“Alien: Romulus” and Survival Horror Video Games
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Fede Alvarez’s “Alien: Romulus” is a great time at the movies: fresh, concise, set in a space work camp, cool android character(s), a couple of extremely creative action sequences… and no more than 12% of “Prometheus”-based horseshit – which is an absolutely fantastic ratio for a modern “Alien” movie!
Screenwriting-wise, Alvarez and his constant partner Rodo Sayagues take a familiar to many space horror situation and put it to the test: what would be the smartest thing for our characters to do? It’s night and day with Ridley Scott’s terrible rehashes of the original “Alien” where, over and over again, we saw new characters in the same exact types of predicaments, usually ending with a Stage One xenomorph on an overly trusting spaceman’s face as they’re looking in yet another disgustingly undulating alien pod (Please don’t do this. Ever!).
The roots of such an approach (what’s the smartest thing to do to survive?) lie not just in a healthy, always-questioning, creatively searching writers’ room – but in the creators’ familiarity with the space-based subgenre of survival horror video games. On the Inside Total Film podcast, Alvarez talks about playing 2014 Creative Assembly’s modern classic “Alien: Isolation.” Obviously, the game influenced his movie enormously – perhaps as much (if not more) as Ridley Scott’s “Alien” and James Cameron’s “Aliens”!
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It's not just the eerie setting of an abandoned space station, although Alvarez’s Renaissance owes more than a little debt to Isolation’s Sevastopol, as the characters in the game and the movie arrive at their destination in a similar way with comparable goals -- both involving salvage from the USCSS Nostromo. And it’s not even the first quarter of both the game’s and the movie’s running time that’s focused on exploration of the station’s xenomorph-free (so far!) nooks and crannies. It’s mostly the approach that both the creators and their characters take when the facehuggers finally hit the vent fan.
What resources do you have? How can you use them to prevent yourself from becoming an alien-intubated chestburster-breeding factory? Do you happen to carry a spare canister of cryo fuel in your inventory to spare one of your NPCs the same fate? Of course, the game only featured a single xenomorph – and zero pulse rifles – but “Alien: Isolation” itself is just the tip of an iceberg of videogame-y space horror influences.
There are too many to name – what we have here is a coreless Russian nesting doll of endless references, going all the way back to the original “Alien” and the skeletal, Gigeresque shadow it cast over the very first video games in existence. The biggest one would probably be 1994 “System Shock”: an alien-deprived, environmental cyberpunk that nevertheless serves as the blueprint for “Isolation” and a horde of other games set on abandoned space stations (and sometimes, in great underwater cities).
Back to “Romulus,” its zero gravity-based action scenes are very reminiscent of 2008 “Dead Space,” the absolute legend of the genre that pitted a lonely systems engineer in a futuristic space suit against a nasty race of undead aliens onboard an abandoned mining ship. Famously, “Dead Space” was intended as pretty much a straightforward remake – or possibly Part 3 – of the “System Shock” series.
But its creators spend about as much time working on the game as playing one of the greatest video games of all time -- Shinji Mikami’s 2005 masterpiece “Resident Evil 4” – that featured a unique blend of body-slashing horror and shoot-their-heads-off action in a third person, behind-the-character’s-shoulder perspective in a backwater European village. So the developers of “Dead Space” changed their approach – and the game’s entire genre – to create a space-themed version of such a blend of survival and action: RE4 with moments of gut-losing zero gravity terror!
It's exactly the approach Alvarez and Sayagues took when blending the elements of “Alien” lonely tenseness with “Aliens”-esque gung ho moments of superior firepower domination. So the formula for “Alien: Romulus” would look like “Alien” meets “Aliens” meets “Alien: Isolation” meets “Dead Space”… if “Dead Space” (and the alien parasite-infested RE4) themselves didn’t already owe a huge creative debt to both Cameron and Scott’s movies!!
But let’s go to the trailers: even at “Resident Evil 4”’s launch you had to sell the horror before your sell the action, and out of the promo’s three-and-a-half minute (!) running time only about 3 seconds feature firing at the alien-zombified cultists with a shoulder-mounted rocket launcher:
“Dead Space”’s 2008 launch trailer is mostly straightforward “Alien” stuff: strange radio messages, empty corridors and the occasional “EVACUATE THIS AREA IMMEDIATELY” scrawled with admirable uniformity in human blood (when, one would think, a simple “GET THE FUCK OUT” would suffice). It’s only at the very end that we go to some flamethrower action.
The “Alien” creeping-down-empty-corridors tradition carries on all the way to “Dead Space” remake reveal teaser:
And, of course, “Alien: Isolation” launch trailer is a cornucopia of “Alien” winks, hints and easter eggs – perhaps more so than the original “Alien” movie trailer!
“Alien: Romulus’” movie trailers, on the other hand, are more of the classic teenage horror fare, slight on both mood and action. We get just a glimpse of the film’s admirable practical effects in the original teaser – and more of the same plus some extended alien POV shots in the full official version of the trailer:
The final trailer simply gives away the movie’s big chestbursting scene in its entirety in hope of pulling in more of the original movie’s crowd:
Judging by the somewhat polarizing reactions to the movie from both the critics and the audience, they’re split 50/50 in-between their expectations and the finished product. About half of the viewers went in expecting low-grade, zoomer-oriented, by-the-numbers rehash of the original movie(s)… and left pleasantly surprised with the film’s quality and creativity. Others based their expectations on the glimpses of hard sci-fi that somehow infiltrated the movie’s promo campaign – and were disappointed by its commitment to moving things along without paying much thought or attention to the plausibility of its premise and technical detail. But one thing this movie very much isn’t is any sort of young adult space horror.
Original “Alien” took one of the most tired horror concepts – a haunted house – and made it fresh by launching the haunting into outer space. “Alien: Romulus” excels at turning the space haunted house into a DIY Halloween xenomorph-themed ride – barrels of fun as long as you have enough speed to ignore all the creakiness. Ironically, it’s the same exact premise used by both “Alien: Isolation” and “Dead Space” games – either of which trailers, with a bit of rebranding, would arguably serve as a better reflection of the resulting “Romulus” movie.
