“Get away from her–you bitch,” a character stutters in a relative monotone, turning an iconic moment from Aliens into a somewhat more halting, slightly funnier one in Alien: Romulus.
What compelled director Fede Álvarez to include this moment in Romulus is anyone’s guess. It’s a line that makes no real sense in context, it’s out of character for the person who says it, and there’s no particular reason to use that particular word on this particular alien monster. In Aliens, when Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley first originated the line, it was shouted in rage, full of emotion, as Ripley stepped out in a power loader to challenge the massive alien queen and save Carrie Henn’s Newt. It was an invective thrown by one would-be mother at another.
In Romulus, the line is a reference to another movie you really liked from 40 years ago. It’s forced into the mouth of this character in this movie, it seems, to get you thinking about that other film. After all, in the modern age, reminding you of something you previously liked is what sequels are all about.
Alien: Romulus rattles off lines like this, repeatedly referencing Alien and Aliens, as the movie tries to recall what made the first two films in the franchise such enduring classics. It misses the mark, however, because while both Alien and Aliens have sharp scripts full of quintessential moments, it’s not the lines that people like about those movies. It’s their subdued tones, slow-burn approaches to storytelling, and emphasis on character development–so that when people start getting dragged into air vents by giant, glistening monsters, the audience is worried about them.
Romulus is anything but subdued. While it captures, often extremely well, the dingy working future imagined vividly in Alien, it can’t do subtlety. There’s not a single facehugger stalking through a half-flooded room, sneaking up on the humans, but a dozen of them, skittering over each other as a wave of spidery death. There are almost none of the quiet moments of oppressive terror that defined the Alien franchise, as characters move through silent spaces, wondering if something unseen is stalking them–there are only booming scenes of unrelenting music and incredibly loud stingers attached to jump scares as the monsters loom huge for close-ups and go straight after their victims.
The camera arcs through corridors past ravaged bodies and cocooned victims, showing none of the spare and anxious approach of either Ridley Scott or James Cameron, and when the alien shows up in earnest, we see a ton of it, with shot after shot of its face approaching a would-be victim, not just recalling the very best image of Alien 3 but xeroxing it over and over again. The approach is in line with Alvarez’s 2013 remake of Evil Dead, an appropriately bombastic, over-the-top entry into a bombastic, over-the-top franchise–but it feels nothing like Alien.
It’s not a total loss. Alien: Romulus successfully returns to and builds on the believable, lived-in capitalist hellscape implied by Alien and further fleshed out in Aliens, and does a phenomenal job of capturing the banality of its rampant evil. Protagonist Rain (Cailee Spaeny) in particular is compelling as a young woman trying to escape a Weyland-Yutani company town with her “brother,” an adopted, decommissioned android named Andy (David Jonsson). Rain’s powerful empathy keeps the movie driving and relatable, while Jonsson does an excellent job of switching between multiple states of the android’s personality and adding depth to the concept of the “artificial person” that Prometheus and Alien: Covenant tended to make confusing and a bit mustache-twirly.
Those latter Alien movies have moved to largely encompass discussions of humanity’s relationship with its near-human creations, and Romulus uses Rain and Andy to approach that relationship from a fascinating new angle. The concept of human and android as siblings, rather than parent and child, helps breathe additional life into some elements of the franchise that could otherwise be getting stale.
The production design is also consistently impressive. Beautiful sets create a mess of gorgeous scenes. In terms of lighting and framing, Alien: Romulus understands the look of every Alien movie that has come before it and cribs from all the best stuff to make a whole lot of beautiful, spooky images. There are also some powerfully horrific moments, particularly with Romulus’s take on the classic chestburster idea using practical effects, and that aforementioned scene with the facehuggers is taut and exciting. And the movie is at its best when it’s taking the reality of the world as seriously as it can, like when the characters think critically about dealing with the aliens’ acid blood–although Romulus can’t help but take that concept to a maybe ludicrous extreme.
If only the rest of the cast got as much attention as Rain and Andy do. Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fern, and Aileen Wu do as much as they can as a bunch of kids hoping to steal some key equipment from a defunct Weyland-Yutani space station that mysteriously shows up in the orbit of their mining colony, but they don’t get a ton of help from the script. Their dynamic is strong when they’re together, but they’re quickly split up and sent off to accomplish the movie’s other goals, and little time is spent to flesh them out. That’s mostly because the script is barreling toward showing off how Romulus connects with established canon, particularly the original Alien.
Romulus is, in fact, a direct sequel to Alien. It begins with a ship finding the wreckage of the Nostromo, Ripley’s vessel from the 1979 film, and recovering the creature she blasted out of an airlock, which survives thanks to the monster’s ridiculous hardiness. There’s a bunch of exposition about what the Company is hoping to achieve by doing this, and Romulus smartly pivots from “the evil executives want to make a bio weapon” to the new, if equally doomed, motivation of “the evil executives want to make medicines.” Alien: Romulus broadens the series’ themes to think about intentions and the ethics of sacrificing one person to save several, and it has a couple fascinating moments where it seems poised to address something more nuanced than the franchise’s continual over-reliance on the evil corporation doing the usual evil corporation things.
Ultimately, though, this all just feels like it’s in service of creating more opportunities to call back to other movies. Romulus adds a little to the conversation and ultimately is playing a lot of the hits of the Alien franchise, as well as a few of the duds that should have been left in the past.
Those duds include the last 20 minutes, which I can’t describe basically at all without instantly stumbling into spoilers. They feel like an escalation borne of a sequel’s desperate need to inject something bigger and more into the idea to justify its existence–the T-rex stomping through San Diego. The finale is somehow both needlessly new and a retread of ground the series has covered in the past, and while it started out unsettling, it eventually just seemed discordant and unnecessary. A few last-second references didn’t really help that feeling, either.
There are a few bad movies in the Alien franchise, and judging it by its peers, Alien: Romulus does all right. The bar is low, however, and try as it might to conjure up the good feelings of Alien and Aliens, Romulus falls well short of them. It lacks the terrifying subtlety of the best movies in the franchise, and while it’s scarier and more intense than the more overwrought ones, like Prometheus, it lacks their dedication to exploring ideas. Romulus falls somewhere between, ready to drop reference after reference to the series’ best but still failing to capture the essential nature of what made Alien great.
