His first film, a remake of Sam Raimi’s “The Evil Dead,” leaned more heavily into the grueling horror of the 1981 low-budget original than its more comical 1986 predecessor, revitalizing the franchise in the process. After launching his own series with “Don’t Breathe,” he cowrote and directed “The Girl in the Spider’s Web,” a sequel to David Fincher’s “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” which met with less success than his earlier work (or Fincher’s) but further established him as a versatile stylist capable of infusing a film with personality while adhering to studio boundaries.
Álvarez further puts that skillset to use on “Alien: Romulus,” the seventh film in the “Alien” franchise (without pitting xenomorphs against Predators, anyway). In a franchise better defined by prequels, digressions and canonical side quests than a clear and straightforward timeline, he has conceived an installment that takes place approximately 20 years after the events of Ridley Scott’s original film, which puts it another few decades ahead of James Cameron’s propulsive follow-up.
Drawing from a seemingly endless — certainly well-documented — reservoir of world-building, Álvarez splits the difference between Scott and Cameron for his aesthetic, while delivering a story, and crowd-rocking thrills, that feels fully modern. The typeface of the credits and technology used by the characters is there to delight longtime “Alien” fans; the youthful cast and thoughtful pace will entice newcomers. It’s a balance his previous work taught him how to strike.
“All of those things should be done in a harmless way,” Álvarez says of the film’s many easter eggs. “Meaning, ‘If you know, you know.’ But I hope a new audience of twentysomethings or teenagers goes, ‘Wow, that doesn’t look like the movies I watched last week. It has this vibe that’s different.’” Those sorts of anachronisms aren’t new, but he remembers how exciting they were to experience when he was matriculating as a film fan.
“I remember watching ‘Pulp Fiction’ and going, ‘What is this world?’ And my dad going, ‘It’s just an exploitation movie from the 60s. What’s special about it?’” he recalls. “I hadn’t really seen any of those, so it just felt all new and cool and modern. And that’s how [“Alien: Romulus”] looks for a new audience: modern, as in a mix of the classic and the best parts of today.”
Though it opens August 16 in theaters, “Alien: Romulus” was first announced in 2022 as a project for Hulu. Álvarez explains that the initial plan, first signed in 2021, was “a reaction to theaters being completely gone” — a byproduct not of small-scale studio thinking but pandemic burn-off.
“That decision was not made at the point where theaters were healthy,” he says. “[But] it was always going to be an ambitious movie for [a streaming] platform.” Unsurprisingly, his big thinking led to distributor 20 th Century Studios changing course for theaters, a decision Álvarez remembers motivating his crew.
“I remember making an announcement to everybody that this movie was going to in theaters, and there was a big cheer,” he says. “I was like, wow, even the gaffer cares that this goes into theaters!”
Cowritten with Rodo Sayagues, his collaborator on “Evil Dead” and the “Don’t Breathe” films, Álvarez set to work on the project with the goal of uniting the complicated, unwieldy mythology of the franchise. “We would joke about how we wanted this movie to be ‘the one ring that bonds them all together’,” he says, referring to the pivotal bauble from the “Lord of the Rings” films. “That’s why I didn’t want follow that trend that, ‘Okay, the only ones that matter are these ones.’ I think that’s disrespectful to the directors that really worked so hard on those other movies. So I was like, ‘We have to embrace them all’.”
In looking at all of the films and determining “I think this is what that movie meant — and explain it,” Álvarez admits he was motivated by a foundational affection for all of them, even those that are less beloved. “Even the studio was like, ‘Are we sure we want to go there?’ And I was like, “Yeah, I truly love them all,’” he remembers.
“Even the ones that didn’t work so well for me, I had a great time in the theater, way more than I had with some random movie,” he observes. “Most movies, you watch them, and you never talk about it ever again. That is a bad thing for me. I felt they all needed to be embraced by the film and make sure at some point there was a connection with them.”
Even so, Álvarez insists that his goal was not simply to continue (much less copy) the look, feel or rhythms of those “Alien” movies that provided him so much inspiration.
“What I tried to reproduce is not only the style, but the feelings that those movies gave me at the time when I watched them,” he says. “With time, people intellectualize about what they think was great, and sometimes they’re wrong. They usually go the highbrow route of, ‘It was a deep theme about this…,’ and the reality is, when you’re a 13-year-old, you’re excited about the guns and the explosions and the violence.”
It’s a lesson he learned back on his remake of Raimi’s oft-imitated but seldom matched horror mainstay. “With ‘Evil Dead,’ I wasn’t trying to remake the movie, I was trying to remake the experience to bring to the audience,” he says. Though cutting to a dusty helmet or primitive computer monitor may prompt joyful feelings of nostalgia for veteran “Alien” fans, he suggests that replicating that recognizable aesthetic is an intermediary step, rather than a destination, in his effort to thrill audiences. “Hopefully what the movie will do is make the new generation understand why ‘Alien’ is so cool and scary.”
Pulling off that feat off would be yet another benchmark for Álvarez, but he admits he’s reluctant to absorb any praise or success that “Alien: Romulus” might receive. “It’s all credit to the original movies,” he says. “My job, I think, is to explain how great those movies are and how insane those ideas were.”
“That’s the insanity in me — that I just want to prove a point to the new generation.”
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