Posted by Alien: Romulus; directed by Fede Alvarez; written by Fede Alvarez & Rodo Sayagues, from characters created by Dan O’Bannon & Ronald Shusett; starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced; 2h; Rated R; 20th Century Fox. Theatrically released on August 16, 2024.
Alien: Romulus is easily the third-best Alien film. After the one-two punch of all-time classics: Alien directed by Ridley Scott in 1979, and Aliens, directed by James Cameron in 1986, the franchise has had ups and downs among the various films, comics, novels, video games, and other ways an IP can be used. It’s easy to get stale and overused, with later entries often having a “sigh, another?” feel, mired in decades of expectation and lore. As has been the trend lately across many established franchises: Halloween, Candyman, and Predator to note good examples, Alien: Romulus, directed by Fede Alvarez, shoves nearly all the 40 years of stowaways out of the airlock to present a lean, mean revisit to the franchise. Like the similarly fantastic Prey (the latest of the shared-universe Predator films), Alien: Romulus revisits the familiar tenets that make the franchise work, but in new and exciting ways.
In short, Alien: Romulus is a two-hour terror ride of incredible tension through a series of fantastic sequences, a fresh monster bursting from the chest of a slightly stale franchise.
Twenty-something Rain (Cailee Spaeny, continuing a banner run from Priscilla and Civil War) and her brother Andy (David Jonsson with a soulful, layered star-making performance I could rave on for this whole review) are in a pickle. Working for “The Company” aka Weyland-Yutani, they are “building better worlds” on a dark (zero days of Sun, I thought we had it bad in Seattle), depressing, and dirty mining colony planet. Quotas are up, so they must work more instead of receiving an earned transfer. But they might have a way out! A set of fellow stuck-twentysomethings have found out there is a derelict space station in orbit. It should have exactly what they need to escape the dead-end life. In and out, super easy. Get and go. What can go wrong?
Everything, of course. What they really need is deep within the ship. Something bad has obviously happened. Terror looms as they make their way through. The build to waiting for what we know to come is palpable. It’s delicious. It’s tense. It’s just what I wanted.
Power comes on. Monsters come out. The rest of the film becomes a series of beautifully crafted sequences of terror building on one another to a fever pitch. As the doomed characters try to survive the shifting and escalating situations, it never slows down from the full run. Between hazards, both environmental and monstrous (the way face-huggers are used is magnificent), along with a booming countdown timer (that stays pretty true to the runtime), the increasingly dire situations work to spectacular degrees. There are fantastic set-ups and pay-offs, so well designed I hit myself in the forehead in “I can’t believe I didn’t see the Chekov’s Gun.”
Likely because I was too invested in what was currently happening to notice. I credit director Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues with a keen sense of setting stakes and storytelling in organic ways. As they did for Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe, they take what could be unlikable characters, making us care for them enough, and make them go through hell in their particular band of revisionist and nasty ways.
Looking back, I realized how much of the drive was in video-game storytelling. This isn’t a dig, just an observation of immersive storytelling. Shifting goals, mapping the way across an isolated location (our derelict and its two sides – Romulus and Remus), gaining knowledge and lore, along with equipment (with training), and even a figure of authority guiding our protagonist by video and audio narration. This character could take many of the out of the movie, he has a CG layer on him that occasionally doesn’t work. I’ll admit, the first appearance was a little sigh, but it ultimately worked, completely winning me over. On an aside: some little sighs that didn’t work were ham-fisted direct references to previous Alien films, but I’ll blame the studio for those.
Outside these, Romulus builds on the previous films in fantastic ways. In a combination of the last two points: the final fifteen minutes may have many viewers scream “What in the Lovecraft?” and check out as two unexpected and shunned corners of the Alien universe converge on the movie and take it to a weird end. I won’t tell you the details, of course, but I was on board.
One of the best ways it builds better worlds is in the astounding production design by Naaman Marshall. It marries the worlds of Alien and Aliens, using both of their lived-in worlds to make its own mark. From the colony to the spaceship the production design is top notch performing the legwork of oppression and hopelessness. The colony world could be straight from Blade Runner (continuing the Ridley Scott connection), realizing mentions of previous films (we do see in comics) but also harkening to Fury 161 of Alien3. All of the design is helped by the cinematography of Galo Oliveres. By nature of the series, it’s nearly monochrome, but the use of shadow, dust, grime, and the impressive setting build the unease. Straight-up killer shot choices throughout.
I credit Alvarez for doing his best to keep the production as practical as possible, even gaining the assistance of the special effects and production masters of previous entries. I had a little cheer in the credits, among the long list of effects to see Phil Tippet’s studio credited. Hell yes.
Alien: Romulus does Dan O’Bannon’s legacy proud with a new entry that uses the best aspects of the series, but also blazing its own path. In the end, I’m more of a fan of Alien’s haunted house tone poem focus to Aliens’s beautifully choreographed action chaos, and for me, I’m glad it is more to the former than the latter, not that it doesn’t have great action beats by the end. Thus, it has everything to make any Alien fan glad, no matter which end of the franchise you prefer. I love the first two, and best, entries being drastically different, yet still linked intrinsically. This allows freedom for filmmakers to explore without being beholden. Fede Alverez and team perform extraordinary amazingly in crafting Alien: Romulus. I’ll gladly take more!
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