Alien Romulus: A Review

(Note: Although I will try to avoid spoiling the movie as best I can, at least modest spoilers can be expected below. There definitely are spoilers about the older Alien movies).

Alien: Romulus is the newest installment in the Alien franchise and, while it’s a solid horror-action movie, it’s mainly a by-the-numbers piece familiar to the series and its many clones.  Worth seeing to be sure, but don’t expect huge revelations.

A student gives their professor a piece of their mind after receiving an A- on an essay they generated with AI.

Set in time between the original Alien movie but before its Aliens sequel (and long after the Prometheus/Covenant side-series), Romulus follows a familiar format: toss a bunch of fools into a spaceship with a face-hugger or three and a sinister android and watch the chaos unfold.  The acting is solid, but it’s hard to catch the lightning-in-a-bottle magic of the original film twice.

Much of the fun of Alien came from two things: first, wondering what the hell the titular alien was and even looked like.  That was 1979.  By 2024 you can probably find webpages on alien anatomy, so Romulus doesn’t bother with the hide-the-alien-until-the-end strategy of the original.  Secondly, and it may be hard for many to remember, but part of the magic of the original Alien movie was not knowing who would survive.  Sigourney Weaver wasn’t nearly as well known then as today, and Ripley, as a character, wasn’t particularly highlighted until the end of the movie.  I saw it on television as a young teen brought up on the trope that the captain of the ship was the hero and most important character.  Thus, I was stunned when Tom Skerrit’s very sympathetic captain character was killed halfway through the movie.  What a revelation in storytelling.

By contrast, from the start we know who the main heroes of Romulus are and, as such, who will survive.  The only death tension comes from wondering what order the rest of the characters will die in and how (the movie does get creative there). 

The 1986 sequel Aliens avoided this trap by simply recasting the film not such much as survival horror but as a pure action film.  Aliens was a fine movie, but I always found it less interesting than the original given its obvious predictability (whatever one otherwise thinks about Alien 3 at least it had the guts to kill off Ripley).

All of the Alien movies (including the Prometheus/Covenant prequels) have several common flaws. 

First, the aliens simply grow too fast in complete denial of basic laws of physics. This stretches suspension of disbelief too far.  Somehow, they expand body mass rapidly from the chest-burster to full-grown alien phase without actually eating anything (yes, I know there are theories about them eating metal, etc., but that’s never shown in the films and feels thin as a rationale).  Even the chesthuggers (and something else in Romulus I’ll leave unmentioned) seem to grow too rapidly, largely leaving their hosts intact and hale until the moment they burst loose.

Second, all of the Alien franchise relies on the Wayland/Yutani corporation coming up with really stupid ideas.  And I mean really stupid schemes.  Romulus is no exception.  Also, why does Wayland/Yutani give all their sinister androids the same face?  Surely, people would catch on sooner or later…

Romulus also is devoid of the philosophical beauty of the Prometheus/Covenant prequels.  To be sure, those films had glaring plot holes (notably in the first film, why would the alien Engineers leave a star map on Earth leading back to the weapons depot that they were going to use to destroy Earth?  And leave that map, apparently, at the very same time they were creating humanity in the first place presumably before they changed their minds and decided to destroy it?)  The crossover from Prometheus to Covenant was also clumsy, particularly the casual off-screen death of Elizabeth Shaw (second only to the off-screen death of Newt in Alien 3 I’d say in regard to disappointment inducement).  But the films were also wonderous and full of lore.  I hope we’ll see a return to them.  By contrast, being back in the “who dies next” basics of the main Alien thread feels a tad hollow.

Romulus also has a bit of a third-act twist.  But it’s easy to see coming from miles away.

I’m probably being more critical than I intended.  Overall, Romulus is a good film and well worth watching.  Just don’t expect it to break new ground.