David Jonsson in Alien: Romulus (2024). Photo by 20th Century Studios/20th Century Studios - © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
Alien: Romulus is a lovingly crafted thrill ride that largely succeeds but is held back by a few key issues
There are spoilers in this review: please consider before reading
RATING: 8/10
By Patrick Greene on behalf of Perfect Organism: The Alien Saga Podcast
Alien: Romulus tells you a lot about itself in its first few minutes. The 20th Century Films logo hangs on the penultimate tone, à la Alien 3; the opening titles appear in period-accurate Helvetica type against a black, foreboding starfield; the ship that materializes out of the inky void is, by all appearances, a beautiful miniature—a physical model—into which the camera gradually pulls us.
We eventually settle on a blister on the ship’s exterior. It’s a window, and it’s looking down into the ship’s bridge, and that bridge is whirring to life in a near-identical manner to the opening moments of Alien.
And then we see where the ship is headed: a debris field. A fifty-foot, intact, legible piece of hull plating floats toward the camera indicating this is the wreckage of the Nostromo, a ship that was obliterated at the end of Alien by at least three nuclear-scale explosions. And in that same debris field, we see what Weyland-Yutani has been after: the Big Chap. Who is floating with this same debris field, even though he’d been jettisoned by the escaped Narcissus after Ripley had piloted that lifeboat well enough away from the Nostromo to survive those cataclysmic self-destruct blasts.
Anyway, we see all this and we know two things to be true: this movie is extraordinarily authentic to the aesthetic of Alien (and, to a degree, Aliens); and this movie is going to have some moments we’re going to need to turn our Alien fan brains off to fully enjoy.
Some of the greatest moments in all of Alien: Romulus happen early in the film, on the Jackson’s Star mining colony. The level of detail—the extras, the costuming, the anti-WY graffiti—is up there with the absolute best moments in the franchise. Jackson’s Star feels like a completely real place with real people in it, and it manages to feel authentic while also feeling new and unlike anything else in the Alien franchise. Anyone who’s seen the Special Edition of Aliens has had a glimpse of the next closest thing to Jackson’s Star: Hadley’s Hope as a bustling terraforming colony. But Jackson’s Star is so different: it’s a place of dread, despair, darkness, a mining colony defined by disease and death. It’s a place people are desperate to get away from. The sort of place a ragtag group of young adults might be looking to escape.
These ragtag young adults hop aboard the Corbelan and point their bow towards a derelict WY station promising cryo tubes that would let this motley crew escape their soot-encrusted fates, and our story begins in earnest.
Horror movies live and die (especially die) by the quality of their characters. Some of the characters in Alien: Romulus are mostly there to get killed, as is often the case with these things. Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu) do a lot with relatively little to work with, but not enough to make their respective deaths feel earned. Bjorn, in particular, seems to exist only to fulfill two purposes: to antagonize the synthetic person Andy (David Jonsson) and to get killed, spectacularly, by the alien.
Kay (Isabela Merced) spends a good chunk of the early movie asleep on a cot aboard the Corbelan as she’s quickly revealed to be pregnant. Once she’s up and at ‘em, though, she brings a wonderful humanity to her role. She gets the tough assignment of telegraphing genuine fear through the camera many times: during Navarro’s chestbursting (that scream!), hiding from a stomping alien inches above her head, recoiling in terror from the nightmare unleashed from her womb in the final act of the film, etc. She’s completely believable in all of these critical moments, while still feeling like a well rounded character with a past and a future.
But the absolute heart of this movie is the aforementioned Andy (Jonsson) and Rain (Cailee Spaeny). Their brother-sister relationship brings an emotional urgency to the film. Tasked with a single directive from their dying father, Andy’s purpose is “to do what’s best for Rain.” Jonsson, who to me is the standout of this entire film, embodies this directive with his entire being. His sweet, open face; his kind, warbling voice; his tension-alleviating dad jokes; his shuffling gait. This, of course, makes his “upgrade” all the more frightening.
Cailee Spaeny and David Jonsson in Alien: Romulus (2024). Photo courtesy of Disney - © Disney
This “upgrade” comes from a chip taken out of Science Officer Rook (voiced by Daniel Betts), who is unquestionably among the weakest parts of the entire film. Rook has a lot of dialog, and almost all of this dialog is exposition. Exposition makes almost any film weaker, but especially when we are thinking to ourselves, “Why would these mining colony escapees need to know about the biological makeup of laboratory samples?” Or, “Why, if they clearly created an entire puppet, would they decide to digitally superimpose Ian Holm’s likeness onto it?”
And one of the biggest questions of all: “Why would they have this digital Ian Holm face be among the most brightly lit things in the entire film?” I’ve seen the movie three times so far, and each has been on an IMAX screen. Watching his uncanny digital face bumping around a giant screen is just so distracting. Surely they could’ve used a new actor? Did Weyland-Yutani just decide to make every single science officer model look identical? And if that’s the case, wouldn’t the crew of the Nostromo have picked up on the fact that Ash was synthetic? Or, for that matter, wouldn’t the crew of the Corbelan know what they were looking at two decades later?
Again, it’s a moment where you either turn your Alien brain off a bit or get progressively crankier the more you think about it.
Luckily, the human performances absolutely pull us back where we need to be. Archie Renaux turns in an action-star-in-the-making performance as Tyler, Kay’s brother and Rain’s former lover. And Cailee Spaeny, who goes on to be our Final Girl, is just magnetic to watch on screen. Watching her go back for Andy towards the end of the film, it’s impossible to not think “Ripley.” But Rain has a gravitas all her own. She does a brilliant job balancing vulnerability and toughness, and those are two attributes that Alien desperately calls for.
It’s Jonsson, though, who really steals the show. Andy is an instantly iconic Alien character. In a franchise where synthetics have been done over and over again—and played brilliantly, by actors like Holm and Michael Fassbender and Winona Ryder—Andy still feels absolutely fresh. His arc is the arc the film hinges upon. His transition from protector to company agent to protector (and finally to protected!) is just wonderful to behold. I can’t wait to see Jonsson in more projects. I have a feeling there will be many more coming soon.
Let’s talk about those Final Girl moments toward the end. As is the case with virtually every Alien film so far, the movie ends with a “blow it out of the airlock” sequence. This one’s a little different—it’s a hole in the floor and it’s The Offspring—but it’s the same thing. Again. Daniels knocks the alien out of the Covenant’s docking bay at the end of Alien: Covenant; Ripley knocks the Big Chap out of the Narcissus at the end of Alien; Ripley knocks the Queen out of the Sulaco at the end of Aliens; Ripley 8 uses another acid hole to knock a different Newborn out of the Betty at the end of Alien: Resurrection. That means when watching these films in order, there will be four movies in a row that end with a woman knocking a creature out of an airlock into space.
At a certain point, it feels like the writers are just running out of ideas. Or running out of trust for the audience? How are filmmakers not noticing this? Alien: Romulus has lots of amazing sequences using freezing instead of flamethrowing—why not freeze and shatter the Offspring?
I’ll use this opportunity to get my only other real complaint out of the way: “Get away from her … you b-b-bitch.” This almost singlehandedly ruined my first viewing of the film. It’s so meta, so 2024. It is a moment where an Alien film knows what it is, and it sticks out so egregiously because the entire rest of the movie is so authentic. The rest of the movie feels so true to itself and its story. Why play an iconic line for cheap applause at the emotional climax of the film? This means anyone watching the movies in chronological order will have Ripley’s genre-defining line in Aliens completely recontextualized. Alien doesn’t need a catchphrase. It doesn’t need to hand-hold. It needs to scare the hell out of us.
And that brings me back to some of the things that work so brilliantly in this movie. Starting with the Offspring. At two of the three screenings I’ve attended, the full-grown Offspring’s first appearance garnered audible dread from the audience. As Alien fans, we live for moments like that. That sense of revulsion and fear is so important in these films, and Alien: Romulus’ final act delivers that in spades.
The creature design across the board is phenomenal in Alien: Romulus. The aliens themselves (referred to as “XX121 Xenomorph” for the first time in a movie, delighting those of us who love the Expanded Universe (the term was coined by S.D. Perry for The Weyland-Yutani Report and appeared for the first time in 2014’s Alien: Sea of Sorrows by James A. Moore)) look absolutely spectacular. I’m not sure they’ve ever looked better than this. The design is a bit of a “greatest hits” xeno interpretation: the Big Chap dome, the digitigrade Stompy legs from Alien: Isolation, the fibrous jaw tendons from the Dark Horse comics. They’ve even reduced the size of the dorsal tubes, bringing the creature back closer to H.R. Giger’s original intentions (to have none at all). The alien just looks amazing. End of story.
Photo by 20th Century Studios/20th Century Studios - © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.
The facehuggers, too, got some MAJOR upgrades in Alien: Romulus. With their barbed claspers and scorpion-poised tails, the huggers are more frightening (and beautiful) than ever before. We knew from the trailers that the facehugger was going to be the breakout star of this movie, and the movie delivered on that promise in a big way.
Fede Alvarez and Co. also did a wonderful job of updating familiar tropes in new and terrifying ways. We’ve known “acid for blood” has always been an issue, but in Alien: Romulus it’s a major hurdle to overcome. The zero-G acid sequence is an instant classic, and one of those moments where I found myself wondering why none of us ever thought of it until now. Similarly, the temperature-regulated facehugger escape was a great way of maintaining tension and suspense without resorting to gore or jump scares.
Not that this informs this review, but it’s worth noting how memorable this entire experience has been for Alien fans around the world. Many of us have flown to far-flung places to watch this movie together. We’ve been driving around collecting popcorn buckets. We’ve been having late-night debates about what we saw in trailers. We’ve been freaking out about so many beloved “hardcore fan” references making it into an Alien film (the Alien: Isolation save station and generator! Alex White’s Plagiarus praepotens being referenced in a Hollywood movie!). This entire experience has been tremendously memorable.
And at the end of the day, we have Fede Alvarez and his incredible team of artists, designers, sound engineers, etc. to thank for that. It’s so continuously clear watching this film that it was made by people madly in love with Alien. Every frame is (chest)bursting with visual detail and care. Not just the easy things, like the dippy bird and the cornbread. But the real-deal things, like why certain greebling exists on air ducts and why a science lab would have a specific shape on a space station. Watching the station disintegrate into the (absolutely gorgeous) dust ring at the end of the film, I feel a real sense of loss.
Lucky for me I can always go back and start from the beginning.