Plot-wise, Alvarez and co-writer/regular partner in crime Rodo Sayagues largely recycle one of their previous endeavors, Don’t Breathe. A young woman, Rain (Cailee Spaeny, The Craft: Legacy), driven by the desperation to escape a bleak hellscape existence, a remote off-world mining colony in this case, gets roped into a too-good-to-be-true heist. The team—Tyler (Archie Renaux, Shadow and Bone), Kay (Isabela Merced, Sweet Girl), Bjorn (Spike Fearn, The Batman), Navarro (newcomer Aileen Wu), and Rain’s “brother” Andy (David Jonsson, Rye Lane)—break into a seemingly abandoned place, a derelict space station this time, only to find someone is home and very, very violent. Instead of a blind man it’s the aforementioned armor-plated alien killing machines. The plot is almost point for point the same, and while there’s not exactly a turkey baster, there’s not not a turkey baster. (Face-huggers, forced impregnation, you get it.)
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Romulus walks a line between the twisting isolated dread of Ridley Scott’s Alien and the big action of James Cameron’s Aliens. It’s a nice meeting of the minds, with plenty of creeping tension and kickass sci-fi horror. The pace clips along and accomplishes a ton of set up and intricate world building in short order.
In true franchise fashion, this is a future with all manner of advanced tech, but when we see it, it’s old, worn out, and broken down. Nothing works right and everything is cobbled together and on the fritz. Take Andy for example, Rain’s brother is in reality a synthetic, a humanoid robot light years ahead of the tech we have now, but in this world, he’s outdated, a relic from a scrap heap where he was once a marvel of science.
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The film roots around in the corporate dystopia of Weyland-Yutani, but it also shows it from the vantage point of a younger generation. These are the spiritual children of the crew of the Nostromo, kids who grew up in the futuristic equivalent of Wey-Yu factory towns—they live in company housing, eat company food, their parents die from diseases caught in company mines. They grow up desolate, hopeless, and with a one-way ticket to a dead end.
The script establishes this quickly, with little fuss, doling out the details by showing Rain and Andy amid this world and letting the audience pick things up for themselves. It does the same thing with the characters, planting seeds that Rain used to be close with the others, but they parted ways along the path. From there, their interactions, lingering wounds, and clear if strained affections do the work of developing their personalities on screen.
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Even with relatively minimal down-time, the ensemble actors do solid jobs of giving their characters texture and nuance. Small moments and quirks within demonstrate the shared bonds and create the feeling of long, authentic friendships. Like, sure, Bjorn is an asshole, but Kay loves him anyway, you see it when her eyes light up talking about him. Without being heavy handed about it, we see these are people who have been through a lot together, good and bad, and are closer because of it.
Of the chorus, Jonsson stands out the most, portraying Andy as both a preprogrammed automaton and a sibling who carries the weight and pain of knowing who he is. His eyes alone do an incredible amount. As good as everyone else is, this is Rain’s movie, Spaeny’s by extension, and she’s up to the task delivering a complex performance that ranges from competent badassery to emotional turmoil and everywhere in between. If we just so happen to get more movies with Rain as the lead, we could do much worse.
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For as good as Romulus is at recreating the look and feel of the franchise, it’s best when it leaves that as background. The most explicit, in-your-face THIS IS AN ALIEN MOVIE callbacks are shoehorned in. Some of that is to be expected and is relatively minor, but other instances are clunky and awkward, the inclusion of one legacy character especially. It’s not a huge spoiler, as it happens early, around the end of act one, but it’s unnecessary at best, distracting more than anything, and even a bit icky considering the actor has been dead for several years.
This is a fantastic looking movie. From the grubby squalor of the mining colony to the claustrophobic interiors of the space station and the design that’s both futuristic and no-frills working class, it’s all spot on. And because we’re in space, there are plenty of spectacular sweeping orbital vistas that truly stun in IMAX. In a vacuum, I like Benjamin Wallfisch’s score, though in moments of high activity, when it fully kicks in, it can be overbearing to the point of intrusiveness. It seriously cranks up a few times so drastically it jars you in your seat.
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Exciting, scary, and occasionally gooey in all the right ways, Alien: Romulus is unapologetically an alien movie at the same time it brings enough of a shift in perspective that it has a personality of its own and doesn’t feel like a retread. This franchise has the ability to morph and evolve, much like the xenomorphs themselves, popping up each time with their own individual flourishes and tweaks. It doesn’t veer too far afield from the formula, but it’s a harrowing, thrilling sci-fi horror adventure.
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