‘Alien: Romulus’ Review: Nasty Surprises Lurk In The Dark Corners Of Fede Álvarez’s Faithful But Inventively Tense Sequel

The seventh instalment in the increasingly aimless Alien franchise is better than it has any right to be, a genuinely thoughtful reimagining that pays stylish homage to the one-two punch packed by Ridley Scott and James Cameron in 1979 and 1986 but adds in some inventively nasty surprises of its own. Sigourney Weaver is nowhere in sight, and Cailee Spaeney might seem, at first glance, to be an unlikely successor, but the Priscilla star certainly earns her stripes by the end of Alien: Romulus’ tight and deceptively well-judged two-hour running time.

Ditching, for the time being, all the boring conceptual non-sequiturs that flooded in after Alien 3 — the creationist story of the xenomorphs and the ongoing soap opera of the Wayland-Yutani Corporation, with its airy-fairy plans to use extraterrestrial DNA for … whatever — Alien: Romulus sets out its stall roughly midway in the 57-year gap between the events of the first movie and the second. An ominous but slightly underwhelming opening sequence sets the scene if not the tone, with the wreckage of the Nostromo being investigated by a space probe, which scoops up what appears to be a giant fossil bearing the sinister, skeletal hallmarks of Swiss artist H.R. Giger’s most famous creation.

At this point, it’s worth stressing that you need your head tested if you think a major studio is going to give such an iconic IP away for major reconstruction: Fede Álvarez’s film is, as one might expect, a loose retread of Scott’s original. This time around, though, the blue-collar drudgery is baked in; Spaeney’s character, Rain Carradine, is part of a younger generation in hock to the industrial complex. To borrow from Tennessee Ernie Ford’s still-relevant 1955 coal-mining blues lament “Sixteen Tons,” they owe more than their soul to the company store.

The story starts in earnest on Jackson’s Star Mining Colony, a grim, no-wattage dystopia where workers, we overhear, are “dropping like flies.” Rain lives there with her brother Andy (David Jonsson); he is slow, fumbles his words and tells crummy jokes, but there are no prizes for guessing that Andy’s really an android, reprogrammed by her late father, since it’s about to become a major plot point. Rain is trying to get them both transferred to a colony many light years away, where the sun is reckoned to shine, but her employers already have moved the goalposts, extending her contract for another six years.

Rain is contacted by her ex, Tyler (Archie Renaux), who proposes a way around this unexpected impasse. He’s heard of a decommissioned space outpost where they can get hold of the cryogenic space pods that will help them get away from Jackson’s Star for good. They will need Andy more than Rain, however, since — being a product of the Wayland-Yutani Corporation — he has in-built access to the craft’s restricted areas. It will, of course, be an in-and-out job; within 36 hours, the outpost will collide with an asteroid belt and be destroyed, but with the cheerful naivete of someone who doesn’t know they’re about to become monster munch in a genre movie, Tyler predicts they’ll be out in half an hour.

Once off Jackson’s Star, Alien: Romulus never will return from space, and Álvarez’s visually flawless film is a close match for Scott’s film in this regard (cinematographer Galo Alvares’ excellent work is especially well served in Imax). The outpost is a suitably dilapidated, desolate place, and the sleep pods soon are located. They’re short of cryo-fuel, however, and it is the search for this McGuffin that exposes Rain and her ragtag band of scavengers to the racks and racks of face-huggers that are piled high, lying dormant in airtight pouches.

It takes a good while to get there, and, even before release, Álvarez has already come under fire for sticking to Scott’s slow-burn blueprint; indeed, it’s a good 45 minutes or so before the film’s first jump-scare. But the time spent on atmosphere and eerie world-building pays off; if the original movie was a haunted house, Alien: Romulus is a ghost train, making full use of the various stages of the creature’s development — from face-hugger to chest-burster to full-scale xenomorph — without overplaying his hand, as these movies are wont to do. There are few new tweaks — who knew that face-huggers detect changes in room temperature? — but such ET biology is kept to a satisfying minimum.

The biggest draw on Alien movie lore is the character of Andy, who, as a “synthetic,” follows in the tradition of Alien’s Ash (Ian Holm) and Prometheus’ David (Michael Fassbender). Being an android, Andy is susceptible to hostile reprogramming, especially once the team encounter the remains of a synthetic named Rook (played by a familiar face in an ingenious surprise cameo). While it pleasingly subverts the bad-robot trope of the early movies, Andy’s duality is as much a minus as it is a plus: Is he ever being his real “good” self, since he is, of course, not real? Jonsson handles it well, but a lot of exposition is lost to confusion as we ponder whose best interests he presently might have in mind.

Fortunately, Alien: Romulus isn’t too reliant on dialogue (the title is explained, but good luck figuring out what it actually means). Instead, with its increasingly gory set pieces, Álvarez’s film is a largely visual experience and a much scarier popcorn movie than its trailer (and rating) might suggest. More so than any director after Scott, including Cameron, Álvarez dives into the icky sexual subtext of the xenomorph’s life cycle, which bloodily caps a seemingly innocuous subplot that begins when the film’s most minor character reveals she is pregnant.

There’s a (literal) injection of mad science from the sequels, which brings a certain amount of creepy novelty to the otherwise predictable false ending, but Álvarez doesn’t put fan service first, even if certain moments are lifted from the back catalog shot for shot. Instead, he works hard to bring something of his own to the project, which he does in a virtuoso scene that finds Rain dodging silver globules of acid alien blood while firing hundreds of rounds from an M-41A pulse rifle in zero gravity. If that catches your interest, Alien: Romulus will catch your eye; with its spectacular darkness, it could be the surprise hit of the season.

Title: Alien: Romulus
Distributor: 20th Century Studios
Release date: August 14, 2024
Director: Fede Álvarez
Screenwriters: Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues
Cast: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hr 59 mins