Alien Romulus (4K UHD Review)
- Review Date: Nov 27, 2024
- Format: 4K Ultra HD
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Director
Fede ÁlvarezRelease Date(s)
2024 (December 2, 2024)Studio(s)
Scott Free Productions/Brandywine/TSG Entertainment (20th Century Studios/Sony Pictures Home Entertainment)- Film/Program Grade: B
- Video Grade: A
- Audio Grade: A+
- Extras Grade: B-
Review
Twenty years after the loss of the Weyland-Yutani starfreighter USCSS Nostromo, and the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979), Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny, Civil War) finds herself orphaned on the remote mining colony of Jackson’s Star, which orbits the ringed world of LV-410 in the Alpheius System, some 65 light years away from Earth. Her parents died while under Company contract, leaving Rain essentially an indentured “employee” of the colony—when she tries to leave, she learns that her contract has been unilaterally extended. But at least she’s not alone: Her parents left her with an old reprogrammed synthetic named Andy (David Jonsson), who she considers to be her brother. And Rain has other young friends who are similarly stuck on the colony, including her one-time boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux), Tyler’s pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced), Tyler and Kay’s cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn’s adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu).
The good news is, Tyler’s got a plan to get them all off Jackson’s Star: As part of their own jobs with the colony, Tyler, Bjorn, and Navarro serve as the crew of the mining hauler Corbelan IV. And on one of their recent trips, they detected something surprising—a derelict spacecraft has drifted into the orbit of LV-410, a spacecraft that’s equipped with functional cryo-sleep pods they can steal, thus enabling the Corbelan to carry all of them to a better life on Yvaga III, a far more idyllic colony planet that’s a nine-year journey away. So the group hatches a plan to take the Corbelan and intercept this spacecraft, steal the pods, and escape to freedom. Little do they know, however, that the derelict is actually a Weyland-Yutani space station, whose crew was wiped out by a particularly nasty little “perfect organism” that the company’s bio-weapons division went to great lengths to retrieve, study, and exploit for profit.
Directed by Fede Álvarez (Evil Dead, The Girl in the Spider’s Web) from a screenplay by Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues, Alien: Romulus is a pleasant surprise—the best entry in this franchise since at least Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection, and maybe David Fincher’s Alien 3. It starts with the cast, particularly Spaeny and Jonsson, who are a breath of fresh air. What’s more, the world-building expansion here is superb and perfectly of a piece with not only Ridley Scott’s original film but also James Cameron’s Aliens. (All of the other films in the franchise are referenced visually too, with the 2014 Alien: Isolation video game being a particularly strong influence.) But the clincher is that Álvarez has made the smart decision to shoot everything that could be done that way practically, particularly the film’s creature effects, which are exquisite and (for my money) the best and most believable we’ve seen since 1979. Unfortunately, the film also makes two significant missteps—first by choosing to bring an iconic character back through VFX that don’t entirely work (some shots are perfect, but others fall deeply into the “uncanny valley”), and second by delivering way too many callbacks to previous films in the series. This second issue is the more significant, because it’s done so often—in ways both major and minor—that it draws you out of your immersion in the story at just the wrong moments. Newcomers to this franchise and super-fans might actually appreciate this sort of “greatest hits” approach, but for serious film viewers it grows tiresome. Even so, what Alien: Romulus gets right it gets so right that you can mostly look past this. Points also for the fact that its story actually makes logical sense. (One can’t say the same for Scott’s own Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, so that’s an improvement all by itself.)
Alien: Romulus was captured digitally in the ARRIRAW codec (at 4.6K) by cinematographer Galo Olivares (Gretel & Hansel) using ARRI Alexa 35 cameras with Zeiss Master Prime and Ultra Prime spherical lenses. It was finished as a 4K Digital Intermediate and was released theatrically in both the 1.90:1 aspect ratio for IMAX cinemas and also 2.39:1 for regular theater screens. (The choice of spherical lens with the 2.39 aspect ratio was apparently seen as a balance between the look of the original Alien and Cameron’s Aliens, which used anamorphic/2.35 and spherical/1.85 respectively.) Wider lenses were employed early in the film, with the framing growing tighter throughout.
20th Century Studios’ 4K Ultra HD release features the 2.39:1 image encoded on a 66 GB disc, with high dynamic range available in both Dolby Vision and HDR10. Image detail is terrific, and rock solid in spite of the film’s abundant use of on-set atmospherics. Facial details, costume fabrics, battered and grimy metal textures—all exhibit incredibly clean and pleasing refinement. The HDR grade offers truly deep blacks, strongly bold highlights, and plenty of detail in each. Colors are an interesting mix of cool plastic and metal surface tones with vibrant lighting, much of which is built right into the sets. The overall effect is to render every environment moody, gloomy, and dangerous—always hostile or at least inhospitable to human life. If I were picking nits here, one could argue that the HDR grade is perhaps a tad too aggressive—occasionally rendering the image just slightly unnatural looking (a little bit of contrast haloing is visible from time to time, of the type you sometimes see in real estate photography that goes heavy on HDR). And the lack of IMAX ratio may disappoint a few people. But these are truly nits: This is pretty damn close to a reference-quality 4K image.
Also excellent is this disc’s sound mix, presented in an English Dolby Atmos port of the theatrical Atmos experience. The soundstage feel appropriately huge and immersive, with excellent dynamic range, and striking clarity. As the Weyland-Yutani scientists in the film’s opening scenes recover the Xenomorph, you can hear every clang of clamps, the rustle of chains, and the rumble of machinery, not to mention the sizzle of lasers, and the atonal choral component of the terrific score by Hans Zimmer protege Benjamin Wallfisch (Blade Runner: 2049, Twisters). Tonally, the mix offers full sounding mids and robust low end. Subtle sound cues abound from every direction as Rain and Andy make their way around the colony. The height channels are employed often to give the stage a bit of lift and vertical extension as spacecraft take off and land, with echos and more machinery noises as the young scavengers explore the derelict space station, and of course all bets are off when the station’s Xenomorph cargo gets loose. Movement is smooth and energetic, as when the Corbelan attempts to escape the station and spins out of control. Dialogue is clean at all times. This is a very moody, evocative, and—when necessary—blustery mix, a terrific Atmos experience. Additional mixes include English 2.0 Descriptive Audio, French 5.1 Dolby Digital, and Spanish and Japanese 7.1 Dolby Digital Plus, with optional subtitles available in English for the Hearing Impaired, French, Spanish, and Japanese.
20th Century Studios’ new 4K package offers the film in 4K on UHD as well as 1080p HD on Blu-ray. There are no extras on the 4K disc itself, but the Blu-ray includes the following:
- Alternate/Extended Scenes (HD – 4 scenes – 11:27 in all)
- Crossing the Facehugger Hallway (Extended) (HD – 2:03)
- Bjorn’s Death (Alternate) (HD – 4:48)
- Romulus Lab (Alternate) (HD – 3:09)
- Hive’s First Contact (Extended) (HD – 1:22)
- Return to Horror: Crafting Alien: Romulus (HD – 4 parts – 25:34 in all)
- The Director’s Vision (HD – 3:28)
- Creating the Story (HD – 2:20)
- Casting the Faces (HD – 6:29)
- Constructing the World (HD – 13:15)
- Inside the Xenomorph Showdown (HD – 11:07)
- Alien: A Conversation (HD – 9:23)
These features are all fairly good, there’s just not enough of them. The deleted scenes include some interesting moments that are definitely worth checking out. The Return to Horror documentary offers a very nice look at the production, with the director and various crew members providing insightful comments on the creative approach and decision-making rationale. The best of these features is Inside the Xenomorph Showdown, which provides a great look at how the practical creature effects were done. And there’s a good 9-minute conversation between Álvarez and producer Ridley Scott. You also get a Movies Anywhere Digital code on a paper insert. Note that the 4K release is available in both regular Amaray and Steelbook packaging.
Alien: Romulus is imperfect to be sure, but it’s also a terrific return to the authentic tone, texture, and vibe of the original Scott and Cameron films that launched this franchise. It perfectly captures the gloomy future noir aesthetic of high-tech hyper capitalism run amok at the expense of Humanity itself. And that zero-G acid blood sequence? Pure genius. What I’m personally most excited about is the new world-building ground to be explored by following Rain and Andy into uncharted territory—the human side of this franchise has always been the less developed, compared to its endless expansions of the Xenomorph life-cycle (some more successful than others), and having characters you actually want to root for again is a welcome development. (The original Alien films were always Ripley’s story as much as the creature’s, at least in my opinion.) In the meantime, 20th Century’s new 4K release of Alien: Romulus delivers the film on disc in outstanding A/V quality that fans should really appreciate.
- Bill Hunt
(You can follow Bill on social media on Twitter, BlueSky, and Facebook, and also here on Patreon)