Alien: Romulus – Frightening, Gloopy, Sci-Fi Goodness [Review]

At this point Fede Alvarez should be known as the franchise whisperer. Either he knows how to spruce up a long-dormant franchise with his filmmaking style like he did with Evil Dead and as a producer on Texas Chainsaw Massacre, or he finds the essence of what makes a franchise what it is, and adds heightened terror and gore to it. The latter is the case with Alien: Romulus. It’s not like this franchise needed reinventing after some high-profile films by Ridley Scott, like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. It needed to get back to basics. Alvarez takes familiar beats with his writing partner Rodo Sayagues on the script, and they crafted a script that was about as tight as possible for the two-hour runtime.

To be as completely transparent as possible, I saw Alien: Romulus in a double feature with the original Alien. That doesn’t hold any weight in this review, but seeing the changes in filmmaking and horror movie style between the two was fascinating. It was also fascinating to see how Fede Alvarez and Co. went to great lengths to emulate the look and feel of that original film. It captures the absolute loneliness and despair of that original film to a “t”. Alien: Romulus follows Rain (Cailee Spaeny), Andy (David Jonsson), and her friends Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Navarro (Aileen Wu). Outside of those six and, of course, the Xenomorph. there’s only a couple of other characters of note in the film. These six actors carry the film on their backs.

With such an effects-heavy and deep film like this one, that would be a challenge for any group of actors. In particular, the relationship between Rain and her “brother” Andy, the synthetic android drives the film. David Jonsson is a revelation in the role. He has to switch between basically two versions of himself throughout the film. Cailee Spaeny channels previous final girls, including Ellen Ripley, but doesn’t copy her homework with those past performances. She makes the archetype her own in this movie. You get plenty of emotional moments mixed with action, ingenuity, and just sheer terror from Spaeny.

The Xenomorph in this film is as deadly as ever. Alvarez and Sayagues somehow gave it an even bigger edge and hunter’s instinct, further cementing it as the “perfect organism.” The scenes where it stalks the six of them or even taunts them by making them think their friend is safe will surely make you sit forward in your chair.

The face-huggers might be even scarier than the actual Xenomorph this time around. The most tense scenes in the movie all involve the face-huggers and how they skulk around. Alvarez doesn’t skimp out on showing the gruesome details of how they attach to people or what they do after they’re latched on. Just looking at the monsters in the film from a cinematography standpoint, we’re back to the original film. The Xenomorph had little screentime in that first film, and here, it has more, but the way the monster is shot still remains scary. The mystique and danger of the beast are always present. It’s never shown in full frame. It’s always pieces or segments that make the monster feel even scarier. All the shots with the face-huggers are quick and frantic, like how the little bastards move.

So, is there anything about Alien: Romulus that doesn’t work? Well, while thrilling and tense, the third act feels a bit derivative of the original film. It does have a sort of false lull into security before hitting you with another fifteen minutes of movie. As the movie goes on the frights turn more into action. So in that way, it feels like the film’s first half emulates the style of Alien, while the second half is going for more of an Aliens-style. That’s not necessarily bad, but it makes for a movie that feels like a tale of two halves.

Without delving into spoilers, there are certainly some interesting choices in the movie, particularly with one character (once you see it, you’ll know) that could turn off some people. Besides some winks and nods to Alien fans, the thing that stood out to me the most about Alien: Romulus is that this could have been another sci-fi movie, without all the extra Weyland-Yutani, Xenomorph stuff, and been as generically science fiction as possible, and it would have worked just as well. Fede Alvarez was the absolute perfect choice to direct and craft this movie.

At its heart, Alien: Romulus is exactly what the Alien series needed.

Alien: Romulus releases in theaters on August 16th.

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