Warning: Full spoilers follow for Alien: Romulus. Alien fans can breathe a sigh of relief. Fede Álvarez’s Alien: Romulus lives up to the hype , delivering a real back-to-basics, claustrophobic sci-fi horror movie that doesn’t completely cut ties with other recent Alien sequels like 2012’s Prometheus.
There’s just one fly in the ointment here in the form of a distractingly bad and completely unnecessary cameo character. Let’s take a closer look at why that cameo almost derailed a perfectly good Alien sequel, and why Hollywood needs to knock off this trend of using CGI to bring dead actors back to life. Again, beware of full spoilers for Alien: Romulus ahead! Alien: Romulus is set 20 years after the events of the first Alien movie but decades before Aliens.
Because of that, there’s not a lot of room for Romulus to bring in familiar faces from the franchise’s past. Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is still frozen in suspended animation, and the rest of the Nostromo crew were killed by the Xenomorph. But Romulus finds a way to bring back one of those characters in a new form.
Midway through the film, we encounter the battered remains of Rook, an android synthetic who shares the likeness of Ian Holm’s character, Ash. Similar to how Rogue One: A Star Wars story digitally recreates the likenesses of the late Peter Cushing’s Grand Moff Tarkin and Carrie Fisher’s Princess Leia, Romulus uses CGI to simulate Holm’s performance. Perhaps it’s fitting that comput.