A young woman and her android brother battle xenomorphs in an abandoned research station.
Seven films into this franchise, Alien: Romulus manages to be both terrifying and comforting; the audience revisiting their haunted childhood home, relieved to be tucked up in their old bed even if it does levitate.
There is no comfort for our growing roll-call of heroines (Ellen Ripley, Newt, Elizabeth Shaw, Daniels, and now Cailee Spaeny’s Rain), who find themselves stuck between two terrifying entities which care only for their own survival: the xenomorph and Weyland-Yutani. Both appropriate the bodies of downtrodden humans, leaving them emptied husks when no longer useful; but they also can’t do it without us, even if we are sub-par as a worker bee species. After all, what is Weyland-Yutani but Ash’s description of the xenomorph in Alien: “A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse, or delusions of morality”.
Unsurprisingly, in Alien: Romulus the company’s scientific endeavour is less about helping the population and more about mankind’s hubris, a theme that runs through the whole series. “We simply can’t wait for evolution”, whines the remaining top half of Weyland-Yutani’s latest android, Rook, a sentiment most mums of toddlers would agree with as we wonder why we haven’t yet grown that useful third arm.
Beyond repeated iconic lines and music (from Alien and the Covenant films) this instalment is very back to basics, with an obvious return to class politics. Alien was dark, brooding and spare, the victims expendable workers on a mining ship just there for the money. Rain and her friends are not just economically shackled but literally can’t leave the mining colony Jackson Star. There’s no back up and no trained soldiers – her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) admits he learned how to handle a gun from “games and magazines”. Everyone is terrified.
Set between Alien and Aliens, Alien: Romulus arrived in cinemas a whopping 45 years since the very first instalment. And it’s unlikely we’ve seen the last of the Xenomorphs even now. What can I say, Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Rook, the movie’s “exposition AI guy”, is clear about where we are and what the point is. He certainly likes to chat. Controversially, he has the face and voice of Alien android Ash’s Ian Holm (who died in 2020), though there is no Ellen Ripley. Two decades have passed since she suggested they blow the xenomorph “the f*ck out into space”, which means she is – as Rain and her friends try to evade facehuggers, acid goo and being cocooned alive – still tucked up asleep with Jones the cat (and will be for another 37 years).
Paradoxically the dark, industrial tunnels and control room desks of yet another Weyland-Yutani spacecraft seem as fresh as the first time I saw Alien. And it says something for this familiar yet always gripping franchise (yup, even Alien 3, haters!) that I, the queen of big lights, who never saw a dimmer switch I didn’t hate, actively seeks out these return visits to the gloomy xenomorph universe like a confused moth.
Actually the writers have a bit of fun with this, as gloom on the planet below gives way to, well more gloom. Jackson’s Star literally never sees the sun, its workers dying. Living on the planet is twentysomething Rain and her brother Andy (David Jonsson), an old android rescued and reprogrammed by Rain’s late father, whose sole aim is to protect Rain. When the company unilaterally extends her contract and sends her back to the mines, Rain accepts Tyler’s invitation to join his team breaking into an equally gloomy abandoned space station they have discovered orbiting the colony. Their aim is to steal its cryochambers so they can escape to Yvaga, a planet nine years’ travel away.
Waiting for them on the ship are several facehuggers, the top half of Rook, and death for nearly all of them. Apart from Tyler, the others in their intrepid group – his sister Kay (Isabella Merced), his cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn’s adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu) – don’t make a huge impression on a first watch. It’s good to see those themes of family, good and bad, continued (and I include the battle between Ripley and the Alien Queen, both mothers, and the sibling-like marine troop in Aliens here) though it took me a couple more viewings to see the group in Alien: Romulus as more than just cannon-fodder for our favourite movie monster. That’s partly because filmicly the looming alien presence sucks up all the air in the room, but there isn’t the deft characterisation of, say, Alien and Aliens.
How much is homage and how much simply re-tread? Of the more obvious call-backs to earlier films, most I loved though a couple are clunky; I cringed waiting for the payoff to one familiar line. Once again there’s a standoff over who is let in or out and once again it depends whose side we’re on. When Ripley tried to stop Kane being brought back onto the Nostromo after being attacked by the contents of an alien seed pod we were on her side; when Meredith Vickers did the same thing on the Prometheus we were not. Now it’s Andy refusing to open the door to Kay, but done to protect the company not Rain.
The big controversy (Holm’s likeness as the half-destroyed android Rook) works in terms of story if not always convincingly in execution. We know the company reused the same face moulds on other synthetics (though presumably not too many times – the crew of Nostromo thought Ash was human so can’t have come across his face before). What isn’t so believable is Rook’s shrieky, impotent rage late in the film: maybe it works from a class perspective, “the machine” discovering the workers can outwit them, but not coming from an android. Icy detachment and the pre-programmed approximation of empathy, yes; hissy fit, no. With no legs, plugged into a computer, he’s like a less-wrinkly Davros when foiled once more by the Doctor and his sonic screwdriver.
Absolutely terrifying though is this movie’s hybrid, the Offspring, and its climactic battle with Rain. And I think they’ve learned from Alien Resurrection. While that human-xenomorph may not have been cute – it looked like a melting blancmange – it at least possessed an expression of yearning for its “mother” Ripley, even as its insides were being sucked out into space, and left Ripley emotionally torn. Not even a mother could love Romulus‘s horrifying matricidal creation.
Jonsson and Spaeny make an excellent team, the attachment between Andy and Rain seemingly unbreakable until his loyalties change just as hers did. Jonsson is superb, as Andy moves between naïf and coolly indifferent company man, bringing just enough humanity to a creation that was designed as a rudimentary facsimile of us, his dreams and disappointments entirely believable even if the result of a programming exercise.
At the time of writing, in the UK Alien: Romulus is available to buy on platforms including Amazon UK, iTunes and Apple TV.
Missed anything? Read my Alien: Romulus plot rundown here.
Watch the official Alien: Romulus trailer below: