Put into development after Disney bought out 20th Century Fox studios, the company sought a stand-alone "Alien" film, after Ridley Scott's planned prequel trilogy was aborted after the weak reception towards "Covenant". Director Fede Alvarez was brought on board to develop a new story, with this film originally meant for streaming release on Hulu. Alvarez nevertheless set his story in the official timeline of the previous films, set chronologically in the years between "Alien" and "Aliens", and even tying the franchise together with references to many of the other films, including the "Prometheus" mythology. Eventually, with Scott's blessing, the film was moved for a theatrical release and proved to be a success at the box office, and garnering praise from critics and fans alike. "Alien: Romulus" tells the story of three sets of siblings scraping by on a Weyland-Yutani mining planet who seek their chance to escape to freedom by hijacking sleeping pods from a nearby derelict space station that will allow them to travel off system--until of course they run into unexpected creatures on board the space station. Alvarez sought to return to a more practical style of filmmaking, emphasizing practical creature effects, miniatures, and excellent set and production design that grounds us in the grim reality of space survival. Despite rushing through some of the alien life-cycles for plot convenience, the film is an excellent sci-fi horror thriller that honors the franchise's legacy while adding a fresh, new perspective to the world.
Collaborating for the first time with director Alvarez is British composer Benjamin Wallfisch, himself no stranger to horror nor legacy franchise scoring. Wallfisch finds the blend that previous series composers have honed--moments of space grandeur and mystery paired with dissonant horror action, although his horror sound here is far more harsh and synthetic than in previous scores. Melodically, Wallfisch roots his score in a simple theme for the main character Rain, and then develops two variations on that thematic material--one for her adopted android brother, and one for the xenomorph antagonists, though none of these ideas are as long-lined or romantic as some of the previous scores in the franchise. On top of this, Wallfisch resurrects Goldsmith's original theme (for a key connection to the original film) as well as echoing his time motif, and quotes Harry Gregson-Williams's 'life' theme from "Prometheus", as well as more subtle stylistic nods to Horner and Goldenthal's work in the series, providing an intelligent score that is perhaps not as accessible as some others in the franchise, but nevertheless one that honors its roots and suits the film well.
Hollywood Records released the original album on streaming, featuring the majority of the score. There is a secondary release for vinyl produced by Made by Mutant, scheduled for release in November, seemingly with the same contents. Personally, I adore the "Alien" franchise, even though the series has a very mixed track record at this point--but at their peak they are sci-fi/horror at their very best, featuring one of the most haunting creature designs in cinema history. It was fun to dive into additional artwork for this film, and I present here a total of twenty-seven new covers to choose from, making this one of my biggest projects. As per usual, these things grow and grow, and just last night I added a new cover from art I stumbled upon.
With such a big collection, I'll break these into sets of three, in their rows above.
Cover 1 uses an incredible piece officially licensed for the movie by artist Matt Ferguson. He actually created 3 versions of this same piece of art, with different color schemes (the second of which I use for Cover 6). For this version, I actually took the red version which was available in full width and edited it to match this version, so that I could widen out my frame just a bit, from what's available on this poster version. Cover 2 uses the main theatrical poster to create an alternate version to the official album cover, a striking, both minimalist and aggressive--I stiched together several versions to create a wider image to space things out to my liking. Cover 3 is the Dolby poster, I just expanded and shifted the green cave top to give more space above to fit the title, and added a bit of a shadow at the bottom so the text would pop better.
Cover 4, another striking red image, this time of Isabela Merced--I stitched together a few alternate images to get the widest image, and then center the eye. Cover 5 uses the Screen-X art, I simply moved the space station at the top a little bit to the side to make space for my added text. Cover 6 again uses Matt Ferguson's art, here in his red "quad" poster horizontal design.
Cover 7 uses AMC's "Thrills & Chills" poster, which I had to enhance, and then painted in a bit more room at the top. Cover 8 uses the 4DX poster, which required little editing, just figuring out the text placement was a bit tricky. Cover 9 shows Rain meeting the xeno face to face, though much more glamorous than that moment in the film--I simply combined the poster with a wallpaper to space it out more and allow text.
Cover 10 uses promo cover art from Total Film magazine. Cover 11 uses a foreign poster, a cool design, but one that was a bit tricky to frame. I ended up having to add a bit of negative space to the left of the image just to give space for the text. Cover 12 uses a publicity still from the film, showing this xeno's translucency, it's a simple image, but I thought it might still work as a cover.
Cover 13 uses the IMAX poster, just took comping two versions to widen out. Cover 14 uses a piece of art from another Total Film alternate cover, with this coloring used for a foreign release poster. Cover 15 uses an early teaser poster, simple but creepy.
Cover 16 uses another promotional still from the film, a wonderfully gothic image. I morphed the image slightly to make it a bit more symmetrical, as the original shot at a bit of an angle, and applied a bit of a vignette to the top. Cover 17 features another promo image of Rain, which I had to again splice together to widen out just a bit. Cover 18 uses cover art from an accompanying comic book mini-series, this cover features a painting by German artist Björn Barends.
Covers 19 and 20 feature original art by Swedish designer Kilian Eng, used for the vinyl release. For 19, I edited his front cover, lowering the image a bit to allow my standard credit at the top, adding a larger title, and tweaking the colors just a bit. Cover 20 uses the right half of the inside fold-out spread, which was a last-minute addition to the collection, but a moody piece of minimal art. Starting from here on our, the remaining images are fan-made posters, with #21 being done by artist Alex Vincent.
Cover 22 uses an incredible piece by Andrew V. M., with a gorgeously moody color palette. I combined his wallpaper version and a taller poster alternate configuration to give a bit more headroom up top. Cover 23 uses a gnarly design by Justice Gage. I had to widen the sides and reconfigure the spacing of things a bit to make room for the added text. Cover 24 uses a pop art style design by Eileen Steinbach, which required little editing.
Cover 25 features a stunning design by Russian illustrator Vitaliy Chepelnikov. Editing was fairly simple, the image needed to be cropped, and I just shifted the frame he had in his image to suit this format. Cover 26 features an original image by Colm Geoghegan/Creepy Duck Design, to which I just had to paint out some text to make space for mine. Finally, Cover 27 features another incredible digital painting by Spanish artist Juan Carlos Ruiz Burgos. No content editing was required, other than splicing a few images together to get the best quality and using AI upscaling of the image.
This was a fun collection to work on, hope you enjoy, and let me know your favorite selections below!
I've been thinking about adding Alien Romulus to my own Alien custom covers series myself, but looking at your huge collection, I think I'm quite covered :)
ReplyDeleteI especially like your #2, as the asymmetry of the original cover has always bothered me. Apart from that, you have several other highlights in your collection. I especially like #1, #3, #11, #21, #23 and #26, a lovely mix of many different source images.
As a designer, I know that we don't just like to hear praise for our own work, but sometimes appreciate well-intentioned criticism even more, so I'd like to give you that too. I think that a collection as huge as this one (but also in general) would benefit from some variety in the font design of one or two covers. This may be a personal preference of mine, but I think that projects like this offer plenty of room to experiment with different typefaces. But maybe uniformity is a preference of yours, in which case I respect that of course.
Either way, great work! I will make good use of it.
Thanks for the feedback, heidl! Cover 2 is a classic example of how some simple care of the image can make a big difference--as you're well aware--and that's without doing any design manipulation at all, simply trying to space things correctly.
DeleteThanks for the criticism/suggestion as well. I totally understand your point, and this is something I debate about sometimes--whether to toy around with various fonts and text stylings. Some specific pieces of art will seem to require a different style than whatever my "main" look is, but you're right, I tend to default to finding a common style I like and then mostly just sticking with that (minus minor changes like occasional recoloring or resizing to match that particular cover). Perhaps this is laziness or comfort, especially when I'm already spending weeks and weeks on a massive project, and don't want to feel like I have to start from scratch with every single one. Another factor in bigger franchises like this one, is it generally makes more sense to me that uniformity allows for more choice for the individual (in trying to make selections between a series or trilogy, for example), if all the fonts are alike. "Alien" is a tricky one though, in that probably not all the films use similar fonts, and honestly I wanted to just deal with this one, and not have the headache of which fonts on which image might have to match up with a corresponding image from another film in the series....
Hopefully that makes sense, but I'll certainly take the suggestion, and see if in future projects I can try to incorporate a bit more variation in the font usage.