The human characters in Alien: Romulus are young adults born into indentured servitude on a hellish mining-colony planet shrouded in permanent night. The closest thing to hope in their lives is the possibility they can stay alive long enough to fulfill infinitely receding service-time quotas, after which they'll be allowed the freedom to go someplace else. In an early scene, the main character, Rain, walks into a grimy company office to claim a long-awaited departure for herself and her synthetic surrogate brother Andy, only for a haggard, dead-eyed clerk to inform her that her quota has doubled and she owes the company at least another five years. The office isn't literally labeled "Sallie Mae," but it might as well be.
Just as the original Alien wore Vietnam War–era working-class paranoia as its skin breached by the titular acid-blooded beast, Romulus—evidently set in between the events of Alien and Aliens, but somewhat off to the side from both—grounds its gore and horror in the plight of Zoomers, born pre-chewed by the gears of a society that has lost the ability to do anything but coerce and extract. Sinister or coldly indifferent corporate machinations have tended to steer prior series protagonists into danger, but the civilization in Romulus is too broken to sustain the chains of authority that make such conspiracies possible. The husk of one such enterprise, already ended in disaster by the time the opening credits have finished rolling, sits in a decaying orbit above the mining-colony planet. To the extent Alien: Romulus has non-alien villains, they too are improvising under duress.
Economic and ecological circumstances are the blind puppet-masters of this derelict society. From our desperate characters' vantage point, the gigantic, mysteriously abandoned Weyland-Yutani Corporation ship slowly plunging toward the planet's meteoroid ring is easily mistaken for a golden opportunity. Rain and Andy join in with some friends' plan to board that ship, commandeer its resources, and make their way to far-off Yvaga, which we're told is no paradise but at least has sunlight. Of course, the ship teems with death.
This is the tradition of the Alien series: combining primal lizard-brain terrors (parasites, infestation, bodily violation, creepy crawlies) with the worldlier monstrosities that supply the simmering background dread in a regular person's life. In that way, the films in the series tend to express or mirror anxieties of their times. Alien (1979) concerns harried blue-collar schlubs unwittingly drafted into an incomprehensible slaughter. Aliens (1986) observes swinging-dick imperial marines swaggering themselves into a meat grinder for the sake of capitalist prerogatives they haven't even been briefed on. Prometheus (2012) swaps out the faceless corporate machine for basically Peter Thiel—a mortality-obsessed futurist shit-for-brains with infinite riches who commandeers all of technology and science in pursuit of consolation for his own childish fears—and its diagonal follow-up Alien: Covenant (2017) looks upon that guy's transhumanist works and despairs. Speaking of which, the funniest joke in that diptych is David, Covenant's post-human villain, confidently misattributing the authorship of Ozymandias, demonstrating the arrogant half-literacy common to all our famous Silicon Valley overlords.
But of course it's the first category, the primal lizard-brain stuff, that really makes an Alien movie sing. The other stuff primes you for the part when the aliens show up and start splattering people, and thereafter Romulus largely dispenses with Themes in favor of near-constant mortal danger. It's a nasty piece of work.
Like director Fede Álvarez's 2013 Evil Dead reboot, Romulus brings a jarring, meaty immediacy to stuff that might otherwise risk becoming familiar this far into the series. The alien's crablike face-hugging parasitoid stage, already one of the most violently revolting creations in movie history, is the star of the film's second act, skittering disgustingly and in numbers and briefly slipping its nasty writhing ovipositor into the open mouth of a character fighting it off—foreshadowing an even more nauseating moment later, when the camera comes in close to show the full ovipositor traversing a mouth in the other direction, as it's pulled from a character's throat. Nearly as bad—meaning horrifying, meaning good—is the Facehugger's wet, flabby respiratory pulsation once it's wrapped itself around a character's head.
Álvarez's task is to restore the marrow-deep, visceral revulsion all of this inspired when people first saw it 45 years ago, and Romulus accomplishes this by lingering not on the alien life-form's anatomy, but on that of the humans. When the implanted alien's embryonic stage bursts from a character's chest, it's a grisly, slow, thrusting process, and the creature erupts not straight outward but at an angle—after all, it's pushing a thick bone sternum out of the way. By that point, I'd basically shrunken into a fiddlehead fern.
The full-grown aliens don't get quite as much to do in Romulus as they did in, for example, Aliens or Alien Resurrection, as Álvarez clearly favors the facehuggers. There's even a fun moment when a character is distracted from the adult alien inches from her face by the sight of one of the nasty little crabs on the wall a few feet away. This turns out to be a good judgment by Álvarez. The adult aliens don't quite prickle the hindbrain the way the facehuggers do, and they tend to resolve a scene to a simple binary: Either they will kill the absolute shit out of the human character, or the human character will kill the shit out of them. They're closer to the end of suspense than the beginning.
As he did in the Evil Dead reboot, Álvarez pours it on, volume scoring yet with admirable efficiency along the way to a breathtakingly deranged climax that I don't want to spoil, except to note that it has fun splashing together memorable elements of Alien Resurrection and Prometheus, and features what I'll remember as one of the greatest jump-scares ever. This is no slow burn like the original 1979 film: Once the aliens show up, there are no significant reprieves, only another dark emergency-lit hallway that must be traversed, immediately, or friend who must be saved from an unthinkable fate.
This firehose approach doesn't leave much room for the characters in Alien: Romulus to exhibit a lot of depth or dimension. There's no opportunity for the kind of bravura go-for-broke performance Jane Levy put on at the center of Álvarez's Evil Dead. With the exception of David Jonsson as the painfully sweet and vulnerable Andy, and a digitally de-aged Ian Holm [CORRECTION: altogether reproduced; Holm died in 2020] as, for all practical purposes, his character Ash from Alien, the cast mostly portrays—effectively—varying intensities of abject misery, terror, and panic for two hours.
Cailee Spaeny, as Rain, is in tears for what feels like four-fifths of the film's runtime. She does good work finding Rain's desperation, grief, and resolve, and the mayhem around her more than justifies the approach. What little humor there is in Alien: Romulus is poignant, in the form of Andy's programmed repertoire of groan-worthy dad-style jokes that he tells Rain as a kind of utterly inadequate soothing mechanism.
I may not be a reliable recommender of this movie: I have liked (to varying degrees) and will defend the virtues of every non–vs. Predator entry in this series, and regard Alien and Aliens as masterpieces. Moreover, I am a Horror Sicko; the stuff my fellow Horror Sicko son and I liked the most in Alien: Romulus is the stuff that made my wife ask, "How can you possibly enjoy that?" when we recapped it to her afterward. Do not watch Alien: Romulus if you know that you do not like violent and frightening movies characterized for nearly their entire length by the constant immediate danger that revolting insectoid monsters will do extremely disgusting things to vulnerable people.
On the other hand, if that is your type of deal, you'll probably enjoy Alien: Romulus. It's scary as hell, and a hoot.
