When you don’t have star power or a massive superhero movie to show off in San Diego Comic-Con’s highly-visible Hall H, you have to get creative.
And Disney and its 20th Century Studios division did just that for its Alien: Romulus panel. A little theatrics — red strobe lights followed by a gurgling man stumbling on stage, then dying from a “chest burster” — and video questions from surprise filmmaker guests such as original Alien director Ridley Scott or filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, among others can go a long way to bolster the already strong clips that were shown.
And if that fails, then you leave them with parting gifts, in this case, rubber alien “face huggers” that were distributed to all 6,500 or so people who packed the cavernous hall of the San Diego Convention Center Friday, many of whom immediately proceeded to take selfies and post the photos to all their friends. Promotional messaging succeeded.
Romulus is the first movie to hit since 2017’s Alien: Covenant and is the first movie to be made since Disney’s acquisition of Fox in 2019. And while two were made in the 2010s with mixed success, those were also big-budget productions, befitting to the manner which filmmaker Ridley Scott is accustomed.
This new one was directed by Fede Álvarez, the filmmaker behind more modestly-budgeted horror movies, including his hit, Don’t Breath, and stars fresh faces and rising actors such as Cailee Spaeny, Isabela Merced, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Spike Fern and Aileen Wu, all of whom were in attendance Friday, minus the latter.
Alien, of course, is not some new commodity. It’s a revered movie franchise that has had some of the best filmmakers in the director’s chairs, including Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet.
Álvarez said he felt immense pressure in taking on the movie and was standing on the shoulders of giants. But he also said the pressure went away when he was on set, which was very practical and to him, a very real environment.
“The pressure goes away, for me, when you suddenly realize you’re on tiny Weyland (a corporation in the Alien universe) shake and bake colony and every vehicle that goes around is real and the neon sign is from Aliens,” he said. “To be on this real space…”
The cast bonded strongly during the making of the movie, which was shot chronologically. But it also meant a loss when one of them shot a death scene and left the production. And as any Alien fan knows, there is a lot of death.
“It was emotional,” Álvarez noted, “because that person now has to leave and you continued with the rest of the cast. And (the deaths) kept on happening.”
The filmmaker and cast tried to honor those who came before them and for the production, that meant going back to the original designs and even hiring crewmembers such as Shane Mahan, who worked on the alien queen in Cameron’s 1986 entry, Aliens.
Álvarez described his creative process as being tortuous, with him thinking his work stinks much of the time. He believes it pushes him to strive for better results. And that honesty won over his cast.
“We could really trust him,” said Spaeny, who starred in Priscilla and Civil War. “He wanted to do something for the fans as a fan. He was very vocal.”
The filmmaker is chasing a high from film that is elusive, even as he wants to deliver that drug to the audience.
“For me, when you sit down in the theater, the logo shows up, the lights go down, I feel that this is it. This is the one that is going to change my life,” he said. “And it’s kinda crazy because most movies are shit. Five minutes in, you go, ‘This is not going to change my life.’ But for the first five seconds, you do feel that way because it did happen to you. And we all keep looking for that moment.”
And it was the ethos he brought to his set.
“It was important that we all knew that and that we honor that,” he continued. “To give 200 percent. And these kids did that to give you the movie you deserve.”