A probe discovers the wreckage of the Nostromo and retrieves a preserved alien. On the mining planet Jackson’s Star, Rain Carradine is frustrated when the company changes the rules and extends her contract. A group of other young people persuade her to flee the planet aboard a shuttle to relocate on the colony at Yvaga. For the journey there, they need cryogenic chambers and plan to raid an abandoned company space station to obtain these. In order to gain access, they need the help of Andy, a company android that has been reprogrammed by Rain’s late father. They arrive at the station, which has been divided into two sectors named Romulus and Remus. Without realising what they are doing, they break into a sealed laboratory and release a series of alien facehuggers. The aliens rapidly breed and grow to full form, at the same time as the group have less than an hour before the station’s orbit brings it into a collision course with the planet’s rings.
Alien (1979) is indisputably one of the landmark genre films. It casts a huge shadow of influence over the genre most obviously in its unique design of the alien being imitated by dozens of copycat films. It set Ridley Scott on the map as a director. James Cameron made the first of the sequels with Aliens (1986), which is a powerhouse of a film that holds an equal standing up alongside the original – fans still debate which of the two is best. This was followed by other sequels of variable effectiveness with Alien3 (1992) and Alien: Resurrection (1997). 20th Century Fox then conducted a franchise crossover with the Predator universe for AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004) and AVPR: Aliens vs Predator Requiem (2007). Ridley Scott then returned to the series with his two prequels Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017).
Alien: Romulus emerges among several competing announced Alien sequels. Ridley Scott (who produces here) is still promising a third prequel, while in the mid-2010s Neill Blomkamp was reported to be working on his own sequel involving Sigourney Weaver. In between these, James Cameron is reported to have some plans up his sleeve for a return to the franchise. That’s not counting the Alien: Earth tv series that has been announced. It is worth noting that Alien: Romulus emerges as the first Alien film produced after Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox and the copyrights in its vaults.
I have a theory that you can predict how a film is going to turn out in advance by looking at the prior output of the directorial name attached and how this has fared. It can be an effective rule of thumb that if the director has directed a string of dogs then the current project is going to turn out the same way, although this isn’t always perfect. By all reckoning according to this, Alien: Romulus should have been a total dog if you look at the career of its director and co-writer Fede Alvarez.
Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and the android Andy (David Jonsson)
The Uruguayan born Fede Alvarez first emerged on cinema screens as director of the remake of Evil Dead (2013), which I thought was okay at the time, although has now faded in memory. Alvarez then made Don’t Breathe (2016) for Sam Raimi’s Ghost House, a strictly average film where teens invading a house get more than they planned for. Alvarez wrote and produced a sequel Don’t Breathe 2 (2021), directed by this film’s co-writer Rodo Sayagues, which was terrible. However, the single worst film on Alvarez’s cv is The Girl in the Spider’s Web (2018), a sequel to the The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo series, which turns the original dark thrillers into an over-the-top and badly miscast action film. Alvarez’s career seems to mostly consist of remaking or making sequels to other people’s films – he also produced another bad revival with the Texas Chainsaw (2022) sequel. When you look to his laying hands on reviving another franchise, the prospects do not look promising.
The major drawback that Alien: Romulus has right out of the starting gate is that it is essentially now Alien but with a cast of characters all of whom look to be about the age of eighteen (most of the actors are in their early twenties). On the plus side, there is the great Cailee Spaeny, who has done sterling work in Alex Garland’s Devs (2020) and Civil War (2024). The downside might be that Spaeny ends up being dwarfed by the size of the production and rarely gets much opportunity to shine, not to mention seems outfitted and made up almost identical to Katharine Waterston in Alien: Covenant.
The surprise is that despite misgivings one might have, Fede Alvarez actually delivers a halfway decent Alien sequel. I did like his efforts to mix up and do something with the standard. Very few of the other Alien films have done much to alter the basics – a colony built on the original planet, relocation to a prison planet. We get another research station, which was also done in Alien: Resurrection, but at least Alvarez gives us something imaginative to it – the team entering while it is in zero gravity, it orbiting and in imminent danger of colliding into a series of planetary rings.
The deepfake Ian Holm
Alvarez makes sure to pay homage and include elements from the previous films. The events are set in between Alien and Aliens with the discovery of the wreckage of the Nostromo and the retrieval of an apparently preserved alien. There is a substantial reappearance throughout of a deepfake recreation of Ian Holm, playing a different android called Rook. Elements have also apparently been incorporated from one of the Alien videogames. The homage that seemed too obviously to be the film stopping still and winking to the audience in quote marks was when David Jonsson does a “Get away from her, you bitch.” The other homage that did nothing to me was the appearance of a hybrid not dissimilar to the one at the end of Alien: Resurrection. You could also quibble how the other Alien films had the alien go through the processes of its lifecycle over the course of several days, whereas this has aliens going from facehuggers to full-sized in a timeframe of under 47 minutes.
There is a much more interesting plot than usual with the team trying to work out answers to a mystery where we already know the answer but where a sufficient number of twists placed on what we expect to happen. One of the most interesting of these is David Jonsson’s android. When we are introduced to him, Andy seems like a child with intellectual development issues. Thus it becomes quite a shock when we see him reprogrammed as a company android, coldly abandoning one of the team inside a roomful of aliens for the sake of the mission.
In these scenes, Fede Alvarez doesn’t do too badly in spinning Alien: Romulus out as a series of intensive set-pieces – the crew coming under attacking by facehuggers in the laboratory with the door jammed only partially open; a good deal of racing through corridors; Spike Fearn attacking a chrysalis alien only for it to start dripping acid on him; the attempt to escape in a shuttle only for it to crash into the other half of the station.
Fede Alvarez gets quite creative in coming up with new set-pieces – a sequence with Cailee Spaeny turning off the gravity as she faces oncoming aliens and shooting them down, only to find that this leaves globs of alien acid blood floating in mid-air meaning that they then have to navigate around these. (The science nitpicker in me did note that Cailee’s firing hundreds of rounds at the aliens from the gun seems to have no recoil, which in zero g would propel her backwards). This is followed by a hair-raising sequence going up in an elevator shaft and then being caught halfway down it. There are equally gripping climactic scenes with Cailee Spaeny dangling out of a cargo hold in a spacesuit on a cable a matter of feet away from the planetary rings at the same time as the hybrid spits acid that starts eating through the mask of her spacesuit. (Again the nitpicker in me kept wanting to point out that planetary rings are not a uniform field of ice but would be more like boulders strewn across a field).
