So, Alien: Romulus isn’t as good as the first two movies in the series, but it’s better than the last two. That’s because Ridley Scott has left the xenomorphs to Fede Álvarez, the Uruguayan director who stays in his lane with films that straddle the line between horror and thriller (Mama, Don’t Breathe, the Evil Dead remake). That tendency is both a good and a bad thing for this watchable installment.
Taking place some time after the events of the first Alien, this movie takes place on a Weyland-Yutani mining colony of Jackson’s Star, where Rain (Cailee Spaeny) works for a pittance alongside a robot named Andy (David Jonsson) who was programmed by her recently deceased parents to protect her. When she realizes that the corporation will never let her go back to her home planet, she falls in with a group of young space pirates who have designs on ransacking an abandoned space station called the Romulus before it crashes into the mining planet’s rings. They need Andy to gain access to the vessel. They have no idea what’s waiting for them onboard.
Fortunately, Andy links up with the remains of the ship’s science officer (which is the same model as Ash from the original film and thus has the late Ian Holm’s CGI-animated and -deaged face) and gets everybody up to speed about the aliens pretty quick. Unfortunately, the link also changes Andy’s programming so that his prime objective becomes delivering an alien specimen to the corporation. In terms of the canon, we do learn what happens when a crew member who is already pregnant with a human baby becomes impregnated with an alien larva, and it isn’t pleasant. That bit of goriness aside, we don’t learn much more about the species, and the movie’s callbacks to the first two films don’t do anything for me. If the movie doesn’t advance the mythology noticeably, at least Álvarez makes sure that it delivers its share of scares and doesn’t drag over the course of its 120 minutes as the crew members fall victim to the aliens in time-honored one-by-one fashion.
The trump card here is Spaeny, who receives a better showcase here than she did in Priscilla or Civil War. She shows the world-weariness of someone who’s working for horrible bosses who keep jacking up her quotas, which then gives way to betrayal as the robot whom she’s come to think of as a brother lets crew members die to save the specimens. During a cool-looking climactic shootout in zero-gravity, she also looks good wielding an automatic firearm against the aliens, whose acid blood floats in mid-air. To a great extent, the original Alien films were anchored by Sigourney Weaver’s presence, and the recent movies never replaced that until now, with a lead actress who is a great deal shorter. I don’t know where the series goes from here, but Spaeny is someone viable to carry it forward.
Alien: Romulus
Starring Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson. Directed by Fede Álvarez. Written by Fede Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues. Rated R.
