Forty-five years have come and gone since Alien first hit cinemas, and what an up-and-down ride we’ve had with the franchise since. The highs? Certainly the first two movies. The lows? Almost everything else - and I do stress the term ‘almost’. Alien 3 was okay, but I’m biased in that regard because of the amount of British acting talent on show. I also enjoyed Alien: Covenant, but that might just be because it wasn’t Prometheus (and don’t get me started on the acting in that one). Either way, there have still been a lot of painful memories and mis-steps to process over that time as well. So forgive me if I went into Alien: Romulus with caution and one lingering question on my mind: can they get it right this time?
Luckily, the answer I got was a solid - if not resounding - yes. Alien: Romulus is definitely a return to form for the franchise. The downside is that it mostly achieves this through being a thematic redux of Alien and Aliens, with a ton of overt tribute to those movies dished out in the process. On the good side, most of that tribute involves a pitch-perfect reprisal of the dark, terrifying atmosphere of the originals. It’s a welcome and much-needed return to the kind of dimly-lit claustrophobic horror that hooked us in the first place, and director Fede Álvarez (Don’t Breathe, Evil Dead) deserves plaudits for pulling it off - even if it does come at the sacrifice of any great leap forward for the franchise.
Set between the events of the two films, Romulus bases itself around a group of disgruntled young colonists stuck working on the Weyland-Yutani industrial complex of Jackson’s Star. Among them are Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her adopted brother Andy (David Jonsson), a reprogrammed synthetic android. Rain hopes to leave Jackson’s Star with Andy to a better life on the planet Yvaga. Such an opportunity emerges when her fellow salvager buddies (Bjorn, played by Spike Fearn, Kay, played by Isabela Merced, and Navarro, played by Aileen Yu), led by her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux), catch wind of a derelict space station known as the Renaissance drifting into their star system. Naturally, defunct space stations carry the possibility of containing cryopods, which can be used to deep sleep while making long-distance voyages (namely ones that involve escape to Yvaga). Together, the group hatch a plan to get aboard and salvage some. Sounds like a great idea - at least in any other universe except the Alien one.
Unsurprisingly, it doesn’t take long for this brave expedition to go swiftly south. As they dock to the station with their own ship, the Corbelan, Rain and the team soon confirm just how completely abandoned it is - or so they think. Plaques on the wall describe the station as a facility for Weyland-Yutani research, although for what kind isn’t clear. Renaissance style paintings depicting children feeding on their parents also fail to lift the mystery (or the mood). A small ounce of the mortifying truth soon reveals itself when Tyler and Bjorn, stumble on a horde of face-huggers in a laboratory. The face-huggers soon awaken thanks to the reactivation of the lab’s conditioning system. In a bid to save them, Rain is forced to reactivate the remains of an android, Rook (Ian Holm in posthumous CGI), switching memory discs with Andy to complete the transfer.
Rook soon reveals the truth about the station: it is yet another keystone in the company’s continued flirtation with the development of the Xenomorph. As one of the station’s science officers, he’s more than familiar with its history - they were even able to salvage the remains of the creature from the first Alien (as shown in the movie’s opening credits) to clone a new Xenomorph. Somewhere along the way though, things naturally went very wrong and this creation was able to escape confinement and kill all the staff on board. And now it’s out there roaming the corridors of the station. All in all, a great time to drop in!
You’d be forgiven for thinking that this setup seems awfully familiar to a few of the previous Alien entries. And you’d be right. Granted, with the film’s opening we do get to finally glimpse what life is like in the kind of colony that set the stage for James Cameron’s Aliens, even if it does depict a truly dystopian experience for all involved. But the predictable segue that comes with stumbling out into an unexplored territory - in this case a dead space station - and getting something frighteningly, xenomorphically worse than you bargained for is still very much intact. It just now comes with miners rather than marines, salvagers rather than scientists. But the same ride down to an ever-familiar alien infested hell still applies.
Still, if the story is much the same, the cast is certainly different - and despite their collectively young age, far less annoying than the ones that have come before (looking at you, Prometheus). Cailey Spaeny steps up well into the ‘Ripley’ role, with her character Rain eventually going through the same growth arc in terms of being able to turn the tables on the alien threat. Admittedly, this progression does have a touch of the Mary Sue about it. Somehow she goes from frantic survivor with little knowledge on the creature that stalks them, to a crack rifle gunner dropping Xenomorphs left, right and centre in the space of thirty minutes. But she’s an engaging heroine nonetheless, in part thanks to the tender bond she has with her android brother, Andy.
Andy himself is also an enigma: a recurring theme for androids in Alien movies, but this time without the masked malicious intent. Awkward in social interactions and coded to fire off a plethora of Dad jokes thanks to Rain’s late father programming them in, he’s a gentle character sympathetically played by David Jonsson. Jonsson’s performance is probably the standout for the film overall, especially given that a third of the way through, he is made to play Andy a completely different way when his memory disc switch with Rook forces him to embody a colder, single-minded personality deadset on rescuing the station’s Xenomorph project. It’s a difficult juggling act for an actor but Jonsson manages to make it extremely convincing, combining both characters into one shell. Both semi-hero and semi-villain, Andy becomes a pivotal character toward the film’s climax, and thanks to Jonsson, he remains a thoroughly compelling character as the tension dials up.
And there is definitely tension in abundance with Romulus. What the film manages to get right - and which so many of its predecessors bafflingly failed at - is the execution of it all. It might all hinge on the exact same ideas that made Alien and Aliens work so well (the suspense of the former, the thrilling set pieces of the latter), but Romulus revives them all in excellent fashion. The early scenes aboard the space station are almost a thesis on the first Alien, carrying a heavily eerie atmosphere that is boosted significantly by some superb camera work, scenery, and lighting to complement both. Simply put, the Renaissance is a cold, dark metal oubliette, not unlike the Nostromo way back then. Avid gamers might also pick up its similarity with the level design that went into Alien: Isolation (a game that also uncannily took place in a spaceport). Essentially, the setting is Alien done up to 4k standards, and it’s just as foreboding now as it’s always been.
When it needs to ramp up the pace instead of merely creeping it along, Romulus’ set pieces are also enthralling stuff. These moments are certainly where the Aliens influence comes into play, with a number of breathtaking, guns-blazing close encounters with the station's monstrosities that will leave any viewer on the edge of their seat. There’s also a bit of inventiveness to be had with these scenes too: one with the salvage team’s survivors forced to slowly creep through a corridor full of dormant face-huggers is a highlight, as is another gunfight in a Xenomorph hive that is turned on its head when the station’s gravity controls go offline.
The screen time for the alien creatures in this movie also feels like it’s been ramped up since previous efforts - most likely as a means of ensuring these moments do not disappoint. But while they add to the excitement, they do come at a price: there’s no real mystique about the Xenomorph anymore. They’re still deadly, but they’re now gun fodder. Romulus doesn’t shed anything new about their behavior, nor add to their function as intelligent killing machines. For the franchise’s main xeno-species itself, it’s a case of more of the same, which might disappoint some fans looking for more mysteries to be shared about the Xenomorph’s origins.
Another disappointment also has to be in the structure of the plot. It’s not dumb (surprisingly, there is little about Romulus that is as stupid as what came up in both Prometheus and Covenant). It’s just a near-copy of previous Alien entries and also relies heavily on dropping hurried explanations when it feels the need to speed up. A lot of this is down to the presence of Rook as a character. With Ian Holm’s countenance plastered on, Rook essentially functions as the typical android villain of this entry. His motive is attempting to salvage the Alien habitat that has propagated since the station’s demise, and he is more than happy to manipulate its new visitors to achieve it. But he’s more of a vessel from which plot exposition flows when needed than a truly calculating nemesis. His presence is a novelty at first, but it wears off when you realize his dialogue are essentially the paragraphs that the writers couldn’t squeeze into anyone else’s. Then there is the use of Holm in the film anyway - is it actually needed? Probably not. It’s not as though we haven’t had other great actors play androids in this franchise. And again, the use of CGI just isn’t yet convincing enough for the amount of screen time he gets. Far from being a clever nod to the past, it ends up landing awkwardly.
In fact, Alien: Romulus gets into too much of a habit of nodding to the past than it really needs to. As the spiritual step-child of the first two movies, it even lifts dialogue and exact camera shots from them as well. None of these moments work - one particular use of a famous line from Aliens - used for comedic purposes here - even threatens to make all this homage desperate and inauthentic. Which the film as a whole certainly is not. What it is though is certainly cautious in how it treats its IP - almost so nervous in stepping forward that it keeps distracting you with these little easter eggs to give you a sense of warmth and familiarity instead.
Still, Romulus remains gripping throughout, mostly thanks to some great set design, action sequences, and a cast full of youth and enthusiasm for the piece. And even though it spends most of its time treading the tracks of the past, it still manages to take one all-or-nothing gamble with the film’s climax, anchoring it firmly to the lore shared in Prometheus and Covenant, and providing a horrific new twist on the connection between the Xenomorph and those two films. Without it, this would probably just have been a rehash of the great Alien films of old - albeit a fun one. With it, I’m now actually looking forward to Alien: Earth next year. Goes to show what can happen when you actually take risks.
