If you're looking to make a sequel to Ridley Scott's spectacular 1979 film Alien, time has shown there are a multitude of interesting ways to go about it. James Cameron leaned more into the action with Aliens, David Fincher made a bleak if broken debut with Alien 3, and Jean-Pierre Jeunet dove headfirst into absurdity with Alien: Resurrection. With Alien: Romulus, it's like all of those films have been put into a blender and then spat out into an occasionally fun though largely turgid sludge. Directed by Fede Álvarez, from a script he co-wrote with his collaborator Rodo Sayagues, the film is best when it manages to carve out its own path. The trouble is the overall experience is unimaginative and derivative rather than consistently creative, stumbling infinitely more than it stands alone. It's less a greatest hits of the series and more a rote retread.
Taking place after Alien and before Aliens, the premise is initially promising. An effective bit of opening worldbuilding places us in the life of Rain, played by a compelling Cailee Spaeny of last year's precise Priscilla, as she tries to escape a mining colony run by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation that has brought her nothing but suffering and where she lives in complete darkness. The only family she has left is Andy, played by a layered David Jonsson of last year's wonderful Rye Lane, who is a dad joke-telling synthetic. While not as subtle as Alien, we come to understand how this sci-fi future is no utopia and exploitation remains the driving force. Thus, Rain joins a group of similarly struggling young people in sneaking aboard an abandoned ship floating far above them to steal the tech they need to safely travel to a better world and future.
Despite initially coming at its story from a different angle, Alien: Romulus soon falls into familiar patterns with next to nothing new. Of course, Álvarez is no stranger to taking parts of existing classics to refashion them into his own work. This has been a mixed bag: He made a splash with his 2013 directorial debut, Evil Dead, but he also contributed to the story of 2022's tepid Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Romulus is better than that, but that's faint praise.
The film mistakes doing more as being equivalent to offering something new. Yes, there are more facehuggers and (eventually) more xenomorphs, but never once are they actually scary. The original Alien was a master class in tension as everything from the characters to the setting felt painfully real. Romulus lacks the patience to pull this off, feeling like it is trying to be more like the video game Alien: Isolation. It not only fails at that but ends up inescapably cluttered in the attempt, throwing in complication after complication like a hat on a hat on a hat.
The design of the creatures and the work put into bringing them to life is remarkable, though it's in service of an increasingly shoddy trip down memory lane. The way Romulus ends up connecting with not just Alien, but Scott's underrated prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant as well, completely sucks the life out of the film. Without tipping off the familiar face that appears, the woefully bad effects used to bring about their return are as distracting as they are depressing considering the person playing them has since passed. It's like we're watching Alien: Romulus shamelessly dig up and puppeteer a corpse — a fitting metaphor for the film itself.
This is all quite disappointing as many moments in isolation are unsettling yet breathtaking. They just all drift away so the film can get to an overwrought exposition dump. That Alien: Romulus so consistently insists on connecting to the other films and tying their stories together does a disservice to itself as well as its predecessors. Even as Spaeny and Jonsson give committed performances that start to tap into new emotional ground for the franchise, the film they're stuck in remains more like an ouroboros consuming itself than a fresh take. It's like a product wearing the skin of an Alien movie with nowhere near the same levels of either heart or soul.
Alien: Romulus
Rated R
Directed by Fede Álvarez
Starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson
