Alien: Romulus is the franchise's most purely enjoyable film since Aliens, a lean and viscerally effective horror film that strips the series back to its essentials and executes them with a confidence and a craft that the prequel films rarely achieved. Fede Álvarez's entry is not interested in the philosophical questions Prometheus raised or the mythological ambitions of Covenant; it is interested in putting a group of young people in a confined space with an alien and making the audience feel every moment of it. On those terms, it succeeds almost completely.
At a Glance
Director: Fede Álvarez
Runtime: 119 minutes
Starring: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aiyana Goodfellow
Release: 2024
Critics Rating: ★★★★ (4/5 stars, the franchise's most purely effective horror film since the original)
Audience Rating: ★★★★ (4/5 stars, a welcome return to form)
Review Breakdown
Plot
A group of young colonists, desperate to escape the oppressive conditions of their mining colony, board an abandoned space station to salvage the hypersleep pods they need for their journey to a better world. The station, it transpires, has been the site of Weyland-Yutani experiments with alien specimens, and the colonists find themselves trapped with the results. The plot is the franchise's most deliberately classical since the original, drawing on the haunted house structure of Scott's film and the action mechanics of Cameron's sequel without attempting to add the philosophical layer that burdened the prequel films. The result is a film that knows exactly what it is and executes it with considerable skill.
Characters
Cailee Spaeny's Rain is the franchise's strongest new protagonist since Ripley, a young woman of practical intelligence and considerable emotional resilience whose relationship with her android companion Andy gives the film its most affecting human dynamic. Spaeny plays the character with a physical conviction and an emotional directness that makes her immediately sympathetic, and her performance gives the film an anchor that the prequel series' more diffuse ensembles lacked. David Jonsson's Andy is the film's most inventive character creation, an android of warmth and genuine affection whose eventual transformation gives the film its most dramatically complex passage. The supporting ensemble is efficiently drawn, with Archie Renaux and Isabela Merced making the most of roles that the film's horror mechanics require to be expendable.
Tone
Álvarez pitches the film at a register of sustained physical dread that is closer to the original than to any subsequent entry, using confined spaces and practical effects to create a horror experience of considerable immediacy. The film is not interested in comedy or philosophical digression; it is interested in fear, and it pursues that interest with a single-mindedness that gives the horror sequences a cumulative force the more tonally varied entries lack. The zero-gravity sequence is the film's most inventive passage, a demonstration of spatial horror that gives the alien's physical capabilities a new and deeply unsettling dimension.
Meaning / Themes
Romulus is less thematically ambitious than the prequel films and more honest about what it is: a film about survival, about the cost of corporate indifference to human life, and about the bond between people who have nothing except each other. The Weyland-Yutani Corporation's experiments give the franchise's central institutional concern its most direct recent expression, and the film's young protagonists, all of them products of a system that regards them as expendable, give that concern a human face the more abstractly philosophical prequel films did not always manage. The film's emotional core, the relationship between Rain and Andy, gives the franchise's treatment of artificial intelligence a warmth and a specificity that Prometheus and Covenant's David, for all his complexity, never quite achieved.
Direction
Álvarez's direction is the franchise's most assured since Cameron's Aliens, a demonstration of spatial intelligence and practical effects craft that gives the horror sequences a physical immediacy the CGI-heavy prequel films rarely matched. The zero-gravity sequence is the film's directorial highlight, and the alien attack sequences throughout are staged with a clarity and a physical energy that makes them among the franchise's most effective. Benjamin Wallfisch's score is propulsive and atmospheric, drawing on the franchise's established sonic identity while giving the film a distinctive contemporary register.
Cultural Reception
Alien: Romulus was a major critical and commercial success on its release, the franchise's strongest performance in both respects since Prometheus. It is now widely regarded as the best Alien film since Aliens and a significant creative course correction after the prequel series. Cailee Spaeny's performance was widely praised as the franchise's strongest new lead since Weaver, and the film's practical effects approach was celebrated as a return to the physical filmmaking that defined the franchise's most effective entries. The ending's connection to the broader franchise mythology generated significant discussion, though most reviewers regarded it as the film's weakest element.
Final Verdict: The franchise's most purely effective horror film since the original and its strongest creative statement since Aliens. Spaeny's Rain is the franchise's best new protagonist in decades, Jonsson's Andy is its most inventive android creation since Bishop, and Álvarez's direction gives the material a physical immediacy and a spatial intelligence the prequel films rarely achieved. Alien: Romulus does not reinvent the franchise. It reminds you why the franchise was worth caring about in the first place.