There’s no ‘fixing’ the worst aspect of Alien: Romulus

Gallons of ink, thick as monster blood, have already been spilled on Alien: Romulus. To some, Fede Álvarez’s legacy sequel looked like the best Alien in ages — a winningly wet creature feature that took the franchise back to squishy basics. Others saw only a derivative Greatest Hits, content to echo past entries instead of putting its own mark on the series. Opinion, in other words, remains sharply divided on last summer’s return voyage to a space where no one can hear you scream. 

On one point, however, the Romulus defenders and skeptics do seem to have found some common ground. Ask just about anyone, and they’ll tell you that the extended cameo arranged for a late actor from Alien is icky in all the wrong ways. If you’ve seen the movie, you know the abominable scenes we’re talking about. (Spoilers hereafter.) They’re the ones where our young heroes stumble upon a busted android and plug him in, only to be greeted by the uncannily smoothed likeness (and voice) of Ian Holm, who played the treacherous synthetic Ash in the original Alien. This special effect is so ghastly that it rips a viewer right out of the film.

Álvarez has heard your complaints about these scenes, and he’s addressed them. Last week, the director told Empire that he had made some alterations to the most objectionable element of Romulus. Rook, the character “played” by “Holm,” was brought to life via a variety of different techniques — including an animatronic built around a casting of the actor’s head from the Lord of the Rings movies. For the recent home-entertainment release of Romulus, Álvarez tinkered with the shots featuring Rook, supposedly pulling back on some of the digital enhancements (the CGI laid over the animatronic) to lean more heavily on the original practical effects. “We just ran out of time in post-production to get it right,” he confesses, before concluding that the new changes “fixed” those problems.

Look, any improvement to Rook is welcome. It’s no exaggeration to say that the android’s appearance in Romulus qualifies as one of the most off-putting, distracting effects “achievements” in recent years, maybe ever. He looks shockingly shoddy — a video-game cutscene phantom too phony even to convince as a deliberately unreal approximation of humanity. His scenes tell the whole story of the Hollywood effects industry, where overtaxed, non-unionized artists are pressed to make unreasonable deadlines, and where studios are constantly concluding that audiences will simply accept bad effects work. Is it any surprise that the same entertainment conglomerate that released the last Ant-Man into theaters with unfinished CGI would look at the Rook scenes in Romulus and say “good enough”?

All that said, “fixed” is probably overstating the changes Álvarez has made to those scenes for the Blu-ray release. (The version on Hulu appears to be identical to what theatrical audiences endured.) A side-by-side comparison reveals a strategic obscuring of the effects work — via shadows and widened shots — more than a total overhaul. Rook looks a little better, but he mostly remains as Romulus envisioned him: a deepfaked monstrosity. You’re still not seeing much of the old-school puppetry Álvarez has bragged about in interviews. He’s still a chiefly digital illusion.

Anyway, to get hung up on the quality (or lack thereof) of the effects work is to miss the larger point. The real problem with Rook, as Romulus conceived him, could not be solved with a mere patch or remaster. His very presence feels like more than just an aesthetic mistake. It’s a walking (or, well, crawling) ethical violation. Simply put, by resurrecting the visage of a deceased actor, Álvarez has committed a fundamentally ghoulish — and, unfortunately, increasingly common — act of digital grave-robbing. It was gross way back in 2004, when the widely forgotten Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow cast the long-dead Laurence Olivier as a hologram of malevolence. And it remained gross in Rogue One and Ghostbusters: Afterlife and The Flash.

Álvarez has been quick to report that he sought and received the blessing of Holm’s estate before embarking on this misguided, 21st-century weekend at Bernie’s. But we’re still talking about the ventriloquizing of an actor who had no say in how his likeness is being used. That the filmmaker deployed AI to achieve some approximation of his famously regal voice is a double whammy of dystopian technological offense: Lakes were evaporated to create the unnerving, unconvincing illusion that a dead person said things that he didn’t. All of this is closely related to the growing deepfake dilemma, as well as the issue of digitizing actors raised during the SAG-AFTRA strikes of 2023. No, there’s no confusing Rook for the real Ian Holm. But he’s also not capable of objecting to his “casting.” Are we staring down the barrel of a future where we lose all control of our image after we die?

Again, this is nowhere Disney hasn’t been before. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, an otherwise pretty stirring act of intellectual-property extension, crossed the very same ethical boundaries nearly a decade ago with the equally unsettling necromancy of Peter Cushing. Holm’s unwitting appearance in Romulus is an omen for the future of the franchise, too. It says that the Mouse House will probably treat Alien the way it’s treated Star Wars: like a nostalgia object to be milked ad nauseam in the years to come. In that sense, you could call Rook a canary in the coal mine; his appearance is a warning about where the series will likely go from here now that Disney has added this Fox property to its portfolio.

He’s also a microcosm for the whole pandering spirit of the movie. Romulus is very much in keeping with the J.J. Abrams school of legacy sequels, designed mostly to deliver Pavolovian cues to salivate for the comfort food of old box-office hits. It’s a Disneyfied Alien — not in severity (you’d never mistake its gooey violence for an all-ages play), but certainly in the way it turns a beloved franchise into a theme park of secondhand pleasures. Álvarez has some fun with the material; the movie’s best set pieces, like a swarm of scurrying Facehuggers and a precarious zero-g ballet, show us things we’ve never seen in an Alien movie before. But those moments are wedged between a barrage of winking callbacks to everything we already have.

Narratively speaking, there’s no reason Rook needed to look or sound like Holm’s Ash. After all, he’s not the same android, or even necessarily the same model. Any actor could have played him. As some have suggested, it might have been more resonant to hand the role to David Jonsson, who stars as the synthetic Andy. But of course that wouldn’t directly trigger any fan’s nostalgia receptors. Rook looks like Holm because the whole character is an Easter egg, like the pulse rifle or the Prometheus music cue or the scene where Jonsson nonsensically calls the Xenomorph a bitch. That’s the only real function this CGI body-snatching serves. A real human being’s likeness has been (hideously) replicated for no higher purpose than a passing chill of spot-the-reference recognition.

Then again, maybe there’s an extra layer of dark subtext to those misbegotten scenes and that horrendous digital puppet. Romulus, like almost all of the Alien movies, is really about the horror of capitalism, a force as soulless and carnivorous and uncaring as H.R. Giger’s space bug. What better way to underscore the corporate world’s disrespect for human life than to turn a beloved dead actor into a sock puppet for IP branding, a glorified Marvel cameo from beyond the grave? When it comes to treating people like exploitable, expendable assets, Disney could give Weyland-Yutani a run for its blood money.

Alien: Romulus is now available on Blu-ray, where the Rook scenes look marginally less terrible, and streaming on Hulu, where they don’t.