Alien: Romulus ~ Review

When a franchise reaches its third decade a funny thing starts to happen. Originality falls by the wayside and the property cannibalizes itself. This isn’t a problem in franchises that don’t care about continuity and continually reboot themselves, such as James Bond or Friday the 13th. However, in franchises concerned with telling an ongoing saga, they become a fan service delivery valve. Disney Star Wars has been in this rut for a while and you can see it trickling into the MCU. So, 45 years later, after seven main feature films, two crossovers with the Predator, countless comics, novels, and video games – the Alien series gets its first legacy sequel – a greatest hits compilation of all the good and terrible things contained in this franchise.

Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her android “brother” Andy (David Jonsson) live on the mining colony of Jackson Star. This dystopian capitalist hellhole makes the other capitalist nightmares seen in this series look like Beverly Hills. This planet sucks so much that not only do the miners still use canaries, but you don’t see daylight…ever. The colony is under the boot of the omnipresent Weyland Yutani Corporation and Rain and Andy are stuck in indentured servitude, trying to work off their debt to the company so they can earn enough hours to leave. That’s a tricky proposition because the company keeps extending their contract, so, they're trapped.

But there’s hope, Rain’s ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) has discovered a derelict Weyland Yutani space ship, in orbit around Jackson’s Star. This ship contains several cryo-sleep chambers which will allow; Rain, Andy, Tyler’s sister Kay (Isabela Merced), his cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn’s girlfriend Navarro (Aileen Wu) to make the trip to a new planet.  However, when they arrive the derelict ship turns out to be a space station split into two sections the Romulus (for science stuff) and the Remus (for military stuff). However, the space station isn’t deserted, because an extremely deadly life form with a very unique life cycle is also onboard on the ship – you know the one that lays an egg in your stomach and then bursts out of you? Yeah, the Xenomorph. So, our heroes are now trapped running hither and thither on a dingy space station desperately trying to survive. 

For most of its runtime, Alien: Romulus is fun. It doesn’t do anything unexpected and borrows heavily from the previous Alien movies (specifically Alien and Aliens). The film is mostly content being a back-to-basics approach to the franchise. There’s not much ambition or thematic depth to the proceedings, so the movie amounts to a bog-standard Friday the 13th sequel with better acting and production design. It never attempts the mythopoetic pretentiousness of Prometheus or Alien: Covenant, gone are references to Chariot of the Gods, Paradise Lost, Frankenstein, and Prometheus Bound, which is probably for the best as all that thematic weight crushed both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. And while it’s sort of boring to watch new characters discover the life cycle of the Xenomorph for the ninth time on screen, director Fede Alvarez manages to take some impressive spins on the formula – a zero-G fight with the Xenomorph, in particular, is a highlight. Alavarez also leans heavily into the grosser aspects of the Xenomorph's biology and the big goopy, gory set pieces are squirm inducing.

So, the movie is fine…until it isn’t. Because the script by Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues not only heavily references the good Alien movies, it also decides to bridge the gap between the bad parts of the series. I won’t say much more as I don’t want to spoil it, but the last 30 minutes of the film recycles previous ideas and plot threads that this franchise has struggled to successfully implement.

The cast is great, even if some roles are written as just fodder for the aliens. Cailee Spaeny is fantastic and feels like a young Sigourney Weaver at points and her chemistry with David Jonnson is palpable – you get a real sense of history from these two and you buy that they grew up together. Jonnson is the real standout here as the malfunctioning android Andy. Much like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant the android is the most interesting character and you wish the whole movie centered on him. There’s a moment where he gets reprogrammed and Jonnson with only his voice and mannerisms conveys that he’s a new character.

So, in the end, what are we left with? For better or worse Alien: Romulus is the Alien equivalent of The Force Awakens and Rogue One – a movie made out of the component parts of the previous films in the series. This is fine, but eventually, it becomes an empty exercise in mimicry, an alien eating its own tail. It will probably make a lot of money.

Two and a half out of three stars