Alien: Romulus is the newest film in the Alien franchise (the first film was initially directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O’Bannon and based on a story by O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett). Romulus is directed by Fede Alvarez (the incredibly awesome Evil Dead remake from 2013, Don’t Breathe, Girl In The Spider’s Web) and written by Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues.
Alien: Romulus stars Cailee Spaeny in the lead role as Rain, David Jonsson as this film’s synthetic Andy (almost all the Alien films have one LOL), Archie Renaux as Tyler, Isabela Merced as Kay, Spike Fearn as Bjorn, Aileen Wu as Navarro (who we know from the trailers gets her chest blown out by a xenomorph birth), and Rosie Ede as WY Officer.
The film is a direct sequel of the first Alien film (chronologically, in-lore) and follows a group of space colonizers as they explore a somewhat abandoned space station. They are in search of refrigerant they can use to cryosleep for a long 9-year trip to escape the nigh totalitarian reach of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (WYC). WYC is a multi planet-spanning monopolized conglomerate that requires our lead Rain to work a number of years on a planet that ostensibly is so polluted that its inhabitants don’t even know what the sun looks like.
Our lead characters visit the aforementioned abandoned station, which of course isn’t ACTUALLY abandoned, and all hell breaks loose.
Without going into spoilers, after the chestburster scene that was in all the trailers takes place in the film, one character makes an incredibly stupid decision that puts everyone else in immediate danger! Speaking of which, this film has characters making some really questionable decisions, even for the typical “We GoTtA Do SoMeThInG sTuPiD hErE tO AdVaNcE tHe PlOt” thing that horror films tend to do. It worked, but it was noticeable. If you have issues with suspension of disbelief, this could be kind of annoying. But it’s a film about fighting aliens with concentrated acid for blood that is capable of eating through any known material, so I’m not really sure why you would care about realism all that much.
From a character development perspective, this film hits on all marks. The camaraderie is present, you can fairly easily tell which characters care for who more than others (and more importantly WHY they do and why WE should care), understand motivations for some of the early establishing actions taken in the film, as well as comprehend why there’s such a strong sense of friendship and even dependency. And there’s one character that returns from the first Alien film that plays a pivotal, critical role. It was a joy to see that character, at least initially. Very unexpected!
But in the third act, it turns into “Generic Sci Fi Action Flick”.
To be fair, cinematographer Galo Olivares (Gretel & Hansel) does an excellent job with composition and camera placement, putting the viewer into a fully immersive, almost dystopian human settlement and an abandoned, slightly dilapidated space station to great effect. At no point does this film NOT feel like the original Alien film from a visual perspective. It absolutely LOOKS like it’s the sequel to the first Alien film. And Naaman Marshall (Mortal Kombat, Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, The Dark Knight) handles production design with expert levels of attention to detail. The space station in particular looks MORE detailed than the set designs in the first Alien film! And the Alien in this film looks BETTER somehow than the OG one. Also, there’s a NEW creature introduced in this film, played by 7’7″ tall basketball player Robert Bobroczkyi that is genuinely disturbing from a design perspective. There is very little CG present in this film from a creature perspective. All around impeccable practical effects work from the production team on this front, though I would have loved a ton more gore, considering this is a Fede Alvarez film. He kind of made a name for himself on being able to do great gore in a horror flick. Blood ABSOLUTELY spills, but this sadly lacks gore in the capacity I personally was looking for in an Alvarez-helmed piece. Still, the original design concepts pioneered by H.R. Giger that spawned the very first Alien film are very much present here in this one, and quite strongly!
As stated before though, the film really does lose that sense of dread and fear that permeated the original Alien film. This film does have tons of in the first two acts, but by the third, it felt like it was time to wrap up production, so they just decided to end it.
