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While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonists come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.¹

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When I first heard that another Alien film was being made my initial thought was “Why?”.

When I heard that it was being directed by Fede Alvarez I thought “Who?”.

When I saw it was called “Romulus” I thought “What?”

So it didn’t get off to the greatest start in my mind.

I appear to be in the minority by thinking Prometheus was a good film, and Covenant was a decent follow-up², so I was interested to see where a script that had some involvement with Ridley Scott would go.

I read a little of the synopsis of Romulus and it sounded an awful lot like “Alien: Again”, and I promptly ignored the whole thing, thinking it was an unnecessary cash-grab.

I managed to avoid any real spoilers due to my general hatred of social media sites like Reddit, so when it was finally available to stream I could go in without knowing the main beats of the movie.

That in itself was a nice experience³.

I had a look at some of Fede Alvarez’s previous work, such as Don’t Breathe and the Evil Dead remake. I wasn’t blown away. I didn’t see what the big deal was about Don’t Breathe. It was fine but nothing special. I haven’t seen the Evil Dead remake, but I am no fan of remakes anyway. I had also read some negative things about that film at the time, and it sounded like another “The Thing (2011)” film⁴.

However, as the original Alien film is essentially a haunted-house-monster-movie with a sense of horror, claustrophobia and dread running through it, then perhaps a director who has experience with films dealing with those themes would make a decent attempt at a fifth Alien film?

I should probably start this “review” off by stating the fundamental fact that Romulus is a good film and it may even be the best new film⁵ I have watched this year. However it falls short of being a great film for reasons I talk about at the end of this little article.

The Good

The universe felt like the Alien (1979) universe, where there is more focus on the manual, dirty, unglamourous jobs that normal people have to do for the Company. In Alien this was refining and in Romulus it’s mining. Both show the working man person being pushed around by the Company, getting no say in any arrangements, whether its having a new science officer foisted upon you, being forced to investigate distress signals under threat of losing all salary and benefits, or having your contract extended by another five years without warning.

I liked the grime and filth of Jackson’s Star Mining Colony. It felt like a mix between Blade Runner and Alien cubed. A depressing industrial wasteland. Lots of people milling about outside concrete structures in the dark and oppressive atmosphere, looking miserable.

The old analogue cassette-futurism from Alien is shown on the Weyland-Yutani salvage ship, and seeing MU/TH/UR booting up will send a wave of nostalgia washing over the viewers:

In fact this is pretty much an obvious rehash of the opening of Alien.

I also loved the shots of the ship flying through the atmosphere and being lit up by the sun. This film looks good.

Alien blood is a danger again

The molecular acid coarsing through the … veins? … of the aliens makes you think twice about killing them. It’s pretty much what Parker said about its “wonderful defense mechanism” from the very beginning.

All other films down-played the severity of the blood since Alien. In Aliens we see Drake being killed as a drone explodes over him, melting half his face, which is pretty dangerous. But considering the blood burned through several decks in Alien, you’d have though his whole head would have just dissolved, rather than burning the surface? Well, I did anyway.

Atmosphere

This was a cool shot and is a nice example of foreshadowing. The metal pipes sloping down look an awful lot like the biomechanical hives that the aliens build. This is just before the facehuggers start attacking.

One scene that did make me laugh was when Bjorn helped get the facehugger off of Tyler with the shock-stick:

Absolutely reminded me of the scene from The Simpsons episode Hell Toupee:

Scary monsters

The final boss of this movie is the “Offspring”, the mutated child of Kay. Out of all of the aliens, except perhaps the neomorph from Covenant, this is the scariest one in the series.

I mean, good lord just look at it, massive and crawling along the ground like a baby. I personally would prefer it if this Offspring wasn’t so massive so quickly, I think a creepy and dangerous baby monster is scary enough.

Is this the future of humanity that Weyland Yutani are hoping for?

The Bad

At times this film felt like a box of easter eggs with some plot draped over it. There are so many callbacks to the previous four films. This is not necessarily a bad thing, but I was getting reference fatigue as it went on.

Scenes were shot the same, characters were made to look the same, some said the same lines. It was just too much.

I do not like fan service in films as it takes me out of the film I am watching.

The absolute worst offender in Romulus has got to be the “Get away from her you bitch” line from Andy. I physically cringed when I heard him say this line. It was made even worse because I thought if he just said “get away from her” it would have been great, but to add that extra bit to remind us all about Ripley vs the alien queen was terrible.

The humans are shallow and uninteresting

Considering this was basically an Alien remake, and we had a small cast trapped in a ship, there was barely any focus on the humans themselves. They were very basic puppets used to pose in a variety of death scenes.

There was:

• Asian lady
• Tall white group-leader man
• Short white ascerbic man
• Hispanic lady
• Andy
• White protagonist lady

Other than Andy, whose name is a pun anyway, I couldn’t remember what anybody’s name was. I couldn’t remember any real details about any of them either. Does that matter? Maybe not, but I like my small cast of characters to have some depth to them before they are killed.

For example, Kay (hispanic lady) dies after her child is mutated by the black goo vaccine thing and feeds off of her. There could have been some more backstory around her, and her hopes and fears around motherhood, or anything at all really. Instead she just says that she hopes her baby sees the sun⁶ and that’s it.

Ash Rook

The bisected android found on the research station is another Ash model.

Oh. God. No. Just awful.

I really dislike this whole part of the movie, which unfortunately is a large part of it, as Ash becomes the main antagonist (again). There is absolutely no need to have “Ash” return, albeit with a different name. Especially with Ian Holm CGI’d to look as he did 45 years ago.

For a film that prided itself on practical effects and models, having this character was a huge mistake. Not only does it look a bit janky, the uncanny valley is strong here, but it is unnecessary.

Why didn’t they just have a different android as a science officer on Romulus? It has been something like 20 years between Alien and Romulus, wouldn’t technology have moved on a bit?

In Alien (1979) Ash wasn’t known to be an android, the crew thought he was a human that the Company decided to add to the crew at the last moment. If there were a whole line of Ash androids out there wouldn’t somebody have noticed?

I guess you could argue that the crew of the Nostromo are just space truckers and wouldn’t have that knowledge. But surely to have been absolutely certain that the crew wouldn’t suspect something was wrong, the Company would have taken precautions?

Besides, I think the film is weakened by Ash returning. It could so easily have been a different science officer, with a different actor playing it.

We know Ash, we know he is programmed to work against the interests of the humans and to ensure the alien survives. We therefore know that Andy will become an antagonist as he is imprinted with the module.

In case you hadn’t picked up on my feelings here; Ash is unnecessary, and we’ve already seen Ash the Antagonist before.

Show Don’t Tell

There were a few times where I felt like the director could have been a little more subtle with the suggestions. The scene where Kay is telling Rain that she is pregnant takes place literally one minute before us being shown this scene:

Maybe it’s just because I’m usually asking myself “why is this being shown, what does this represent, why is this dialogue here” whenever I’m watching films, but this was just too obvious a link. I felt like it gave away the ending as we now knew something was going to happen with Kay’s baby turning into a kind of monster thing. I mean, it is obvious that it was a plot device, and this is an Alien film, but it took away most of the suspense around it.

The following scene is where Ash is telling the gang about the experiments taking place on board the research ship, and how this new substance will enhance humanity. A rat is crushed to death and then given a dose of the vaccine, reconstituting itself and coming back to life.

However…

Oh so this evolutionary vaccine won’t actually work the way we expect, and will have horrific side-effects? Well, I kinda guessed that anyway as a prototype never actually works properly, and also we’ve seen how the black goo changes creatures from watching Prometheus and Covenant, but it’s good to show that the rat actually mutated and died, I suppose.

Ah, well just in case I was too stupid to work out that the rat died and mutated into a monster, there is a helpful loop of the rat dying on the video monitor. Come on Alvares, don’t treat your audience as total morons.

Again, we are shown the ampoules from Prometheus and Covenant on a 3D hologram which is enough information for us to work out that the scientists on Romulus are working on the forced evolutionary virus, but then immediately afterwards we get a long monologue from Ash detailing everything about it, just in case you hadn’t watched those films, or didn’t pay attention.

Overall

All that being said, I still think this was a good film and well worth a watch.

The run-time is only two hours too, which really helps.

I rate it a 6/10 and am looking forward to watching Alien: Romuli in 2026.

I feel like I wanted to rate this higher, but on reflection, while I thought the Alien bits were really good, the rest of the film is very under-developed. Thin plot, unexplored opportunities, prop characters etc, so it does get dragged down. I think a 6 is a fair rating.

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18th October 2024