ALIEN: ROMULUS - Mark Reviews Movies

Alien: Romulus, 20th Century Studios

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Review by Mark Dujsik | August 16, 2024

With Alien: Romulus, co-writer/director Fede Alvarez has essentially cobbled together the best or more intriguing ideas from the previous entries in this series. Then again, that's the way it always has been with these movies following Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien, which this one, wisely, imitates more closely than any of the other installments.

From the second film (still the best of the sequels, because it expanded the world of the claustrophobic first one and agilely shifted into bombastic action), Alvarez and co-screenwriter Rodo Sayagues pull some automatic rifles, some of the heavy action, and one particular one-liner. From the third one, the filmmakers, perhaps, take the larger space of the story's setting.

Somehow, they even find something worthy of swiping from the fourth misfire of an entry, although it's probably best to keep what that thing is out of this review. Since the prequel series is still up in the air, there's not much of that here, and let's just be glad the screenwriters either ignored or forgot the strange cross-over movies that pitted another alien monster against the xenomorphs—a move that resulted in that offshoot series' second installment, one of the worst big Hollywood studio movies in recent history, at least.

What's past is once again present in Alvarez's own spin-off entry, which is set between the original film and the second one, takes place in a different part of space than either of those, and introduces a new sextet of characters to encounter that "perfect" species of killer alien. Most of the cast doesn't survive, but we already know that's going to be the case from all of the other installments, not to mention just about every horror movie that has come before, after, and in between them.

It's a retread, obviously, but that's not necessarily a detriment. It's not in this case, because the filmmakers are smart about what they borrow, using the familiar elements to craft an effective homage of a thriller, and clever in coming up with a couple of novel ideas within the established mythology of the franchise.

The most important components taken from the first film, perhaps, are the aura of mystery (starting with a wordless prologue that opens with a spaceship drifting through the pure silence of space), the sense of practical world-building, and the gradual build-up of suspense until the alien is unleashed on the unsuspecting crew. In this one, the characters are a group of young miners, trying to work off a debt of more than a thousand hours of work on a colony where people routinely die from accidents or diseases and the sun never shines. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) has completed her assigned work, but the sinister company that has been operating in the background of these movies since the beginning decides to double everyone's mandatory hours.

That makes the escape plan being organized by a group of friends quite enticing. A deserted ship has entered the planet's orbit, and if they can steal the cryo-chambers aboard it, the group can safely make the nine-year trip to an independent colony in a different part of the galaxy. With nothing to lose and everything to gain, Rain joins Tyler (Archie Renaux), his cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and their pals Kay (Isabela Merced) and Navarro (Aileen Wu) in the mission.

Along for the job is Andy (David Jonsson), another fascinating specimen in the series' long line of android characters. He was programmed by Rain's dead father to protect Rain at all costs, and she sees Andy, a slightly malfunctioning and very sad-looking robot, as a brother now.

Once aboard the derelict vessel that turns out to be a massive and divided space station, Andy gets some new programming from the station's synthetic science officer (That character is an unnatural digital puppet, which serves as an unnecessary and questionable callback to a prior film). Once the aliens in their various forms come out to hunt for temporary hosts in their invasive gestation process, Andy sees the cold and sometimes cruel logic of what it'll take for any of them to survive the ordeal. The odds are terrible from the start and only become worse from there.

The basic plotting here, obviously, amounts to characters being unaware of the threat, the aliens making their presence known, and the helpless humans trying to avoid being killed. Since the station was researching the xenomorphs before inevitably being overrun by them, there are lots and lots of aliens in this entry, although Alvarez and Sayagues know to take their time with smaller setpieces before all hell breaks loose.

Both the isolated suspense sequences and the louder action-oriented ones are staged well, such as when a crawling, spider-like one escapes its holding chamber, using the water of the flood laboratory to surprise the trapped scavengers, and how that builds to the unsettling sight of dozens of the creepy-crawlers chasing the crew through a corridor. If it all feels a bit routine for a while, that's fine, because the craft displays a good amount of care, with Alvarez favoring practical effects over digital ones and making those digital ones feel tactile. A shot of the alien's acid blood eating someone's fingers to the bone is especially grisly, and that blood becomes the centerpiece of a later scene, in which the lack of gravity transforms the green goo into a swirling maze.

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to make these monsters feel new again after 45 years and eight movies, but to be fair, Alien: Romulus isn't attempting something so ambitiously foolhardy. No, it simply wants to make the aliens frightening, and in using the best of the old tricks and a few new ones, the film succeeds at that.

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