Review – Alien: Romulus

Fede Alvarez plays the hits.

For better and for worse, Fede Alvarez returns the Alien franchise to the horror movie roots laid by Ridley Scott in 1979. Less a haunted house movie in space than a slasher among the stars, Alien: Romulus is a bloody, claustrophobic entry. But it also diverts the franchise from the provocative ideas posed by Prometheus and Alien: Covenant to deliver a safe and familiar – albeit entertaining – greatest hits package. 

Cailee Spaeny stars as Rain, a worker consigned to a miserable mining outpost in what appears to be the armpit of the galaxy. She hopes for a transfer to a planet where she can actually see the sun, but the Weyland-Yutani company – which, of course, runs the entire Alien-verse economy – keeps changing the requirements. Her only companion is a rundown android named Andy (David Jonsson) that her father programmed with two directives – take care of Rain and have a ready supply of dad jokes. 

Hope comes when a group of Rain’s friends approach her with a way off the rock. They’ve discovered a decommissioned ship orbiting the planet with enough cryopods to take them to a more pleasant stretch of the solar system. They just need Andy to hack into the system so they can board the ship and take its cargo. Upon entering space, they quickly discover this isn’t just a ship; it’s a space station with working labs. The crew, unfortunately, is all dead. And, of course, there are some nasty, icky monsters with acid blood seeking their next meal. 

This is all right up Alvarez’s alley. The director made a name for himself with the 2013 Evil Dead remake and Don’t Breathe. Both movies set the formula that Alien: Romulus follows – a bunch of young people try to get away from their problems and end up locked inside a remote location with something or someone that wants to rip them apart. 

Evil Dead was a reimagining of that franchise, taking Sam Raimi’s mix of supernatural horror and slapstick comedy and turning into something unrelenting, mean and nasty. Alien: Romulus is less reinvention and more remix. The series has taken many directions since Scott’s original, and Alvarez’s job is to go back to the basics. That means labyrinthine ships with endless corridors, facehuggers and chestbursters, acid blood and pulse guns, duplicitous androids and evil corporations. It’s cover band filmmaking, repackaging the familiar and delivering it in a way that the audience can shout “remember that” in between screams. 

And a good cover band can be a lot of fun. Alvarez crafts effective suspense sequences and doles out solid scares. If, like me, your find the face huggers revolting, you’ll squirm during the scenes where the heroes have to navigate rooms full of them. Multiple xenomorphs stalk the station, and gallons of acid blood are spilled. The film moves fast and its atmosphere is soaked in dread; it looks great in IMAX. As a piece of brand management, it hits the expected beats, celebrates the iconography and introduces characters who are analogs for our old ones. It’s this franchise’s Force Awakens, and I mean that as a compliment and a criticism. 

But the joy of the Alien franchise was always the unpredictability of its tone and directorial vision. Scott’s work of claustrophobic terror was followed by James Cameron’s macho war movie. David Fincher delivered a brooding bit of horror, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet brought a touch of dark whimsy. In recent decades, Scott returned – we’re going to pretend the Alien V Predator installments don’t exist – and took the franchise in a heavy sci-fi direction, musing on the creation of humanity and religion. Alien was always a director’s franchise, allowing artists to bring that world to life with their own ideas and aesthetic flourishes. Alvarez’s instruction seems to have been to take Alien, Aliens, and bits and pieces of mythology from the previous films and put them in an easy-to-digest package. 

It’s not just that the film leans on franchise hallmarks like Xenomorphs and facehuggers; you couldn’t really call it an Alien film if it didn’t (although you could call it Prometheus). It’s that Alvarez, like J.J. Abrams did with Star Wars, leans heavily into the aesthetic of Scott’s original. Without going into spoilers, the film finds a way to link back to the original movie, both through canny Easter eggs but also through a sure-to-be controversial and extremely unnecessary CGI resurrection of the dead. Its rhythms – right up through its final moments – keep nudging the audience in the ribs with Alien references. It might hold together better as a piece of entertainment than Prometheus or Alien: Covenant, but it lacks those films’ curiosity and big ideas, just as it lacks Aliens’ go-big-or-go-home attitude and decision to turn an intimate horror film into a balls-out action movie. Most of what works in Alien: Romulus has already been done before, arguably better. 

There are two exceptions. The first involves the character of Andy. Jonsson gives the film’s best performance as the synthetic, who is beginning to run down and exists only to be a companion for Rain. His performance is sweet and sad. But when he gets an upgrade from Weyland-Yutani – which takes hold in one of the film’s eeriest images, as Andy resets – the android finds a new directive and some upgrades. Jonsson’s fantastic as the sympathetic heart of the film and switches easily between heartbreaking and terrifying. The second exception involves the film’s extended third act, which remixes some ideas from Prometheus and Alien: Resurrection in ways that don’t quite work; a new creature design is unveiled in the film’s final minutes that elicited more laughs than gasps. But at least it’s something other than more hide and seek with the Xenomorph. 

I’m aware this review sounds overly negative, and I want to stress that, for what it is, I had a good time with Alien: Romulus, and I suspect audiences will, too. Alvarez knows how to deliver scares, and this movie’s set pieces are going to play well on the big screen. The cast is unremarkable but fine; Spaeny is a decent Ripley surrogate, with a bit softer edge than Sigourney Weaver but still able to wield a pulse blaster. The other characters basically break down to Pregnant Girl, Bald Girl, Mean Boy and Nice Boy – they’re little more than alien chow – but the actors do what they can. The set design is gorgeous, particularly the brief moments we get early on in the depressing star mine, and Benjamin Wallfisch’s score is wonderfully unnerving. 

Like I said, Alvarez knows his craft. Alien: Romulus is a well-made and entertaining night at the movies. It might be the work of a cover band, but it’s a good cover band. It’s probably a more enjoyable film than most Alien sequels and prequels, and definitely one of the more visceral and scarier entries in the franchise. But I miss the wild swings of the other films, which, while not always successful, felt like they followed a directorial voice rather than a corporate mandate. There’s a big universe out there, and there are numerous directions to take this franchise. Unfortunately, it looks like Disney just wants to keep regurgitating what worked before instead of taking a risk on something new.