Alien Romulus – Review

“ALIEN ROMULUS”

Alien Romulus is the latest in the Alien franchise, though unlike recent entries, this one does not have Ridley Scott in the director’s chair- he’s now in the role of producer, with Fede Alvarez taking over as director. In case you’re wondering, he’s the guy behind the Evil Dead film from 2013 and Don’t Breathe. What he brings to the table is very interesting, since Alien Romulus has really had an interesting reception upon its early screenings, and previews were quick to point out how good the practical effects were.

If you haven’t seen the other films in the franchise like Prometheus or Alien Covenant, don’t worry, since this film takes place in between Alien and Aliens, so you only really need to have seen the original movie if you want some background.

The film follows a group of young people trying to get away from a mine colony ran by Weyland-Yutani, with the group ran by Rain (played by Cailee Spaeny) and her android brother Andy (David Jonsson) who need to steal a group of cryo-tubes in order to survive the full trip to their home planet and go to steal some from the supposed abandoned space station Romulus. However, it’s become very clear that Weyland-Yutani has been doing some research on the Xenomorphs here, and all hell breaks loose upon the group’s arrival.

I don’t want to go too much into spoilers since there is so much that goes on in this movie, but I will say that there is some really good stuff here! For one thing, I like the relationship between the central main characters, and the crew as a whole are all relatively strong characters, so you want to see them all do well.

The plot itself does a really good job setting up a domino effect that means the characters don’t have to be incredibly stupid in order for hijinks to ensue- and the performances are damn great across the board, too! I think special mention has to go to David Jonsson who does a brilliant job with the difficult role he has to play.

The thing you have to do in this scenario is once again, make the Xenomorphs feel almost unbeatable. They do an excellent job with this, and there’s some real tension in this movie which has been missing from the franchise for quite some time. There’s also a second antagonistic figure with the sinister android, Rook, who for the most part is played by Bilbo Baggins himself, Ian Holme, and does a really good job!

I have to point out that the thing that makes this film work so well is the use of practical effects. The set design is excellent, and I really appreciate how much effort has gone into it considering they were trying to minimise the use of green screens as much as possible. There’s also great work done on the Xenomorphs that gives them a great sense of weight- I really hope the set designers and production team do well in next year’s award season, because they’ve done an excellent job with this film.

I also really appreciate that this film avoids going back to Prometheus, for the most part. I know people like it, but I’m not in that camp, and I’m glad we got an Alien movie that avoids what was added in that movie.

It’s not entirely perfect, there are some lines of dialogue that don’t entirely land, and if anything, I felt that the film added on a climax that it didn’t really need- especially considering that the end of the movie really felt like they went for shock value for the sake of it, which I didn’t think entirely worked. It also made me question certain aspects about how this affects the lore that was established in the series.