Few things get me as excited as a new Alien movie. The franchise has done it all, from haunted house movies to action to schlocky B-movie trash, and it’s handled most of them with a lot more grace than might otherwise be expected. Few things are as versatile, director-drive, or gnarly as this franchise. Each entry is a unique object, totally separate from the others while all feeling of a piece with each other. James Cameron, Ridley Scott, David Fincher, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet have all had their fingers in this pie. While the franchise reception over the last fifteen years or so has been mixed (I say this as a defender of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant). I held out hope that we’d get another stylistic director to come add another entry into this franchise, hopefully with a new story non-reliant on the return of Sigourney Weaver or Ridley Scott. I still want Scott’s final film in his “David Trilogy,” but this franchise needed a serious dose of new blood, acidic or not.
Enter Fede Álvarez, director of 2013’s Evil Dead reboot/sequel and Don’t Breathe. Both are bloody, goopy, hard-on-the-audience movies that hold nothing back and serve up more viscera than they do character development. I wasn’t too worried, as all but the best two flicks in this series are fairly light on how deep they dive on any character but Ripley. That’s fine, just as long as they’re gross and mean and really remind you of just how little any corporation you work for cares about you. I was also excited when it was to revolve around all-new characters and be a straight-up horror film again.
And it’s a solid movie, mostly bogged down by its slavish need to reference all other films in the franchise. Remove all of that crap and you’ve got one of the best Alien films all around.
Fan-service has to be done right and nothing’s better than reminding the audience that Weyland-Yutani sucks. Alien: Romulus opens on young Rain (Civil War‘s Cailee Spaeny) and her brother, Andy (David Jonsson). Okay, so he’s not really her brother, just an outdated android unit that is programmed to protect her. Rain’s contract with Weyland-Yutani is up and she’s excited to leave the colony of Jackson’s Star, a world so polluted by mining that no one’s seen the sun in multiple generations. Sadly, Weyland-Yutani needs more workers so she’s informed that her contract hours have been doubled and she’ll most likely die working on the planet.
Luckily her ex-boyfriend, Tyler (Archie Renaux), has a plan. He’s discovered a decommissioned space station in orbit. It’s got a few days before it collides with the planet’s rings and that’s just long enough for them to get in, get cryopods, and get out so they can make their way to a new life in a system Weyland-Yutani can’t touch. Tyler’s crew consists of his sister, Kay (Isabel Merced), cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn’s girlfriend Navarro (Aileen Yu). The messy little family have a plan, a light little cargo freighter, and just enough time to pull this off before the collision/destruction of this empty space station.
Trouble is that the STORY opens on Rain and Andy. The FILM opens with Weyland-Yutani picking through the wreckage of the Nostromo, looking for things from the first film that they can use, and they find the big chap himself floating out there. I have no idea how no one pointed out to Disney what they were doing with this scene as the film continues to mine previous entries for gold but…well, here we are.
What follows is a mixture of excellent setpieces that I honestly love to bits. Facehuggers in the water, zero-G fights against xenomorphs, and the most incredible usage of the acid blood I’ve seen in any Alien film. Alvarez knows what he’s doing with his aggressively violent horror and makes no bones about going for broke. Moments in the film will be a rough watch for those with weaker stomachs, even if he never achieves the level of insane onscreen violence he did with 2013’s Evil Dead. Spaeny and crew are up for it, believably engaging with the action and now-mandatory 2024-looking CGI to create characters that feel capable, frightened, clever, and exciting despite their paper-thinness.
It’s a shame that the film gets bogged down in fanservice, something that feels smart to avoid when we’re less than a month out from Deadpool & Wolverine. Countless lines from previous entries are reused in ways that feel unearned, particularly a major one from Aliens that received cheers in 1986 and groans in 2024. Multiple callbacks to every era of the franchise (except Alien3) bog down what could be an otherwise awesome interquel between Alien and Aliens. The most egregious of these is the ghoulish resurrection of a dead actor, trotted out for no other reason than to show him onscreen, and the CGI/AI used to revive this person is absolutely horrid. There was no reason to do this, particularly since it’s a new character, and that in combination with the obnoxious “do you remember how much you loved these lines” moments took me out of this movie and just made me wish I were watching those referenced instead.
Thank goodness it looks amazing. While the CGI resurrection is a travesty the rest looks appropriately awesome for a space movie. Jackson’s Star is a blackened planet, covered in dark ash with the only visible thing beneath its blackened skies rivers of lava. The rings are beautiful and all space shots are gorgeous to look at. Something the Alien films have always done well is make space look like a job while simultaneously making it look like a beautiful, haunting beast beyond our control. Alien: Romulus accomplishes that marvelously, with space sequences rotating between destruction and beauty breathlessly. In space no one can hear you scream but theatregoers can hear gasps of awe for damn sure.
Jackson’s Star itself is a hopelessly bleak location-as-character, making up for some of the lack of development in our humans. The magic of Alien and Alien: Isolation (a videogame this film borrows from heavily) is that the characters are given time to show you who they are before any action starts going down. That display is in-depth, thoughtful, and full of meaning. Cameron’s Aliens took a different approach, having all of its characters arrive fully-developed and not worrying about holding your hand through their introductions. Sgt. Apone (played magnificently by Al Matthews) pops up out of cryo and promptly shoves a cigar into his mouth, Vasquez (Jenette Goldstein) does pull-ups and insults her male co-workers, and Hudson (Bill Paxton) is all bluff and bluster before he crashes into screaming manbaby.
These things make it so much harder to deal with the crew in Alien: Romulus, who are mostly paper-thin. Sure, you recognize Archie Renaux from Netflix’s Shadow & Bone and he’s handsome as all get-out, but handsome doesn’t make a character. Kay, Bjorn, and Navarro are similarly wasted even though they feel like they could be interesting. I’d much rather spend time getting more depth to these people than listening to callback lines and watching a dead actor resurrected poorly (Disney, please, stop doing this).
Luckily Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson heave the bulk of that need onto their backs and carry this film across the finish line. Spaeny is a raw nerve, lonely and desperate to keep her “brother” near her. It’s a very honest performance with little held back, smart and badass instead of the big-eyed “faun-taking-its-first-steps” performance of Civil War. Jonsson, our android, is first introduced without warning and appears neurodivergent. I was worried at first as this is a depiction so many movies drop the ball on but Jonsson is sensitive, sweet, and cracking jokes that would make many a dad blush. The reveal of him as a outdated, semi-functioning robot helps this a lot and moves things away from neurodivergency while allowing that idea to still stick in an audience’s heads. The relationship between Andy and Rain is the core of the film and it works wonderfully.
We need to talk about Benjamin Wallfisch’s score. The composer has come along way from being part of the school of Zimmer, developing as a unique voice that is capable of some lovely music. Alien: Romulus has a delightful atmosphere that pulls from what came before but mostly does something new. It’s a very of-its-day score, one utilizing the same beats and audio that you might hear in something by Tom Holkenberg or Ludwig Gorransson. Wallfisch has his own flares but the score is so reliant, potentially by mandate, on what came before that it attempts to marry themes from Alien, Prometheus, and somehow William Eubank’s Underwater. It succeeds on every level in a way the film itself can’t quite get to, keeping these themes present without drowning anything unique. It’s a badass series of tracks that shows what this film could have been capable of had it just found the balance between fanservice and story.
Alien: Romulus is going to satisfy a lot of people. The Marvel crowd has been trained to cheer for any reference, earned or deserved or not, so that won’t bother most people. For me those things didn’t work, derailing a great film and making it simply a fun time instead. This is great date-night fare for couples that want to jump, squirm, and cling to each other (lot of people going to be making out at the drive-in during this movie). It’s got good energy, great visuals, and beautiful music. The lack of character development is made up for by a game cast who are willing to go places, get splattered in blood, and wander a ship full of monsters while drenched in sweat. It’s a mean, fun, sometimes nasty little movie with a third act that is going to absolutely destroy some viewers. I had a good time with it, despite reservations, and I hope it makes all of the money.
Alien: Romulus is currently in theatres.
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