to anchor the violence in a scene worthy of a trendy horror film. Take for example the film’s extremely twisted Chestburster scene, which Alvarez compares to the most violent segment on the planet. The Earth was never broadcast. “It’s at most a nature documentary,” he says of a series that required nine puppeteers.
“While we were watching it on set, we were joking and trying to tell it like Attenborough would say. ‘The creature comes out slowly. It’s because of the mother’s smell. . . ‘ The creature rarely looks very hard to scare. The creature is trying to get out of This dick, it turns out to be a person. It’s almost like it’s more realistic in a way, but without betraying all the beautiful things in the original drawings.
Here’s our selection of videos and exhibits to watch ahead of Alien: Romulus.
“There are actually express sequences in this movie that will scare some kids who sneak into the movie for the rest of their lives,” says Merced, who was able to watch one of the sequences up close and private. . sequences. ” You can definitely say goodbye to a 12A,” Jonsson adds with a laugh. “The space in between with Fede is simply not his style. If you’re looking to scare people, then you’re scaring them. “
“He doesn’t know how not to put that spin on it,” Spaeny notes, referring to Don’t Breathe and its (literally) visceral reimagining of Evil Dead. “It’s just his instinct. He’s waiting to do anything weird and twisted. And you know he understood it when he was about to say, ‘Shall we do this?’ That’s when you know, ‘Okay, Fede is in his ideal position. ‘”
For Alvarez, the noble goal of Alien: Romulus is to reflect the effect that the original film, and specifically the Chestburster series, had on unsuspecting audiences in 1979, a difficult task in an era when unimaginable horrors are part of everyday life. . ” When you’re young, you feel so envious of those stories. You say, ‘Oh man, I wish I was there on the day that no one expected it and the theater went crazy,'” Alvarez says. “So you have to make sure that he keeps that promise, that other people are saying similar things to his friends, like, ‘Ugh, that scene, man. I was there when that happened. I saw it. ‘”
Part of the mystique of Alien has been its allusions to a larger mythology, adding the mysterious Space Jockey and his abandoned shipment, which remained unexplained. . . until Prometheus and the Covenant provided answers that no one else didn’t really understand, let alone want. Perhaps rightly, Alvarez says that “there is no time to live too much of the philosophy of this film. The rhythm is very different. When you’re running for your life in this very raw, survival horror way, you just don’t have time to go through it. “”, before acknowledging that there will be biological “connections” to each Alien movie, and even nods to stories from the expanded universe, adding comics, books, and games. “It’s there for the public that seeks it. “
The film’s subname itself is the clearest indicator that more than just a scary device is in store. In connection with “Weyland-Yutani’s obsession with imperialist iconography”, it refers to the myth of the creation of Rome through Romulus and Remus – brothers and sisters suckled through a she-wolf before Romulus committed fratricide on his brother twin. “That’s one of my favourite portions of the movie, the mystery of ‘What’s beyond being chased through a creature?'” Alvarez says enigmatically, revealing that the Renaissance is a studies station where xeno-experiments were taking place, and that the name is “directly similar to anything Weyland-Yutani is doing in the tale this time”.
All of this makes an Alien movie familiar while also having something noticeably different to offer. “It’s an absolutely new vision, really, absolutely new, to the point that it’s a little scary,” says Jonsson. although it is a tribute to the original,” adds Merced, “I feel that Fede, as a fan, knew that he was looking to see new things and that he was looking to be the one to introduce them to the world of Alien. “
But as Spaeny says, Rómulo is above all a love letter to the two decisive parts of the series. “It was really fun, chronologically, to put our story between one and two,” the star says with a smile. As a fan, you can connect the dots. So I hope other people can watch Alien, then Alien: Romulus, then Aliens. And it will be satisfying. ” The query “Would you rather?” Things may soon be much more complicated.
Alien: Romulus hits theaters on August 16, 2024. In the meantime, why not stop by and see one of the Alien movies?
I’m Deputy Editor of Total Film Magazine and oversee the articles segment of each issue, where you can read exclusive, in-depth interviews and see close-up shots of the biggest films. In the past I was editor-in-chief of the SFX Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Movie Bible. You’ll find my call in news, reviews, and articles covering all kinds of movies, from the latest French arthouse film to Hollywood’s biggest blockbuster. My paintings have also been featured in the official PlayStation and Edge magazines.
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