Alien: Romulus review: a solid franchise tribute plagued by odd optics

It’s mind-boggling that Alien: Romulus almost wound up debuting on Hulu instead of theaters. The film’s intricate set design alone makes it one of the series’ most visually impressive chapters, and its practical effects are a welcome change of pace in a summer blockbuster season that has been dominated by uninspired CGI spectacle.

Director Fede Álvarez’s new standalone entry in the long-running sci-fi / horror franchise feels especially primed to speak to a new generation of fans. But as fun as Romulus is to look at, its story plays more like a compilation of the Alien series’ greatest hits than a movie that’s trying to sing its own tune. And the few new ideas Romulus does bring to the table are undercut by its insistence on leaning into some very questionable optics.

Set sometime between the first two Alien entries, Romulus is another horrific tale of how a group of unsuspecting people’s lives are ruined (and, in some cases, ended) by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s fixation on profits and biological weapons. On Jackson’s Star, the Wey-Yu-owned mining colony, desperate workers like Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) are forced to spend decades laboring to earn their freedom to leave. There are plenty of monsters — bureaucratic ones — prioritizing the company’s interests. It’s not uncommon for people to die down in the mines, and life up on the colony’s grimy, sunless surface isn’t much better. 

Even when it seems as if freedom is within reach, there’s never any guarantee that Weyland-Yutani will actually do right by its all-but-enslaved employees. Rain learns that the company’s newly calculated quotes will keep her on the colony years longer than she anticipated, and she knows deep down that her faceless corporate overlords have no real intentions of ever letting her or her synthetic adoptive brother Andy (David Jonsson) escape.

Romulus’ focus on younger characters sets it apart from previous Alien installments, and though the story doesn’t directly connect to any of the older films, it’s inferred that people’s hopeless lives of toil and struggle on colonies like Jackson’s Star are part of what makes voyages like the Nostromo’s possible. Rain, Andy, and all of the film’s other space-born twentysomethings (Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu) know they’ll die before they see a penny of the money they generate for their corporate overlords. That bleak reality makes it all too easy for the youths to come up with a convoluted plan to fly up to a decommissioned space station named Renaissance in hopes of finding a way to zoom off to a better future. But things, of course, do not go as planned.

From its striking opening scene up in orbit, Alien: Romulus’ space horror atmosphere is exquisite thanks in no small part to its massive, intricately designed practical sets. They give the film’s various locations a sense of actual place and a sense of lived-in-ness. Every shot of Jackson’s Star makes it feel like a smoggy, apocalyptic wasteland where the air itself might kill you. In contrast to the colony’s sludge and filth, there’s a retrofuturistic sheen to places within the Renaissance, the film’s abandoned space station. But beneath the thick layers of dust, slimy nightmares await Rain and her friends. And, as tends to be the case with Alien films, Romulus’ humans quickly realize why it’s never really a good idea to mess around with Wey-Yu property.

Because so many of Romulus’ beats echo iconic moments from past Alien movies, very few of the new film’s twists and turns will take longtime fans by surprise as the Renaissance is transformed into a nest teeming with Xenomorphs. Unlike many of Aliens’ previous protagonists, Rain’s crew is so green that they’re essentially helpless to fend off swarms of facehuggers awakened by the kids’ fumbling around. It all makes for a structurally solid enough origin for a new Ripley-esque hero, but the substance of Romulus’ story — which is meant to keep you invested in these people’s lives — falls a bit flat.

Both Spaeny and Jonsson bring compelling energies to their performances as Rain, a steely audience insert, and Andy, a peculiar synth whose outdated hardware leaves him prone to seizures and bouts of social awkwardness that read almost like a kind of neurodivergence. But as many times as Rain refers to Andy as her “brother,” Romulus does a piss poor job of ever presenting the characters’ relationship in a way that makes it feel like one built on believable, reciprocal love. Andy is programmed to follow Rain around and tell knock-knock jokes to lift her spirits; Rain is usually there to reboot him when he glitches out. But she is slow to defend the synth from her fellow humans who delight in poking, prodding, and zapping her brother as a way of raging at the unfairness of their lives. Their relationship is often unconvincing and sometimes completely off-putting.

With Andy, Romulus attempts to riff on the way that past Alien films have framed synths like Ian Holm’s Ash and Michael Fassbender’s David as humanoid avatars of Weyland-Yutani’s nefariousness. Here, that idea is reflected in the way that everyone around Andy treats him like a simple-minded child, programmed solely to keep his sister happy. Executed differently, this dynamic might have worked to make Rain and Andy feel like a duo who keep each other safe. But the abuse Romulus heaps on its sole Black character in service of iffy worldbuilding and plot advancement is its most glaring weakness.

Strangely, Romulus winds up spending so much time showing you how much humans hate synths like Andy that the movie’s left with almost no space to properly develop its other characters enough to make their battles with Xenomorphs particularly memorable. The practical aliens themselves are magnificent, and Álvarez finds several inventive ways to showcase how terrifying the creatures can still be even 50 years after they first appeared on-screen. As the movie rushes to a classic Alien final battle, though, Romulus becomes so comfortable whipping those old tricks out that it feels as if it’s trying to coast on nostalgia rather than flying under its own steam.

That might turn off longtime fans hoping to see something new after years of watching ovomorphs bloom open and chestbursters claw their way out of people’s bodies. But for folks really just looking for a few solid jump scares and a big, artful celebration of the impact Ridley Scott’s imagination has had on the sci-fi / horror genre, Alien: Romulus is enough.