Alien: Romulus

4 outta 5

Alien: Romulus is a crackerjack entry in the Alien franchise that flips between knowing homages, splicing in bits of continuity, flat-out ripping off others and repeating some bits exactly. It can be sort of a “greatest hits” version of a few Alien movies all combined into one, and its willingness to take from multiple corners of the mythology is kind of neat. But really it excels at doing some interesting Alien bits, flipping around some bits, and dutifully recreating some others. It doesn’t reinvent the franchise, but it does recombine it into some interesting ways.

Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is a miner on a desolate planet run by the Weyland-Yutani Company, and wants to escape with her synthetic android “Brother”, Andy (David Jonsson). To do that, some of her friends, Tyler (Archie Renaux), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), Kay (Isabela Merced) and Navarro (Aileen Wu) discover an abandoned space station floating above their crummy planet that they want to raid for resources to start a new life on a distant planet. But they find evidence of a great slaughter, a dead Alien creature, and a broken-down android named Rook who was performing experiments on the creature. Now crawling facehuggers want to implant embryos in the crew, and the station is slowly starting to descend into oblivion. And when the bigger Xenomorph creatures arrive, they must fight their way to survival. 

There is definitely Alien stuff in here, even if it takes awhile but, frankly, every dang Alien movie takes awhile. Most of them are just 40 minutes of people wandering around before the bugs show up, and that tradition continues here. When things kick in there are some various scare scenes that use Alien creatures in unique ways. This one has more facehuggers than usual, showing how nasty these little buggers can be, like when they attack a bunch of folks stuck in a locked room. There is an exceptionally drawn out Chestburster scene and the dang thing just slowlllly unravels as the camera lingers on it, usually those bastards flee quickly which is probably why it was so unsettling.

Some things are cool callbacks to the original few films, and some are just direct lifts of lines like “I can’t lie about your chances, but you have my sympathies,” or the iconic “Get away from her, you bitch.” Which is fun to see again but it’ll never be as cool as it was in Aliens. There are a lot of things getting shot out into space that was already done at the end of Alien and Aliens, although there are interesting new twists like Xenomorph blood floating in zero G. A significant chunk of third act revelations in Romulus are derived from some reveals in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which is unexpected. And the finale is a mashup of the evolutionary body horror elements of Prometheus and Alien: Resurrection.

The crew stumbles across the broken android Rook and, via VFX trickery, it looks like Ian Holm’s Ash from the 1979 original. It is a rather convincing recreation although he looks most convincing when he’s talking to them on a glitchy monitor. Rook has pretty much the same attitude are Ash, with a near reverence for the Perfect Organism Xenomorph. Holm is credited twice in the film, once as performance reference and thanks to the estate of Ian Holm so they approved his image usage. It’s not like when WB just stuck Christopher Reeve in The Flash and didn’t tell his family.

There are some compelling dynamics with the characters that keep the audience invested instead of just waiting for them to get picked off. The “brother and sister” relationship between Rain and Andy is emotional. Andy starts off as a glitchy android that she looks after, and even one of the characters dismisses Andy as just a piece of garbage her dad found. Rain doesn’t want to admit to Andy that he can’t come to a new world, and even the android he feels emotionally wounded. When a chip from Rook is uploaded into Andy, the latter starts to become more interested in preserving the Alien above all priorities. Rain is mostly like the previous protagonists in the series, complete with using a pulse rifle to mow down Xenomorphs at the end, but she sells the tension well. Fearn as Bjorn is really mean towards Andy so when he gets chased around by monsters it is easy to dislike him. Renaux as Tyler gets in a scene where he shows Rain how to use a Pulse Rifle which is sort of a direct lift of a scene with Hicks and Ripley in Aliens. Wu as Navarro sells the bejesus out of a chestbursting scene, and Merced as Kay gets stuck in the worst Xenomorph related situations that just get messier and more horrible as it goes on. It is kind of impressive.

There are a lot of remakes and remixes throughout Alien: Romulus, but overall it certainly feels like a piece of the Alien universe. And when it gets messy it stands up with some of the messiest moments in a very messy franchise, which is saying something. It may crib a bit liberally from the Alien series, but the big bug moments play energetically, and when it gets rolling, it is a tense ride until the end.