Fede Álvarez may have been the perfect director to refresh the Alien film franchise. His movie Alien: Romulus is incredibly well shot, with the camera slinking like a predator down each beautiful hallway in the failing Romulus space station, building tension with each step the characters take. Problem is, he just happened to be the worst possible writer for the job, too. When it comes time for those characters to speak, the whole film falls apart, turning into a hollow imitation of the better movies that came before it. It’s obvious Álvarez loves the Alien franchise. It just feels like he loves it a little too much.

You can feel Álvarez’s enthusiasm for the franchise during every moment of the movie, but it too often bleeds into the characters, washing out any semblance of unique personalities in favor of making them amorphous blobs that can be crammed together into the rough shape of past Alien movies. Alien: Romulus feels weirdly like Ernest Cline’s novel Ready Player One, where the characters worship pop culture so fanatically and thoroughly that their favorite shows, movies, and games are indistinguishable from their actual personalities. Similarly, none of Romulus’ characters feel like believable people who could inhabit the Alien universe. They feel like 20-somethings who watched Alien movies obsessively, then got transported into their favorite sci-fi setting.

Nearly every other line in Romulus is a reference to another movie in the franchise, or feels self-consciously tied to the series’ past. More than once, a character almost literally turns to the camera to recite a catchphrase, like a repetition of Alien’s memorable line “I can’t lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies.” And each time, that line is delivered with a bizarre, atonal resonance that’s rooted in........

© Polygon