Alien: Romulus review: a down-and-dirty creature feature that plays it too safe

Most of Alien: Romulus, the umpteenth installment in a series forever docked at the intersection of horror and sci-fi, takes place aboard a derelict space station. You know the kind: cavernous, leaky, closer in ambiance to an abandoned factory than a Starfleet hub. You also know what happened to all the missing people. They ran afoul of that spindly, leathery, parasitic abomination Ridley Scott sent bursting out of a chest cavity and into the pop-culture imagination back in 1979. 

The place should give us the willies, but there’s actually something kind of… cozy about it. Maybe it’s the retro flicker of the computers, their primitive graphics and ancient lines of green code painting a vision of the future dreamt up in the past. Or maybe it’s the way the mawlike air vents open and close with a comfortingly familiar metallic whine. Fans of the hostile universe Scott first imagined have been here before. To them, a floating deathtrap mausoleum looks like home.

Throwback production design is just one way that Romulus takes Alien back to basics. It follows in the wake of Scott’s divisive prequels, Prometheus and the more baroque Alien: Covenant, which rewound to the beginning of the saga the director kicked off without recapturing the primal simplicity of his opening installment. Those were oddball epics with divided priorities, straining to reconcile their gory fan service with loftier inquiries into the matters of creation and destruction. Romulus is not so ambitious. It’s a down-and-dirty creature feature with no delusions of grandeur — a straightforward Alien movie for the bloodthirsty purists. Unfortunately, it goes about tapping into the soul of the original in a rather thuddingly literal way.

Our characters this time are desperate youth — a group of twentysomething future laborers caught in the exploitative employ of Weyland-Yutani, the evil corporation that greedily enables the gnashing in every Alien movie. It’s cool to see the series center on working-class heroes again, but these kids don’t look like they stepped out of a mineshaft so much as a Levi’s commercial. Where are the interesting faces and personalities of Veronica Cartwright, Charles S. Dutton, or Ron Perlman? 

At the center of the team of makeshift scavengers, tiptoeing down the wrong corridors in search of cryogenic escape, is our resident understudy Ripley. Played by Cailee Spaeny, the delicately expressive star of Priscilla and Civil War, this orphaned heroine has forged a sibling bond with a defective company android (Rye Lane’s David Jonsson) who starts out like the movie’s artificially intelligent version of a retrograde neurodivergent sidekick — think Rain Man as an actual counting machine — before his allegiances are unwillingly complicated. In so much as Romulus has any interpersonal drama to go with its gooey run-and-scream mayhem, it hinges on whether the robot will land closer to Ash than Bishop on Alien’s spectrum of varyingly friendly AI crewmates.

The “brother”/sister relationship is one way Romulus marks itself as the work of writer-director Fede Álvarez, who brought a similar familial dynamic into his record-breakingly bloody Evil Dead remake. This is also the second movie he’s made, after the terrifically suspenseful home-invasion thriller Don’t Breathe, about a group of down-on-their-luck burglars breaking their way into the wrong darkened property. The Alien series has always accommodated the sensibilities of new filmmakers. Mostly, what Álvarez brings to the assignment is a slick panache, and a deep affection for the analog qualities of the franchise, to which he pays special tribute via the physicality of his sets and practical effects.

When Romulus is really cooking, it achieves a squishy glory. There’s some great splatter in this movie, and a few inspired set pieces. Álvarez does creepy-crawly wonders with the Facehugger, the scurrying, spider-like larval stage of the alien; we’ve never seen as much or this many of them before. And a nifty, tense sequence involving zero gravity and the beast’s famously acidic blood shows that he’s thought about how to vary the action of the series, even as he clings to its monster-movie fundamentals. That said, Álvarez hasn’t figured out much new to do with the Xenomorph itself. Maybe no one could. Seven entries into the franchise — or nine, if you count those regrettable title fights against the Predator — the novelty of H.R. Giger’s sinewy, biomechanical space roach has worn off.

The longer the movie goes on, the more its fresh ideas start to recede into the background of its collage of references. What Álvarez has really assembled here is a sampler platter of Alien leftovers. The class politics, the question of machine morality and sentience — these are microwaved themes, mere scraps of the full meals Scott and Cameron served. Set between the events of Alien and Aliens, Álvarez’s legacy sequel (or “inquel”) seems content echoing old stories instead of telling a compelling new one, though it deserves credit for working in nods to the franchise’s less popular corners, too. Fan-favorite lines are rotely repeated. Easter eggs, like a little drinking bird of ’70s vintage, are trotted out.

The Alien series used to boldly reject the past. Each new sequel felt like a reinvention — sometimes cruelly so, as in the criminally underappreciated Alien 3, which incensed fans by harshly extinguishing the light of hope on which Aliens ended. The paradox of Scott’s prequels is that they used the host body of Hollywood’s laziest franchise strategy — the origin story — as an excuse to take the series in a new direction. The worst you could say about them is that in substituting the timeless minimalism of the original Alien for dense mythology, they misplaced the inherent appeal of the premise. But isn’t that better than simply playing the hits, or scavenging Alien‘s lineage for applause lines?

Romulus has been made with craft and a clear admiration for the movies that came before it. (Even a little Prometheus DNA squirms into its petri dish of influences.) But its artistry is eclipsed by a more cynical Hollywood logic, an exploitation of nostalgia that would make the execs at Weyland-Yutani blush. Around the midpoint, we reach the pandering nadir: a cameo so ethically dodgy and aesthetically displeasing that it zaps you right out of the story. It might be easier to wave off this development as a passing miscalculation if it didn’t feel like a tidy symbol for the cannibalistic spirit of the endeavor. Synthetic reanimation is the movie’s whole deal.

Alien: Romulus is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.