Review: "Alien: Romulus" is 'Alien' as theme park ride

And I (mostly) mean that as a compliment

For me, the Alien films stand toe-to-toe with Tom Cruise’s Mission: Impossible movies as Hollywood’s best, most interesting, and most reliable long-running franchise. I love almost all of them, each in very different ways, and the one I don’t love – 2012’s prequel Prometheus – led directly to Alien: Covenant, one of my favorite blockbusters of its decade, (I wrote about it at length for the latest Movie of the Week column), so I cannot fault it too much. The world Ridley Scott, Dan O’Bannon, H.R. Giger, and all else involved created in the 1979 original is so rich, so open to different genres and tones and ideas, that no less than three great American filmmakers left their distinctive stamp on it in succession – Scott, James Cameron, and David Fincher – and even the most maligned entry, 1997’s gonzo B-movie extravaganza Alien: Resurrection, demonstrates more of the personality of its director, Amelie’s Jean-Pierre Jeunet, than it is typically given credit for. I adore these movies, and I love just how malleable and protean they have continually proven themselves to be.

All of which is to say Fede Álvarez’ Alien: Romulus, the latest installment and the first directed by someone other than Scott since Resurrection almost 30 years ago, is both a very real treat and a very slight disappointment. It enthusiastically executes at least a little bit of everything I love in these movies, showcasing stupendously detailed production design, outstanding cinematography that constructs some truly awe-inspiring widescreen tableaus, and wonderful practical effects work for the aliens themselves that’s on par with the series’ best efforts (if I have one complaint with my beloved Covenant, it’s that the aliens are too often realized with CGI – that’s not a problem here, as the creatures are once again grotesquely tactile). The film is incredibly creative in how it deploys all the iconographic beats we know are coming – the facehuggers, the chestburster, the acid blood, and so on – always managing to hit the expected notes in unexpected, inventive ways. It builds elaborate Rube Goldberg-esque sequences of terror and tension where the heroes find themselves juggling ten different threats at once, all of which converge at the most inconvenient point imaginable. Like Álvarez’ Evil Dead remake from 2013, Romulus is full-bore horror and unrelentingly intense, and it has more than a few truly gnarly images and ideas (and sound effects) up its sleeve that will take viewers aback. If horror is your favorite flavor of Alien, as it is mine, Álvarez will not leave you disappointed; he knows how to do this, and he does it very well.

And yet – if I want to look this gift horse in the mouth, I could also say that just about everything Romulus does well colors within the lines we have come to expect from the past six installments. It does not take the tone, themes, atmosphere, or aesthetic of the series in radically new or unexpected directions the way each of the previous films did, and given how many of those movies were roundly rejected by the public, that will no doubt be welcome news to many viewers. But if you, like me, love this series for all the things it can be, for the way a film like Alien 3 or Covenant can brutally reject what came before and proceed to tell a story the viewer never knew they wanted, that can feel a bit disappointing. Only a bit, I want to stress: this is not a J.J. Abrams Star Wars movie or a Jason Reitman Ghostbusters sequel, uncreatively regurgitating well-digested nostalgia. Romulus is full-throated and ferocious and a whole lot of fun, and it is produced with a degree of imagination and craft that blows most Hollywood franchise films out of the water. It’s a blast. The bar it falls short of – a string of sequels that upend expectations in ways that have had long-term impacts on pop culture and action grammar (Aliens) or sneak a brutal contemplation of loss, mortality, and depression through the Trojan Horse of a familiar brand name (Alien 3) – is a bar that exists for no other movie series. We are definitely grading on a very singular curve here.

Like most Alien films, Romulus establishes itself as an anti-capitalist parable, its heroes in thrall to a brutal economic regime they have no legal recourse to escape; the Xenomorph does the killing, but The Company is the one with actual malice and culpability. Romulus generally delivers these ideas well, a little bluntly but with some genuine potency. It doesn’t have much to say on the subject the series hasn’t said before, but given how entertaining the overall package is, that’s something I’m mostly happy to accept…were it not for one unforced error that opens a whole distracting can of worms. Discussing it requires a big old [SPOILER WARNING], so skip ahead past the next paragraph if you want to go in cold.

[START SPOILERS] Romulus brings back a version of the android character Ash from the first film, here named Rook, performed by Daniel Betts but animated and vocally altered to look and sound like Ian Holm, who originally played the role. Holm, a beloved actor with a nearly bottomless list of credits, whose performance in Alien is one of the most deeply unsettling parts of an all-time great horror movie, died in 2020, and was obviously unable to provide any kind of consent for use of his likeness here. Digitally puppeteering the dead body of a beloved actor for free labor years after his passing is the kind of gross capitalist nightmare that frankly sounds like a plot point in an Alien movie, and I cannot decide if that damns Romulus or adds an additional layer of creepiness that complements what the film is about. It’s probably a little bit of both, but the whole situation should have been avoided. The digital effects used to resurrect Holm’s likeness are terrible; when he is in the background of a shot or speaking through a video monitor, it kind of works in an off-putting, uncanny way, but when they do full-on close ups, it looks so very very bad that I am frankly shocked those shots made it to theaters at all. It is ultimately a creative detriment and distraction, and for a series that’s absolutely chock full of great android characters played by amazing actors, it feels like a real lost opportunity to not let another performer build their own character here and leave their stamp on the series. Even if Holm were alive to sign off on this, there were better paths for Romulus to take. It is an unfortunate asterisk on a movie I otherwise enjoyed an awful lot. [END SPOILERS]

Romulus hosts one of the smaller and thinner casts in the series’ history, but it’s buoyed by two lead performances that are so good, and in one case truly sensational, that it doesn’t feel underbaked. Cailee Spaeny has delivered three star-making roles in less than a year between this, Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, and Alex Garland’s Civil War; her role here as protagonist Rain is a more physical and reactive part than either of those, but Spaeny is just as capable as ever, taking as much abuse as Álvarez can throw at her – as with Jane Levy in Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe, Álvarez puts his heroines through the wringer – and grounding it all with a quiet dignity and moving, human vulnerability. She’s excellent, and Rain is probably the best human hero the series has had since Sigourney Weaver.

Even more impressive is David Jonsson as Rain’s ‘synthetic’ brother Andy, stepping into the long lineage of great actors who have played rich, fascinating android characters in Alien movies – Ian Holm, Lance Henriksen, Winona Ryder, and Michael Fassbender – and more than rising to the occasion. If Romulus adds anything truly substantial to the Alien canon, it is the way Álvarez and Rodo Sayagues’ script and Jonsson’s performance expands the emotional and thematic tenor of the artificial human role. Andy is not a tool of the company when we meet him, but an adopted member of Rain’s family, one whose malfunctions and technological limitations play out like human disabilities or learning differences, ones Rain loves him for and not in spite of; that relationship feels extremely real and lived-in, and the character goes on a real journey across the film, one that intersects with the most potent and pointed thematic material the film has to offer. Jonsson is astonishing in every mode and beat he is asked to play. Romulus does not go out on a cliffhanger immediately demanding a sequel, but it does resolve in such a way that it feels like Álvarez and Jonsson have more to say with the character. If that is indeed where the series goes next, I’ll happily be there.

Ultimately, Romulus feels like an extremely well-executed version of an Alien theme park ride, or an Alien-themed haunted house. That may sound like a criticism, and I am sure every viewer’s mileage may vary, but I genuinely mean it as a compliment. It has that same quality as a good Universal Studios attraction where it takes the very rich iconography of the franchise and finds very fun, embodied things to do with it that make the viewer feel like a participant in the world. If it is not as deep or provocative as this series can be at its best, it is more than creative and propulsive enough to earn its place in the line-up. For every very obvious reference to past installments I found a bit groan-inducing (like a verbatim quote from Aliens that lands with too much of a wink), there are two or three deployments of standard series tropes that are delirious and excessive in ways that made me want to stand up and cheer; it even builds on a few ideas I never thought the series would go back to, including a nod to the craziest part of Resurrection that is here rendered properly horrifying, in one of the best and most intense ‘fourth act’ twists the series has yet delivered.  

At its best, Álvarez’ film doesn’t feel like something you are watching, but something that is happening to you, an intense roller-coaster attraction that left me, at least, breathless. That kind of embodied response isn’t the sort of thing that lingers as long or cuts as deep as the dark, subversive contemplations undergirding Alien 3 or Covenant, and it won’t leave the same kind of mark on pop culture as the original Alien or Aliens, but it alsoisn’t an accomplishment we should downplay. Creating good, surprising big-budget horror like this, the kind that makes you twist in your seat and gasp and occasionally laugh to relieve the tension, is no mean feat, just as crafting a good theme park ride you want to step back into line to ride again takes a lot of skill and ingenuity. Romulus is that kind of pleasure, and if it weren’t for the presence of [REDACTED SPOILER], I would be even more willing to wholeheartedly sing its praises. I hope we get another fascinating, challenging curveball from this series one day, but for now, Romulus is a more-than-enjoyable treat, with at least one properly batshit visual that will probably haunt my dreams tonight. For now, especially in a Hollywood landscape where we very rarely get big-budget entertainment this inventively and expertly mounted, that makes such good use of the giant widescreen frame and the dark, isolated space of the movie theater, that’s enough.

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