BY HARLAN CHAPMAN-GREEN
It’s been a while since we’ve done a movie review here, hasn’t it? Our last review was of Dune: Part Two, which was an incredible watching experience in the cinema, marred slightly by the fact that you needed to have recently watched Part One to remember what’s happening in the story. Thankfully, today’s topic doesn’t require you to remember anything, although if you haven’t seen the 1979 horror classic that is Alien, I strongly recommend that you do; it’s heralded as one of the greatest films of the genre (and of all time) for a reason.
Therefore, it’s with some sadness that I think about how this poor franchise has been treated over the decades. Alien and Aliens (1986) are absolute classics with fantastic reputations, as I’ve partly mentioned. Alien 3 was released in 1992 and brought what I can only describe as a 90s grunge-inspired tone, which was present and topical in this period. I must be one of the few who enjoyed Alien 3, although I recognise that the film isn’t as good as the previous two. Then there’s 1997’s Alien: Resurrection, and that’s about as much as I have to say about that.
We also got two Aliens vs Predator movies; the first was a semi-decent action movie but served no benefit to the Alien franchise, and the second was a cinematic abomination. 2012’s Prometheus was produced and directed by Ridley Scott who directed the first film, but it felt like it needed several degrees in philosophy and history to understand (except for the brain-dead characters) and 2017’s Alien: Covenant showed us that Michael Fassbender is particularly good at acting opposite himself. All in all, pretty bad treatment for one of modern cinema’s most iconic monsters. There have been some compelling entries in other media, though, such as loads of comics, novels, and 2014’s fantastic survival-horror game Alien: Isolation (a must-play, in my opinion).
That brings us to 2024’s Alien: Romulus, and I’m pleased to say this one’s pretty darned good. It’s not a patch on the first two, but after so long languishing in the gutter, it’s good to see a reasonably compelling entry into the Alien saga.
From this point on, there are plot spoilers for this film and a few for other Alien movies, although they mostly come at night… mostly.
Alien: Romulus is set about 20 years after Alien, which puts it way before Aliens. The movie sets the scene with a mysterious spaceship finding the wreckage of the USCSS Nostromo, the ship Ellen Ripley destroyed at the end of Alien. The spaceship is operated by Weyland-Yutani, known in most of the franchise storyline as just ‘the Company’. Weyland-Yutani is the poster child ‘evil movie corporation’ and is consistently listed among the top most evil fictional franchises in all media for their consistent disregard for staff wellbeing in the chase of profits; someone should give them a medal.
Anyway, Alien established that one of the Company’s top priorities has been getting its grubby little mitts on as many Xenomorphs as it possibly can and it’s been consistent in that goal. The spaceship in Alien: Romulus locates a mysterious rock and returns it to a place full of ominously dark lighting and sciencey people in rubber suits. It’s revealed that inside the rock was a Xenomorph, specifically, the Xenomorph from the first Alien film, which survived being jettisoned into space by Ripley in 1979’s classic.
We then cut to our main characters, Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny – Pacific Rim Uprising, Priscilla) and her adoptive brother Andy (David Jonsson – Industry [tv series], Rye Lane), who are stuck on a miserable mining colony planet called Jackson’s Star. The film makes it clear early on that Andy is a Weyland-Yutani-made synthetic person; these have generally been in all the Alien movies either as an ally or, in some cases, an enemy. Andy tells a lot of ‘dad jokes’ in the beginning to try and cheer Rain up, in fact, it happens a fair few times throughout the film, although I’ve heard them so many times in life I don’t mind hearing them here.
After an interaction with a Company representative who makes an excellent impression of a school dinner lady from my youth, it becomes clear to Rain that the Company will keep extending her contract requirement, and she’ll never be able to leave Jackson’s Star. That is until one of her friends gets in touch and invites her and Andy to a meeting.
The meeting introduces us to nearly all of the rest of the characters. We have the man in charge, Tyler (Archie Reneaux – Gold Digger [tv series], Morbius), who is also Rain’s ex-boyfriend. We also have the badass pilot-type Navarro (Aileen Wu – Closing Doors, Skin), Navarro’s apparent boyfriend Bjorn (Spike Fearn – Aftersun, The Batman), who is the film’s resident jackass and is also the cousin of both Tyler and the last character, Kay (Isabela Merced – Transformers: The Last Knight, Sicario 2: Soldado).
When working a shift, the guys found out about an old decommissioned Weyland-Yutani ship floating above Jackson’s Star. They plan to use it to stock up their ship before flying off into space to start new lives on a colony not operated by the Company. Rain isn’t keen on the idea, but the guys need Andy as he’ll be able to interface with the derelict ship’s systems (remember, he’s an android). Some back and forth ensues, and Bjorn makes it crystal clear he doesn’t like Andy or think he’s a real person. However, after some more back and forth between Rain and Tyler, Rain joins in with Andy, and they depart Jackson’s Star. Nobody tries to stop them, so I guess either it’s not a relevant detail or, more likely, the Company is so massive and runs so many colonies it doesn’t care if a few people go missing.
After breaking through the perpetual stormy cloud layer over Jackson’s Star and taking in their first sunlight, the team quickly notice that what they thought was a decommissioned spaceship was actually a massive space station that’s on a collision course with the asteroid belt around Jackson’s Star, although they should had plenty of time to retrieve the supplies they needed.
Andy, Tyler, and Bjorn break into the space station, which has been designed in two halves, one Remus and one Romulus, in reference to the Roman legend. The team find the cryostasis pods they’re looking for but need more fuel to make the nine-year trip, so they continue inside the space station, accidentally locking themselves in a research lab as Andy doesn’t have the clearance to unlock the lab door. Navarro and Rain leave Kay, who is pregnant, behind on the ship and enter the station to help the others.
Meanwhile, the others take the cryostasis fuel from the labs but unknowingly cause most of the Xenomorph facehuggers in the lab to emerge from cryostasis and wake up. Rain takes a memory chip from a damaged android and gives it to the guys stuck in the lab to pass to Andy, who goes into a freaky-looking boot-up sequence and is out of action while the face-huggers jump at Tyler and Bjorn. Eventually, Andy reboots and uses his super robot reflexes to catch a face-hugger by its tail which is impressive, and then uses his new security clearance to open the lab door pursued by a small army of face-huggers. One face-hugger manages to get through to them and successfully lands on Navarro, subduing her.
At Andy’s suggestion, Rain boots up the damaged android she took the chip from, which turns out to be the same model as Ash from Alien, but this one is called Rook. This part causes a lot of friction for some people, as Ash was portrayed by Ian Holm (Chariots of Fire, The Lord of the Rings [two films]), who passed away in 2020, but using special effects and AI-powered CGI was brought back to the silver screen with the blessing of Holm’s family. The effect could be better, at least visually. The vocal performance, done by Daniel Betts (Fury, Sex Education [tv series]), was excellent. It’s just a shame that the facial work didn’t match up. There are more discussions to be had about using actors who have died in films again, but that’s not for this article.
The crew asks Rook if they can do anything for Navarro, and he explains what the facehugger is doing (implanting Navarro with a “seed”). Rook also explains the purpose of the labs, and the crew notice the body of “big chap”, the original Xenomorph from Alien, which ran amok on the station before it was finally brought down by the security forces. Rain theorises that they could use the cryo-pack they’d brought with them to freeze the facehugger’s tail to force it to release Navarro; any other way would’ve caused it to strangle her to death. The plan works, and the facehugger is pulled off of her face with some gruesome visuals.
Unbeknownst to the crew, the chip they gave to Andy to give him security clearance to unlock the lab door also updated his programming, and his motives subtly change to doing what Weyland-Yutani does best: securing the Xenomorph and company assets at the cost of everything and everyone else. Andy tries to stop the crew from taking Navarro back to their ship, citing crew safety, but Bjorn electrocutes him, and Navarro makes a run for it with Bjorn in tow. When they get back to the ship, they seal themselves in, trapping Rain, Tyler and Andy on the station.
As Navarro returns to the cockpit where Kay has been, the inevitable happens in an Alien movie and a chestburster forces its way out of her with some sufficiently gory details to boot. Navarro’s thrashing around during this sequence knocks the ship’s controls, and it crashes into another part of the station, which also knocks Kay unconscious. When she awakes, she tries to leave the station and reunites with Bjorn, who draws her attention to the strange pod on the wall, which is revealed later on as a new stage of the Xenomorph’s lifecycle. It’s been speculated since the original film how the Xenomorphs grow up so quickly, as they go from a small chestburster to over seven feet (2.1m) in under an hour in some cases, so this is an interesting addition to the lore.
Bjorn attempts to kill the Xenomorph in its pod with his shock stick but is injured and eventually killed by the creature’s acidic blood, one of its trademark features. The Xenomorph then begins to wake up, and Kay tries to leave but is stuck. She radios Tyler for help, which is terrible timing as he, Rain and Andy are sneaking through a room full of facehuggers which they managed to trick by heating the room to match their body temperatures (Andy states that facehuggers use a mix of things, including audio and infra-red sensing to detect potential hosts). The intensity ramps up as the facehuggers notice their presence as Tyler guides Kay through the radio, eventually ending in a chase sequence with facehuggers going everywhere. Meanwhile, Kay is eventually able to let herself off the ship but falls out from the high door and knocks herself unconscious again.
This time, when she wakes up, she’s nearly killed by the Xenomorph, which either doesn’t “see” her or, if it does, uses her as bait for the others. When they show up, Andy refuses to open the door, stating that doing so would give the Xenomorph what it wants and get them all killed. The Xenomorph severely wounds Kay and carries her away deeper into the station, while Rain and Tyler realise they can no longer trust Andy as he didn’t open the door for Kay, although they need him for survival. They continue to the bottom of the station where the labs are, and Rook and Andy take turns explaining that Weyland-Yutani has been trialling a new compound taken from Xenomorph DNA, which would give humans a genetic advantage. However, the lab experiments were mutated horribly, as the camera work implied. This substance is a distilled version of the “black goo”, which we became familiar with in Prometheus, and Rook won’t let them leave the station without it.
Andy gives them a version of the Pulse Rifle, which was used by the Colonial Marines and Ellen Ripley in Aliens, musing that although firing it at acid-blooded Xenomorphs in a space station would cause catastrophic decompression, it could appear to them as a threat and cause them to halt in their tracks. As they attempt to escape through what seems to be the space station’s basement, they realise that Kay is still alive and go to rescue her. She’d been cocooned but not impregnated (Andy notices no dead facehugger nearby), presumably because she would’ve been too weak to support a Xenomorph chestburster in her current state. Or, she could’ve been bait in another trap, as this is when the Xenomorphs move in, Tyler is killed, and Andy is also rendered inactive.
Rain and Kay escape on a lift (elevator), which looks a lot like the one from Aliens, and they leave, although Rain is conflicted. Eventually, she concludes that she can’t go without Andy and gives Kay the compound taken from the lab, instructing her to get on the ship and return it to Jackson’s Star. Before the Xenomorphs attacked them, Rain, Tyler and Andy discussed using some of the compound to give Kay a better chance of surviving her injuries. However, they eventually decide against it as they don’t know what it will do. Kay does the opposite of this (although it’s precisely what we’d expect from a horror movie) and injects it into herself when she’s alone.
Meanwhile, Rain returns to Andy and bargains with him, saying that she’ll fix him if he lets her remove Rook’s chip and his new directive to help the Company. They’re eventually trapped as Rook won’t let them back into the station and the Xenomorphs close in rapidly. Rain has the idea to switch the artificial gravity off so that the Xenomorph blood won’t immediately melt through the space station’s hull when she shoots them. The plan works, and there’s a great visual of them floating through zero gravity with the blood all over the place.
They eventually make it back to the lift shaft and begin the slow climb up, although the gravity generators cycle themselves on and off in a ‘purge’ sequence, explained earlier in the film. This happens as Andy and Rain climb up the shaft, although Rain is unsuccessful and appears to fall to her demise, only to be caught (but not impaled) by the tail of a Xenomorph. All hell breaks loose when the acidic blood from the Xenomorphs Rain previously shot melts through the hull, and the classic sci-fi ‘slow decompression’ begins. Also, the lift nearly hits Rain on its way back down, but she and the Xenomorph survive, but Andy lands on the alien and shoots it to save Rain from being killed.
They eventually climb back to their ship and override Rook’s controls, and not too soon, as the station has now started colliding with the asteroid ring around Jackson’s Star, tearing it apart little by little. Rain, Andy, and Kay take over and begin their flight away. The end.
Okay, it’s not the end. Throughout the film, it’s been clear that director Fede Álvarez (Evil Dead, Don’t Breathe) has been paying tribute to past Alien media. Whether it’s with the overall visual appeal, which is reminiscent of Alien, to dialogue such as “get away from her, you bitch” from Aliens, which is re-used and sometimes breaks up the scenes it’s put in. There are also minor details like emergency phones in the background, which, in Alien: Isolation, are the checkpoints the player uses to manually save their game as it has no autosave feature (to increase tension). I’ve been okay with these callbacks, except for some of the quotes, as they’re from media I love and break scenes up, as I’ve said. However, what Álvarez does with Alien: Romulus next is just too far for me.
So, as everyone settles in for their nine-year cryo voyage to their new home, Kay’s cryostasis is interrupted when the pod’s medical software detects a severe issue. It appears that the compound derived from the “black goo” that Kay injected herself with has forced Kay’s pregnancy along and caused her unborn child to mutate into a strange pod, which she gives birth to in a gruesome fashion. As Rain tries to take the pod and throw it out the airlock, not knowing what it is, it somehow secretes acid, causing her to drop it. It begins melting through the ship’s floor to the cargo hold, but not before we glimpse a human-looking baby inside the pod. I think you know where this is going.
Rain then takes a cryo pack and attempts to find the new creature which has grown even faster than any Xenomorph. She returns to where Kay and Andy are, only to discover that the beast (sometimes referred to as ‘Offspring’) has found them, virtually killed Andy and appears to be eating Kay’s dead body. The creature, which is massively tall, towers over Kay and attempts to kill her. She lures it to the cargo hold and attempts to detach the hold from the rest of the ship, but the Offspring traps her. Using her wit, she knocks over the creature’s pod, which is full of acidic fluid. It melts through the hold floor and rapidly decompresses it. She and the Offspring have a final showdown as she’s holding onto a rope for dear life while the beast attempts to smash her helmet, but eventually, the cargo hold is disconnected from the ship, taking the Offspring with it and smashing into the asteroid ring. The film ends with Rain delivering a monologue similar to that of Ellen Ripley as she flies solo to her new home.
Thoughts
There’s a fair bit to unpack here, but I’d first like to say how thrilled I am to have any Alien film up on the silver screen without it coming with unbearably complex undertones and visuals that don’t quite match up with what I’ve come to know. Alien is one of my most favourite films, up there with Die Hard, Schindler’s List and a couple of others, so when there’s new media for the franchise, I’m usually pretty hyped.
As I said, overall, this is a good movie. It’s not groundbreaking, and it doesn’t attempt to revolutionise much in the Alien universe (look at how well Prometheus and Alien: Covenant fared; most people really didn’t like those, and they were “innovative”). I’m glad it returned to the familiar, although I hope we can innovate more if there’s a follow-up. The film blends elements of Alien and Aliens, so I doubt we’ll see a follow-up filled with Colonial Marines. Also, Unless this is your first Alien movie, you already know how the Xenomorphs work and you know all their party tricks. The surprises that made them unique in 1979 don’t work on today’s audiences, but I don’t think that means they should be shunned. Álvarez makes the scenes with facehuggers more gruesome and intense, and the idea of the Xenomorph’s pod on the wall, reminiscent of real-life insects, is unique. Also, they just look cool.
But, with all that said, I’m not unaware of this film’s flaws. Some of the repeated dialogue is unnecessary, and we really see too much of CGI Ian Holm. There are a few scenes towards the end where we only see him through a fuzzy old TV screen and he looks fine there, I wish they’d done more of that. Finally, of course, there’s the Offspring creature. Look, I don’t blame them for trying that, I guess. Mixing Xenomorphs with people isn’t a new concept, but for god’s sake it didn’t work in Alien: Resurrection and it doesn’t work here. The effects are suitably sound, at least; it’s got that over the aforementioned film, and this is the acting debut of Robert Bobroczkyi, who is 7ft 7in (2.31m) tall and undoubtedly has a long career playing massive scary beasts ahead of him. But I wish we had another Xenomorph or something. The Offspring was freaky, though; I’ll give Álvarez that.
So far the film has done well, Wikipedia shows that it’s made over $225m at the box office against a budget of $80m. A mix of some CGI and a lot of practical effects undoubtedly kept the budget lower but don’t subtract from the looks. In fact, they add to it, giving Alien: Romulus a look of familiarity. Like The Creator (2023) which we also reviewed, it’s surprising how much that budget has gone considering that most films these days tend to cost upwards of $200m. As long as someone is able to stop Disney (which owns 20th Century and therefore the Alien franchise) from facehugging the franchise to oblivion, we might see more well-crafted Alien films yet.
Runtime: 119 minutes
Year of release: 2024
Director: Fede Álvarez
Screenwriters: Fede Álvarez, Rodo Sayagues
Music: Benjamin Wallfisch
Producers: Ridley Scott, Walter Hill, Michael Pruss
Production: Scott Free Productions, Brandywine Productions, TSG Entertainment
Pros:
- David Jonsson’s stellar performance as Andy
- The appearance, atmosphere and setting were all fantastic thanks to practical effects
- The Xenomorphs look as good as they ever should and are a genuine threat (especially the facehuggers)
Cons:
- The CGI Ian Holm just looks unsettling, and we see far too much of him up close
- Some of the callbacks are “on the nose” and break the scenes they’re in
- The hybrid… I know it’s been done before but a showdown with another Xenomorph would’ve been better
Rating:
7/10
