Alien: Romulus is a Shell of an Alien Movie | Review

Well-made, occasionally inspired, consistently entertaining, but a shell nonetheless.

WARNING: Spoilers for the movie Alien: Romulus ahead.

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Much of Alien: Romulus’s promotional campaign has centered around the “back-to-basics” approach that writer and director Fede Álvarez took in crafting the latest entry in the Alien franchise. The film’s setting between Alien and Aliens promised to bring the film back to its roots as a haunted house film set in space before it transformed into a franchise with lofty ideas about the origins of humanity and the terror of actually meeting God-like beings.

Álvarez is largely successful in returning the franchise to its horror roots. As the director of the underrated 2013 Evil Dead, which smartly leaned into the body horror of the original without trying to ape its darkly comedic tones, and 2016’s taut Don’t Breathe, Álvarez did feel like an obvious choice to make an Alien film. He felt like the right director to draw on the claustrophobia of the original, the sexualized body horror inherent in how the aliens reproduce, and the franchise’s more gory elements.

Much of Romulus works well because of Álvarez’s direction. He consistently frames characters from the back as dark silhouettes entering darkly lit, hostile environments. I also love how he uses the facehuggers as antagonists during some of the film’s tenser scenes – he understands that a swarm of facehuggers jumping can tap into an innate fear of spiders or other leaping creepy-crawlies (or maybe just mine). He also crafts a couple of brilliantly tense and creative set-pieces, providing some of the best moments of pure Alien horror in the franchise.

While the performances are largely unremarkable, David Jonsson’s performance as the android Andy is the film’s breakout part, as Jonsson balances the character’s naivety and innocence with its newfound power. It’s the only character arc that feels compelling and almost makes the film’s emotional core, the sibling relationship between Rain and Andy, work. 

But the arc is undermined by the film’s biggest and most controversial misstep, which is the CGI resurrection of Ian Holm. Putting aside the distractingly uncanny CGI, the Rook character is just in the film way too much, without actually accomplishing anything for the story besides providing a familiar face for audiences to recognize and a villainous voice-over for the third act. It’s an unnecessary addition in a film that’s already chock-full of fanservice – I couldn’t have been the only one to groan at the direct quoting of the finale of Aliens. 

The swing the third act takes feels like the most original and creative part of the film, making literal the visual motifs of maternal nurturing threaded throughout the rest of the film and franchise (it also produces the best jump scare I’ve seen in a long time). The design of the child-creature is horrifying and feels like a natural finale to the franchise’s obsession with birth and motherhood. Granted, the plot point is lifted directly out of Resurrection, but it works far better here.

However, at the end of all of it, I can’t help but feel like Romulus rings a little hollow. There isn’t much of an idea behind the film. The Alien franchise has endured not just because of the appeal of the central premise and the iconic nature of the alien, but because the most successful movies in the franchise had very clear ideas and themes. 

Alien is a story of truckers in space trapped in a haunted house that turns against them because of their employer’s indifference to their fate. Aliens is a Vietnam War allegory about a group of overconfident military men who find themselves woefully underprepared and out of their depth in a hostile environment. Alien3 (yes, I’m including it in the “good” category) is one of the most nihilistic mainstream blockbusters ever made, a film about the necessity of self-sacrifice and the pointlessness of faith in a cruel and indifferent world. 

Prometheus is, for all of its flaws, a wildly ambitious film that manages to be a top-tier science fiction-horror movie. A lot of that is because of the nightmare logic that Ridley Scott injects into the film – things happen without much motivation, characters don’t act rationally, subplots seem to come out of nowhere and then disappear without much of a payoff. But it’s still incredibly impactful both as a body horror-infused piece of sci-fi horror and as a story that swings for the fences by wrestling with the theme of “meeting your maker.” It’s also a visually stunning film to watch – Ridley Scott is unparalleled in his ability to craft “big” films. 

Alien: Covenant is the weakest besides Resurrection, largely because of a generic third act that falls flat, but it still follows through on the promise of Prometheus, with Scott crafting a gorgeously empty paradise that becomes hell for the film’s characters. It also ends on a great cliffhanger, and it’s a shame that we likely won’t get to see where Scott was going to take the third film. 

While it’s certainly a coherent and effective film, Romulus feels so preoccupied putting all the pieces in place and ensuring that all of the plot mechanics work that it forgets to include any of the wonder or larger ideas of the previous entries. The narrative choices to incorporate the plot threads of all six of the Alien films makes some sense, but just feels inconsequential. It lacks the ambition of the other Alien sequels, and seems content with remixing the franchise’s greatest hits.

The film’s moderate success at the box office suggests that it will likely get a sequel down the line. I don’t think any of the threads that Romulus leaves demand a continuation. While it would be great to Scott return to complete his prequel trilogy, maybe Alien is a franchise better off allowing different filmmakers to come in and imprint their vision on the franchise. The initial horror and claustrophobia of Scott, the pulpy but emotionally compelling action filmmaking of Cameron, the nihilism of Fincher, the late-stage grandeur of Scott, the body horror of Álvarez – all of these styles make the franchise endlessly rewatchable. I just hope that whatever comes next breaks away from Romulus’s preoccupation with fanservice and remixes. 

We have too many franchises obsessed with that already.

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Alien: Romulus is now playing in theaters nationwide. Rated R for bloody violent content and language