Jonah Naplan   August 16, 2024

One of the most surprising and confusing mixed bags of the current sci-fi era, “Alien: Romulus” has so many excellent ideas that it’s disappointing to see all the attention it gives to the weakest ones, undermining its best and most thoughtful self. Director Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe”) displays a clear understanding of what made Ridley Scott’s original “Alien” and James Cameron’s sequel “Aliens” so great, composing a trapped, lived-in space with dark crevices housing deadly secrets. He also pays tribute to the “lesser” franchise entries like David Fincher’s “Alien 3” and the perpetually divisive “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” by infusing his film with a tint of thoughtfulness about the purpose of human life and the inevitability of death. The result is a crowded project that wants to be a little bit of everything, ultimately forgetting to be new and memorable by itself. Instead of mining fresh creative routes, “Alien: Romulus” relies on puzzle pieces from other places and the audience’s intrigue as the glue to hold it all together. But a series of really solid setpieces and a couple of strong performances end up being the real day-saver here, and hold Álvarez’s film down from completely drifting out to space.

This seventh franchise installment follows a motley crew of financially inept workers living on a desolate wasteland without sunlight who decide to escape their torrential situation by raiding a seemingly abandoned spaceship hovering over their planet and stealing its escape pods to shoot off to another galaxy. Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) is the quintessential heroine here, defying an impoverished lifestyle to prove her intellectual worth with her android “brother” Andy (David Jonsson, who was so excellent in “Rye Lane”) closely by her side. Other members of this crew include Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Navarro (Aileen Wu), and you can best believe that at least some of them will die painful, gruesome deaths by the time the film has ended, so don’t get too attached. 

Like the other movies in this franchise, “Alien: Romulus” doesn’t really have any other characters outside of this group to follow so we’ve kind of got no other choice than to try to be invested in them. It’s rather difficult. Many of them are unlikable and/or boring to watch, which makes the first section of this film a bore as we patiently wait for the Xenomorphs to show up and start raising hell. Some later sequences prove that Álvarez knows how to create tension within a cramped space, but you wouldn’t know it from the dull air that swallows these opening moments. It’s a real shame, too, because this “space” the characters occupy is an intrinsically fascinating and raw one; a dilapidated ship with all sorts of hidden passageways and nooks and crannies that feels like a real space that people once inhabited instead of a technically-manicured one created by VFX and green screen.

It also houses a tableau of vicious aliens of varying shapes and sizes but all with the same general directive: attack. The best parts of “Alien: Romulus” are the humans’ attempts to ward off these creatures with little success; that way, when an army of them finally is decimated, it’s a triumphant novelty. Cinematographer Galo Olivares turns in mixed work here—his wide shots enhance the tension of a moment by framing a character in an interesting way or including some sort of detail lurking in the background that helps us brace for the incoming jumpscare. But the cinematography also made it difficult for me to figure out where characters were in relation to each other, which particularly became a problem in the more action-driven scenes.

All the “dramatic stuff,” to the extent that any of these “Alien” movies could actually be called dramatic, is hammered home by a handful of perfectly calibrated performances that are probably much more thoughtful and refined than they ever needed to be for this type of film. Spaeny, who recently stuck her foot in the political-thriller genre with the exceptional “Civil War,” and played the title character in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla,” is particularly excellent here, taking what could have been just a typical female horror protagonist, one who might let out blood-curdling screams as they move from one setpiece to the next, and gives us something more, filling out her character with traits that let us know she’s strong, but also smart and resourceful and acutely empathetic. Similarly entrancing is Jonsson’s android, whose performance is heartfelt and sublimely nuanced, communicating so much with his uncertain facial expressions and tangible melancholy.

We’re rooting for that duo to succeed even as others around them reach their demise, and continue to do so as the film turns a proverbial corner to face an untimely plot twist. Fans will tend to veer every which way, but my feeling is that “Alien: Romulus” didn’t need it in order to be successful and that, if anything, its sudden arrival hampers what could have been a victory lap of a finale for a film rich with big ideas and thematic magnitude. The same goes for all the other less-than-subtle things that Álvarez inserts in, not just as little franchise callbacks that you might miss if you blink, but very obvious, direct references that look straight at the viewer and announce “Hey look at me. Look what I just did. Did you recognize it? Are you impressed? We can be like Marvel too!”

This alleged “fan service” isn’t actually fan service because it hasn’t been earned; instead, the feeling we get while watching it is that the filmmakers threw something in front of our faces just because they could and thought it might be cool for a couple seconds before the plot pushes forward. But all that actually does is turn “Alien: Romulus” into more of a Frankenstein’s monster of other projects and lines of dialogue and characters (a certain CGI head, you’ll know it when you see it, took me out of the movie every time it was on-screen) than an independent, singular film. It wants to be “Alien” and “Aliens” in the way the film is shot and mannered—there is undeniably a retro vibe to the opening credits and the orchestral score that plays throughout—while still attempting to speak the intellectual volumes of “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant.” The simplistic script is ultimately too weak to allow both. 

What results is a jumbled mess of concepts and callbacks that may or may not have something to say depending on how you look at it, but that will certainly be entertaining in its best stretches and perfectly satisfactory when it comes to the goriest kills. I doubt few will examine and tear it apart the same way they have with other franchise entries, but don’t expect to hear many people scream its praises either here on Earth or in space.

Now playing in theaters.