Cards on the table, Alien: Romulus is really good. Great even. It’s a fun and fresh remixing of the series’ core elements, reviving the classic “haunted house in space” vibes that have been somewhat deadened by years of sequels full of lore. Lore that peeled the mystique of the Xenomorph away, and I’d go so far as to say Romulus brings some of that mysterious energy back, even for repeat customers of the series. For its quality, it lands high in my personal rankings, right below Alien 3 and right above Aliens (with Alien obviously in first place).
I liked it a lot.
But I say this knowing that Alien: Romulus, respectfully, ends up performing an amalgam of the Alien franchise’s greatest hits towards its end. I’m left wondering: “Do I really love Alien: Romulus, or is it just the parts of Alien that it’s managed to replicate that I like? Do I love the memories? And is it wrong if it’s the latter?”
Alien: Romulus hints at being the perfect bridge between Alien and Aliens in its first half, which is appropriate since it’s supposed to take place between them as a sort of side story. It follows a group of colonists, trying to escape their dead lives on a pitch-black planet by stealing technology from a derelict space station in orbit known as the Renaissance. Needless to say, it turns into a nightmare scenario, and there aren’t any colonial marines or space mercenaries here to step in and start shooting. This is that classic Alien horror where the search for a way out is much more important than the hunt for a weapon to beat the monster.
But this kind of flawless middle-point energy starts to fall apart when the vibes it sets up are supplanted by story beats and callbacks to the events of almost every other Alien film laced throughout the final act of the movie. The power of the franchise and its iconic scenes being referenced subsumes the back half of the film and makes it weaker than the first half. Which is an odd feeling because the first half is, genuinely, the closest we get to a true horror masterpiece like the original Alien. The tone is uncannily strong in its resemblance to the original films, while still managing to be something completely new.
Writer-director Fede Alvarez’s venture into the world Ridley Scott dragged into existence kicking and screaming with slippery body horror and psychosexual H.R. Giger designs shows us one thing above all else: this man has a comprehensive, front-to-back, undeniable understanding of Alien. There’s a comprehension of the cyclical and back-breaking themes of worker oppression, and the violation of personhood that permeates the series. It shows a deep grasp, not just for the franchise but for its greater meaning and the greater horror it presents of having your autonomy stolen from you. And it’s all presented in the most gorgeous package imaginable.
Romulus is on par with Aliens in terms of its technical innovations behind the scenes and packing the visual punch Cameron did with effects; it’s the best-looking film we’ve gotten since the original, with the environs of planetary orbit and the Renaissance being a perfect blend of brutalism and chunky analog tech that a lot of the other movies have left behind. It’s aesthetically bleak, even with the devastatingly beautiful views of space we get to glimpse, and both halves of the station have no comfort to offer its residents other than the knowledge of imminent chaos through its constant malfunctions.
This doesn’t mean Alvarez doesn’t have any fun with the material. He tosses in a few frantic, Sam Raimi homages into the mix, with the one I fell in love with being a scene I can only describe as “a perfectly executed Evil Dead sequence in space”. The effects that fill these ambitious scenes are full of perfectly blended CGI and practical SFX that ought to win Romulus an Oscar (if the Academy ever does the right thing and molts its dry, nasty, anti-horror cocoon it’s cooking in). If you haven’t learned how to fear face huggers all over again by the time this movie is over, I don’t know, you might need to check your pulse.
And the ragtag crew of workers we’re given to experience the horror through is the perfect array of victims and heroes. Cailee Spaeny and Archie Renaux are great leads in this, pulling off a lot of very emotional moments and making some harrowing scenes so much scarier with their genuinely soul-crushing reactions. Spaeny’s tortured laborer turned even more tortured heroine, Rain, is a great successor in the Ellen Ripley badass dynasty. For me, she’s right up there with Lex from Alien vs Predator when it comes to loving her on-screen presence. And who would have expected Isabela Merced to be such a natural when it comes to navigating the scream queen terrain? My only complaint is Aileen Wu’s steady and steely pilot Navarro, the character that left me wanting more; not because she underperformed, but because she was so cool that I just wanted to straight up see more of her.
But if you’ve seen this film, you know there’s one actor who steals the show, and that is David Jonsson as Andy. When I say he has one of the best performances of the year locked in here, that he is one of my favorite characters in the entire series right up there next to Ripley and David, I mean it with my whole chest. Jonsson is sensational, he’s charismatic, he’s unbelievably skilled, and he has rendered some of the best physical acting I’ve seen on screen in a long time, not just in a horror movie, but bar none. If you see this movie for anything, let it be David Jonsson.
And while I can complain and say the film ends up playing the hits by its end, it’s not like it doesn’t do that well. I can prefer a less drawn-out ending, and less references to the newer films. I can wish they had pulled back with some of their line drops. And I can wish that they kept evoking that perfect feeling of the original film. But it certainly doesn’t make the great entry we have here irredeemable, and it’s certainly not going to stop me from watching it again (in true IMAX, if I can get to one). Alien: Romulus is a wonderful new addition to Alien’s canon, recognizing where it came from and hopefully marking the quality the series is returning to.
