Alien: Romulus

The Plot: Weyland-Yutani worker bee Rain (Cailee Spaeny) dreams of a better life in a distant, off-world colony accompanied by her artificial person ‘brother’ Andy (David Jonsson). Stuck in a lengthy contract on a mining planet, she sees an opportunity with her crew including Kay (Isabela Merced) to scavenge a derelict space station above the planet for cryo tubes for the long journey ahead. Bad idea. Upon arrival, the crew find out they’re not alone and in space, no one can hear you scream…

The Verdict: Now 45 years into a franchise that created the ultimate in space terror through H.R. Giger’s perfect organism, the Alien series shows no signs of being blown out of the airlock just yet. There’s plenty of potential here to build better worlds, only to rip them back down again with a splash of acid and a quickly-silenced scream. It’s often easy to forget that its origins lie very much in tacky 1950s B-movies (specifically It! The Terror From Beyond Space), but elevated with a modern sensibility to really send shivers down an audience’s spine. Ridley Scott returned to the series with his origin films in more recent years, but he’s set those aside for now to let another distinctive voice come forward to wrestle and mould this beastie into something resembling a new back-to-basics Alien film. No flighty concepts of evolution at play here. This one is a heart-pumping, streamlined chaser.

Alien: Romulus is anything but a basic film though. This much is evident from the script by co-writer and director Fede Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues. The storyline is set between the events of Alien and Aliens, giving it a specific place in the Alien timeline. The nefarious Weyland-Yutani Corporation is still there and up to no good as usual. Everything from the mining colony to the spaceships and the interiors has a beat-up, worn look to it in line with the ‘used space’ look of Alien. There are plenty of nods in the script to the reference films, but not to the point where it needs them as supports to prop up its own agenda. With Scott on board as a producer and giving the finished film his seal of approval along with one James Cameron (they’re both hard taskmasters), Alvarez must have felt the pressure to perform every day. He takes it in his stride though, pursuing his own particular direction with the script and then knocking it out of the park with one thrilling set piece after another.

That has been one of the great things about the Alien series – the way that different directors have come in and left their own acid-splashed mark on it, for better or for worse. It’s that variety in directorial style that has allowed new concepts to come into play, which show the characters thinking on their feet to battle the aliens running amok on a derelict space station. Alvarez and his team use zero gravity a good bit to show how close-quarter battles with the aliens might work out in those conditions, while the idea of facehuggers acting on heat signatures is effectively used for a palm-sweating escape sequence. Alvarez’s apparent goal here is to combine the haunted house impression of Alien with the rollercoaster ride of Aliens and then amp it up further by having the two crash into each other. All hell breaks loose afterwards, but Alvarez (director of Don’t Breathe) knows how to use a confined setting and then squeeze every drop of sweat and tension out of it.

This is particularly evident in the wild third act, which is like the first two acts in miniature but then goes towards the kind of territory that Alien: Resurrection (the black sheep of the family) couldn’t quite pull off. Alvarez does manage to pull it off with style though for a breathless climax, using old-school puppets and animatronics for added realism. If there’s one fault here it’s that the alien growth cycle seems quite accelerated compared to the previous films. However, given that this is a ticking-clock film with more than one impending disaster on its mind then that’s a forgivable fault. Scott had one direct piece of advice to Alvarez – don’t mess it up (or rather, a cruder version of that in Scott’s typically no-nonsense talk). Alvarez certainly hasn’t, as Alien: Romulus is its own almost perfect organism that gets palms sweating, hearts racing and the mind whirring in the way that only this series can do. Not bad for a human.

Rating: 4 / 5

Review by Gareth O’Connor