Alien: Romulus starts with our heroine, Rain, played by Cailee Spaeny, a young woman living in a space colony on a planet without sunlight. She dreams of a life where she feels the sun on her skin. She takes care of her brother Andy, played by David Jonsson, who seems a bit different from the rest, and has to protect him in the world. With what she believes her work contract up, she tries to get off the world only to be denied by the Weyland-Yutani corporation. She gets a call from her friend Tyler (Archie Renaux) and he tells her that he and their friends have a plan to leave this world and have a better life. All they have to do is go to an abandoned spaceship, take the cryopods, and then journey to another system. One catch is that they need Andy, her brother, who isn’t a human but an artificial person. From there things happen as you’d expect from an Alien story.
Fede Álvarez, the director and co-writer of this new entry into the franchise, takes a lot of cues from the past in crafting the look of this film. Since this film takes place between Alien and Aliens, the aesthetic design of what we see will feel familiar. Even the old-looking Apple II-like computers that are supposed to be in the future. The film has real sets, and the tactile feel of the actors in these places helps with the suspension of disbelief. This is one of the most feeling-like Alien out of all the sequels I’ve seen. The way this film is shot really helped to build that science-fiction horror tension that isn’t always in these films. Galo Olivares, the cinematographer, and Álvarez made a lot of smart choices in using the enclosed space in this unnerving adventure Rain and Andy are in. Benjamin Wallfisch, who’s in charge of the music, combines the visuals to push the tension further while also bringing in cues of themes from earlier films at the right times to connect to some of the story and visual nods to those films. While it could feel a little too on the nose with its references for some others, it worked for me.
Acting wise the bulk of the film is carried by the performances of Spaeny and Jonsson. Cailee Spaeny, who you might have known from Civil War earlier this year, or maybe the film Priscilla last year, does the Alien heroine job well. The story thematically feels relatable to the real world as this group of characters feels like Gen Z adults dealing with the overwhelming presence of late-stage capitalism. While not the leader, Rain ends up in the position of the group with the most sense and moral clarity outside of Andy. Sometimes, she feels different than the “Ripley” type but then falls into that archetype by the last act. Her best character relationship is with Jonsson’s Andy, who starts as a brother she needs to care for until he changes because of events in the story. You get a dynamic that brings a conflict that we’ve seen in these over time through the likes of Bishop in the earlier films or later David in the two prequel films. Andy, for me, feels dynamically different as he’s the most pragmatic of any of the other android characters; he’s not all cold machine working for the company, and he’s not a resentful Paradise Lost satan like character hating his creators. All this can be read on Jonsson’s face, as can be seen in how he uses his expressions and his stare.
Isabela Merced, who plays Kay, is the character who initially seems pretty small but increases as the story goes on. She’s an actor who’s constantly working, who some will know as live-action Dora the Explorer or from that very not-good Madame Web film from earlier this year. Here, she gets to do a lot of the classic horror movie girl stuff, doing things that will make you want to yell at the screen. She is able to use those big eyes to sell those scares to the audience. You feel that she is utterly scared and is trying not to die. In those scenes, it’s where she feels more like Ripley in Alien than Rain does. I wish I had a lot to say about Archie Renaux as Tyler and Spike Fearn as Bjorn, but there’s not much to their characters for you to care about other than expecting something terrible to happen to them. The Bjorn character is needlessly a jerk that’s a bit too over the top. Aileen Wu has the least but at least she looks cool as Navarro, the pilot of the cargo ship.
I like how this film attempts to feel different and familiar simultaneously. It handles being something that can work for fans of the franchise and for people who this film might be their first one. As I stated earlier, everything in this film feels tactile and tangible. The use of animatronics and prosthetics is a welcome sight in a film like that. It merges the computer effects and these practical ones in a way that is rarely ever distracting or breaks your immersion. I really enjoyed this film and look forward to seeing it again, hopefully in 4DX, to see some things I might’ve not caught. Alien: Romulus is a tense, creepy, and welcome return of the franchise to more of its origins than what the last two were for most. It’s a film that could bring a new storyline to connect to a whole new generation of audiences.
