“We have to find the cryo pods.”
“They’re out of fuel.”
“We have to find the fuel.”
“It’s behind a locked door.”
“We have to find the code...”
Alien: Romulus often feels more like a video game than most actual adaptations, with sequential levels, upgrading equipment and some breathtaking boss fights in the second hour. It’s also a complete technical marvel, particularly in its soaring third act, while Cailee Spaeny gives us easily the franchise’s best heroine since Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley.
Narratively, the film is impressively even more straightforward than the 1975 original. Spaeny’s Rain Cavendish grinds the days away on a mining planet alongside her adopted brother Andy (David Jonsson), a glitchy synthetic robot assigned to be her protector, who more typically needs protecting himself. In a desperate bid to escape from the world which we are told worked their parents to death, the pair join with several other teens to steal an abandoned ship drifting in orbit and fly off to pastures greener. Upon reaching this ship however, it should come to the surprise of no one familiar with the franchise that the ragtag bunch are far from alone.
It’s a strikingly young cast for an Alien film, with Spaeny herself certainly bringing a different, less grizzled energy to the Ripley part than previous leads Naomi Watts and Katherine Waterston, while Jonsson’s Andy marks an even further cry from the theatrical gravitas of Ian Holm or Michael Fassbender as prior synths. In this regard, Romulus might be better compared to Fede Alvarez’s Evil Dead film than to any previous xenomorph adventures, with even his face-huggers leaping and bounding about the ship like damned undead.
That is not to say that there is any shortage of actual aliens in the film. Compared to previous entries Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, which were somewhat conservative in their use of the series’ iconography, Alvarez relishes the chance to play with every toy in the franchise sandbox. The story may be simple, essentially a series of fetch quests amid a rising body count and increasingly fiery ship, but really we’re here to see Spaeny fry creepy crawlies and swim through pools of acid, which is exactly what we get.
Credit where credit is due, between all the nasty blockbuster thrills, the film does find a heart in the sibling relationship between Spaeny and her synth ‘brother’ Andy. It makes for a smaller scale story than the political commentary of the originals or the religious connotations of Prometheus and Covenant, but it fits the more Gen-Z oriented ensemble this time around. The macro storyline is an escape from capitalism, but the true themes at the core of Alvarez’s film are those of tolerance and found family, albeit one of a dwindling, or more astutely melting number. Alien Romulus might not be the best Alien sequel, but it is the most straightforwardly successful in some time, and did I mention Cailee Spaeny swims through acid?
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