Alien: Romulus (2024) Review

Recent American movies seem obsessed with franchises, however their relationship with them is not as simple as it might seem.

Desperate to both engage a fresh new audience while pleasing an older obsessive fan base the reboots, re-imaginings, sequels and prequels of the last few years play a tricky game of trying to please all the people all of the time and very often completely failing.

What disparate legacy film series from Halloween to Rocky to Beverly Hills Cop to Top Gun to Friday 13th to Star Wars and many more share is years if not decades between instalments. There is also a desire with all of these from the production companies for you to view each new entry as simultaneously a shiny stand alone slice of entertainment and a call back filled fest that joins all the dots you were once desperate to connect.

Obviously the above is impossible (unless you’re taking about Prey!) and my preference is to take all the films of a franchise as a whole weighing up the good and the bad to see which way that particular series is sliding.

It is purely personal of course but in terms of the Alien movies in my humble opinion out of the 6 (or 8 if you include the Alien vs Predator double bill) so far there are 3 masterpieces and a whole lot of crap.*

The big question is… With all this in play before the film even hits the screen, what hopes does Alien: Romulus have? And which side does it tip the balance towards?

With 45 years passing since Ridley Scott’s sensational Sci-Horror changed the genre and created one of the most iconic movie monsters of all time, Alien: Romulus serves as an interquel, set between the first film and James Cameron’s equally amazing all action sequel.

The story focusses on Cailee Spaeny’s Rain, a young orphan stuck on a deadly dirty planet in perpetual darkness and tied to a Weyland-Yutani mining corporation, a company that will have her slaving away until the day she dies. Her group of friends all feel the same and, desperate to avoid the pointless and painful fate their parents faced, they cook up a plan to leave the hell hole behind and start a new life.

The youngsters head up towhat they think is an abandoned space ship that they find in orbit above their planet. There, they hope to hijack the Cryo Pods for their long journey to another world. Vital to their gambit succeeding is access the computer controlling the company craft, and for this they need Rain’ s surrogate brother Andy (played by the David Jonsson), an android programmed by her father to protect her.

Although reluctant to put her life-long companion in danger, Rain eventually gives in. However, on arrival in space, the crew discovers that things are not what they seem. What they thought was an innocent forgotten craft is in fact an empty Weyland-Yutani research station, split into 2 halves and named after the wolf suckling twin brothers of mythology, Remus and Romulus who founded the city of Rome.

As they start scavenging deep inside the eerie facility, the rag-tag team find acid burned floors, strange secured specimens and signs of carnage, as well as a half functioning android that may or may not have their best intentions at heart. But the worst discovery is yet to come and once unleashed this monstrous and unknowable creatures will turn everyones dreams of escape into a petrifying nightmare.

Having already had a hand in the script for 2022’s Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot as well as penning and directing 2013’s Evil Dead with his partner Rodo Sayagues, Fede Alvarez seemed the perfect choice to take a stab at bringing the H. R. Giger designed xenomoprph back from the dead.

Directing as well as writing Romulus, it’s immediately clear that Alvarez gets the right look and feel of the film. Dingy and grimy, makeshift and mangled, the intergalactic future feels exactly like it did back in 1979 aboard the Nostromo. Both the mining facility and base are packed with retro computer screens, keypad controlled doors and badly lit corridors, giving everything a fully functional feel that managed to ground the original movie so firmly, considering its subject.

Another element he gets right is the slow build, which allows not only a great deal of tension to grow, but also a deserved payoff when the horror shifts up a gear. Even here Alvarez correctly takes his time, climbing us up in stages with the introduction of the various Alien incarnations and also by never showing too much too early.

Surprisingly, Romulus gleefully gives a great deal of screen time to the facehuggers, and where previous parts have seen them as a means to a chest-erupting end, Alvarez makes them far more of a threat, increasing their menace many fold, especially in the first half of the film.

When the real horror does kick in there are no punches pulled, and although the Alien’s behaviour and biology doesn’t always make total sense, it most definitely delivers on the scares and screams.

The young cast – although first appearing like something from a teen drama or slasher movie – serve the purpose to both connect with a younger audience but also build a believable set up for the situation which works fine.

Most interesting and nuanced of all the characters is Andy, the bad-joke-telling synthetic human, and David Jonsson gives a stand out performance that is both believable and strangely relatable. With the largest journey of all the androids in an Alien movie, it is a new element that elevates Romulus, especially above Ridley Scott’s own prequels featuring the dire flute and DNA fiddling David.

Sadly its not all positive. While Andy feels like a fully formed creation, Cailee Spaeny’s Rain is a bland and boring Ripley rip off. Worse still is her seemingly encyclopaedia knowledge of Marine weaponry and alien anatomy that springs from nowhere, conveniently offering random answers to dilemmas that the group face. Ideas that multiple films-worth of characters have previously failed to consider.

As Rain’s screen time increases, the films intelligence and originality decreases as the story drags. As Saw X proved, an interquel is an odd beast, as newcomers to the franchise will instantly have elements from other movies that came before spoiled if they jump in at this point. And that is most definitely the case with Romulus. It is almost as if a powerful studio executive suddenly ordered the producers of Romulus not to “forget the fans”, as part way through, a string of jarring call backs and plot links emerge – some of which just about work, but most of which feel like pointless pandering.

Thankfully it’s not all bad, and Alvarez has a final trick up his sleeve as the film progresses further, plunging Romulus into a very familiar yet particularly disturbing climax. This leaves the viewers with a good scare before the credits roll.

All in all, Alien: Romulus gets a lot of things right, and although not reaching the heights of the best in the Alien series it avoids the depths of the worst, paying respect in the right way while trying to keep the audience screaming at the same time.

Want more Alien: Romulus? Fancy hearing some huge spoilers? Check out the Science Fiction Rating System Podcast right HERE.

Movie Rating:

*In case you wondered the 3 masterpieces are Alien, Aliens and Alien3 – but only the Assembly Cut. Alien Resurrection, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are garbage and the Xenomorphs in Alien vs. Predator and Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem are basically superfluous.

Alien: Romulus trailer