Review: Alien: Romulus (2024)

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Rated R for bloody violent content and language

Score: 3 out of 5

Alien: Romulus is a movie I've seen another critic describe as the best possible adaptation of its own theme park ride. Specifically, it's a nostalgia-bait sequel of the sort that both the horror genre and Hollywood in general have seen a ton of in the last several years, set between Alien and Aliens and filled with voluminous shout-outs and references to both films -- and, for better or worse, the rest of the Alien franchise. It's a very uneven film that's at its worst when it's focusing on the plot and the broader lore of the series, repeating many of the mistakes of other late-period films in the franchise while also being let down by the leaden performance of its leading lady (especially amidst an otherwise standout cast), but at its best when it's being the two-hour thrill ride that writer/director Fede Álvarez intended it to be, hitting some impressive highs with both great atmosphere and some intense sequences involving the aliens stalking and killing our protagonists as well as them fighting back. What few new ideas it brings to the franchise are largely secondary to the fact that this is pretty much a "greatest hits" reel for the Alien series, a film that, for its first two acts at least, is largely a straightforward and well-made movie about people stumbling around where they shouldn't and getting fucked up by creepy alien monsters.

Said people this time are a group of young workers on what seems to be Weyland-Yutani's grimmest mining colony, located on a planet called Jackson's Star whose stormy, polluted atmosphere means that it's always night on its surface. They don't want to spend their lives in this awful dump, so when they hear about a decommissioned spacecraft that's been towed into orbit, they decide to go up there, loot it for any cryogenic stasis chambers and other valuables it may have on board, and then take their shuttle on a one-way trip to another planet, a plot description that right away reminds me of Álvarez's previous film Don't Breathe about a group of crooks breaking in somewhere they shouldn't. When they get there, they find that it's actually a former research facility split into two halves, Romulus and Remus, where scientists had been conducting research into a little something-something they'd recovered from the wreck of a derelict space freighter called the Nostromo... and that there's a reason why this place was hastily abandoned and left to get torn apart by the rings of Jackson's Star. Yep, this place is infested with xenomorphs who are eager to chow down on the bunch of little human-shaped snacks who've just come aboard.

This movie's got a great ensemble cast that I often found myself wishing it focused more on, and which it seemed to be trying to frequently. David Jonsson was the MVP as Andy, a malfunctioning android who serves as the protagonist Rain's adoptive brother. He has to play two roles here, that of a childlike figure in a grown man's body who frequently repeats the corny dad jokes Rain's father programmed into him, and the morally ambiguous figure he transforms into after he's uploaded with data from the station's shifty android science officer Rook, including his mission, his loyalty to the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, and his cold calculations about human lives. Archie Renaux and Isabela Merced were great as the brother and sister Tyler and Kay, the former a hothead who you know not only isn't gonna make it but is probably gonna fuck things up, and the latter as somebody who, at least in my opinion, should've been the film's heroine, especially with her subplot about being pregnant making her struggle to get off Jackson's Star into a mission to get a better life for her child than what they'd face in such a dump. All in all, this was a great cast of young actors who I can see going places...

...and then you have Cailee Spaeny as Rain Carradine. Look, I don't want to hate Spaeny. While she's been in plenty of bad movies where her performance didn't exactly liven up the proceedings, she also proved last year with Priscilla that she can actually act. I don't know if it was misdirection, miscasting, a lack of enthusiasm, or what, but Spaeny's performance felt lifeless here, with only a few moments where she seemed to come alive. The character had some interesting ideas behind her in the writing, such as Rain's background as an orphan, her having apparently lived on another planet before Jackson's Star, and her relationship with Andy, who serves as an adoptive brother of sorts and her only connection to her family, and a better performance probably could've done a lot to bring those ideas to life. But Spaeny, unfortunately, just falls flat. She seems to be getting into it more during the action scenes where she has to run from and eventually fight the aliens, especially a creative third-act sequence involving what the xenomorphs' acidic blood does in zero gravity, but during the long dramatic sequences, she simply felt bored even as the rest of the cast around her was shining. Honestly, Kay should've been the protagonist just from how much livelier Merced's performance was. Give her the focus, and bring her pregnancy to the forefront given how it winds up impacting the plot, meaning that she's the one who has to do that at the end, the one for whom it's personal, while Rain's relationship with Andy ultimately leads to hazy judgment that costs her dearly (and believe me, there was a head-slapper on her part towards the end). Spaeny may have been styled like a young Sigourney Weaver in the older films, but she was no Weaver.

Fortunately, behind the camera, Álvarez makes this one hell of a horror rollercoaster. It's a very fast-moving film, but even so, he's able to maintain a considerable sense of tension throughout, the film clearly being a product of somebody who loved the older films and, more importantly, knew how to replicate what worked about them on screen. Yes, there are the obligatory quotes of the older films that can feel downright cringeworthy with how they feel shoehorned in, even if I did think they did something funny with how they used "get away from her, you bitch!" by making it come off as deliberately awkward from the film's most deliberately cringy character. But Álvarez also knew how to make the Romulus/Remus station a scary, foreboding place using many of the same tricks he learned watching Ridley Scott and James Cameron do the same with the Nostromo and Hadley's Hope, making full use of the busted lighting and the '70s/'80s retro-futuristic aesthetics that have long lent this series its characteristic worn-down, blue-collar feel. Even when the plot was kind of losing it in the third act, calling back to the series' lesser late-period entries in the worst way (I don't really want to spoil how, though if you read between the lines with what I said earlier about Rain and Kay, you can probably figure it out), Álvarez always made this a very fun and interesting film to actually watch.

The Bottom Line

When it comes to revivals of classic sci-fi horror properties, Alien: Romulus isn't as balls-out awesome as Prey was last year, with a whole lot of components that don't work as well as they should. That said, it's still a very fun and intense movie that delivers the goods where it counts, and was quite entertaining to watch on the big screen.