The Big Twist in Alien: Romulus Is Already Making People Angry. In a Way, It’s Perfect. (2024)

Like the ever-evolving apex predator at its center, the Alien series owes its survival to its adaptability. Where other long-running franchises sag under the weight of accumulated lore, the Alien movies have largely shaken off such encrustation, leaving each new set of creators—a total of five directors and 16 writers over the course of seven films and 45 years—free to work from the ground up. The results could be almost aggressively fan-unfriendly: Alien 3 summarily killed off two of the three survivors from the massively successful Aliens, as well as the series’ heroine, Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley; Alien Resurrection brought her back, 200 years later, as a clone whose DNA had been hybridized with her mortal enemy’s. But even when they weren’t entirely successful, the movies were always distinctive. Drop into the middle of any Alien and you’ll instantly know where you are, even if you don’t want to be there.

Directed by Fede Álvarez, who co-wrote the screenplay with his regular collaborator, Rodo Sayagues, the new Alien: Romulus is the first movie in the series to turn back the clock, both literally and figuratively. Rather than extend past the timeline of the original quartet—or create a new antecedent to it, like Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant—Romulus opts to squeeze in between the first movie and the second, opening with a spaceship salvaging a jagged shard of the Nostromo, the space freighter Ripley detonates at the end of Alien. In other words, it begins with scraps.

A well-behaved franchise hire, Álvarez is an avid student of the previous films, and eager to show what he’s learned. Romulus is strewn with citations, subtle and not-so, drawn from across the series, plot threads and dialogue snippets and chunks of Jerry Goldsmith’s and James Horner’s respective scores. The biggest, and least digested, chunk is the revivification of Ian Holm’s android, as well as Holm himself: Ash was deactivated with prejudice in 1979, and Holm died in 2020, but why let the dead rest when there’s IP to be mined? The one constant in the series, beyond the presence of gleaming death-monsters with acid for blood, is the influence of a massive conglomerate that puts profit ahead of respect for human lives. But Romulus is the first Alien movie to feel like it might be a product of the Weyland­–Yutani corporation itself, as mercilessly efficient as it is inhuman. He learned it by watching you!

The one thing you can say about the Holm clone, here called Rook, is that it’s meant to be monstrous, and the movie’s presentation looks more like a rubber mask brought to life than an uncanny failure at replicating a human form. (Holm is credited with “facial and vocal reference,” while another actor, Daniel Betts, gets credit for the performance.) Rook turns up on an apparently deserted space station where Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a lifelong inhabitant of a mining planet where the sun never shines and corporate servitude never ends, has come to steal a cryogenic pod that would allow her to escape to friendlier climes. She’s accompanied by a group of similarly desperate friends, mostly interchangeable—and, thanks to a muddy sound mix, sometimes unintelligible—but they’re just there to give the aliens fresh meat to grind until we get down to the characters we actually care about.

Indeed, while the Alien series has taken on grand ideas, all the way down to the meaning of life itself, at heart these are slasher movies in space. And it’s almost inevitable that slasher franchises end up falling in love with their killers. With no drive to do anything other than eliminate other species and propagate their own, the xenomorphs are as single-minded as any ax-wielding boogeyman; in Alien, Ash admiringly calls the monster that has wiped out most of his ship’s human crew a “perfect organism.” By Covenant, which treated the likely death of thousands of human colonists as a climactic punchline, the series was thoroughly on the xenomorphs’ side. In the Darwinian arena of Hollywood filmmaking, the aliens were the clear victors, the only name above the title the franchise needed.

Romulus adds a few human touches, including a moment where Rain, fleeing the approach of a horde of creepy-crawlies, leaps to close an overhead elevator gate and the 5-foot-1 Spaeny catches nothing but air. But Álvarez often seems blind to the implications of the world he’s created, because he’s just biding time until the next kill. Andy, an android whom Rain has adopted as a surrogate brother, is played by Industry’s David Jonsson, the only Black actor in the core cast, which already makes the fact that his only purpose is to take care of Rain a bit hinky. But that’s nothing compared to the moment when Rook expresses the Weyland–Yutani’s corporation’s gratitude to Andy, because “your model was the backbone of our colonial efforts.” The series’ androids have been villains and tragic heroes, murderous company men and self-sacrificing protectors, but they’ve never been outright slaves, and it’s baffling, at best, to see a movie engage that idea and then drop it for good in the space of a couple of minutes.

It’s not that Romulus has no new ideas, exactly. It’s just that they’re almost entirely procedural. Álvarez is probably the least pretentious director to ever take on an Aliens movie, and he excels at the nuts-and-bolts mechanics of a claustrophobic thriller. (He even manages to shoot in near-darkness without turning the image a dull, washed-out gray, an all but extinct skill in the digital era.) But even if his movie succeeds on its own terms, it’s a little disheartening to see those terms so greatly reduced, and a series that’s enabled so many big reaches settle for what’s already in its grasp. Romulus isn’t a mutation. It’s just inbred.