Review: ‘Alien: Romulus’ Is Fan Fair With a Haunted House Flare
'Alien: Romulus' (2024)
In space, no one can hear you scream. That’s the promise that Alien: Romulus delivers to the audience and the cast of characters moving through the haunted house that once was an operating space station divided into parts: Romulus and Remus.
Tucked neatly between Alien and Aliens, co-writer and director Fede Álvarez’s venture into the long-running franchise with the ninth installment refocuses the series from myth-making to the sci-fi terror cemented into film history by Ridley Scott’s second feature film. Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues have declared themselves superfans of the franchise, and their love shows itself in the carefully crafted story that leans into the fanfare of the world endangered by xenomorphs and the “Engineers,” while adding something refreshingly new that isn’t just rehashing the abandoned plots of the David trilogy (Prometheus and Alien: Covenant) but instead exists to be genuinely terrifying.
Cemented firmly in the subgenre of horror known as haunted house horror, Romulus doesn’t spend time exploring the extensive questions of humanity posed by Ridley and James Cameron in the franchise's strongest entries—it's not quite Álvarez’s and Sayagues’s intention to examine the consequences of a plot point on the human soul. Instead, Romulus aims to create something fun. While fun can be a cruel slap in the face to cinema, this is the horror genre—one that critics often scoff at as low-budget schlock meant to entice our primal emotions to the surface. Closer looks at Romulus reveal substance beneath the fun, but summer blockbusters this year don’t seem to care too much about probing into ideas of what it means to be human. Instead, it focuses on the fight for survival against the creepy crawling facehuggers and acid-bleeding xenomorphs that lurk in the shadows.
A group of mining orphans, which includes Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and Tyler (Archie Renaux), along with a decommissioned android, Andy (David Jonsson), goes to an abandoned Weyland-Yutani ship floating above their sunless planet with the hopes of finding an escape to Yvaga. As they search for the necessary items to help them retrieve and operate cryostasis chambers for their nine-year-long trip—echoing the terrifying gameplay of Alien: Isolation—the past of the ship comes to life to haunt and kill those trying to escape.
A surprising cameo from the late Ian Holm, who played the android Ash in the first film, plays a crucial role in the film’s progression, updating Andy to carry out the sinister plans of the company and minimize casualties in the pursuit of science. But capitalism never wins in these types of films (see the Jurassic Park franchise). In fact, it is the greed of the company’s directive that causes the dying pregnant Kay (Isabela Merced) to inject “Prometheus Fire” into her body to survive her short journey back to the spaceship to escape the many xenomorphs chasing her friends, most of whom die quickly at the hands of the superior species.
The bad taste of one of the most ham-fisted fan service moments—which sees Andy deliver Ellen Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) iconic line from Aliens, “Get away from her, you bitch!”—is quickly washed away by one of the most original moments to enter the franchise. What is even more amazing is that it works.
Kay survives thanks to “Prometheus Fire,” but the audience has been warned about the destructive power of the vials of blood through a video of a failed lab rat experiment. As Rain is about to enter the cryostasis chambers, Kay starts to give birth to something. The traumatic birth scene, which I would warn has become a notable staple of Álvarez’s and Sayagues’s work, isn’t what kills Kay. Instead, it is the creature that steals her life force and hunts Rain down. Mimicking the final moments in Alien, the stakes of this chase feel significantly higher. No one is safe, not even Kay, who had plot armor for the majority of the movie.
'Alien: Romulus' (2024)
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Romulus is as much a homage to the entirety of the Alien franchise, which serves and harms the movie at several points, as it is a love letter to Georges Méliès' Le Manoir du diable, which kicked off the horror genre well over 125 years ago. What is even better is that the film pushes the horror genre to be something more. Sure, the story is paper-thin, another hallmark of Álvarez’s and Sayagues’s past work, but the set pieces are what make this movie fun.
It is a notable horror film in an era where the genre has taken a turn toward serious, introspective material that brings our internal horrors to the surface. Romulus is just a middle finger to capitalism and maybe to the Hollywood studio system that tried to push this film into streaming oblivion (a common attitude toward horror films) and its efforts to repurpose once-successful franchises, as it shrouds itself in a beloved legacy established by great filmmakers who have lost their touch.
Álvarez proves that bringing a film back to basics has a purpose in the Hollywood legacy sequel machine. Changing the formula too much doesn’t work. Rather than muddying the waters with new ideas, it leans into the plot points and iconic dialogue that made the first film work while adding just enough new ideas later on that the audience, who is already hooked, can find something new to love whether we wanted this film or not.
