Alien: Romulus review – A semi-great sequel that becomes absurd and ethically problematic

Alien: Romulus has the capacity for greatness. If you could somehow surgically extract its strongest sequences, you’d see that beautiful, blood-quivering harmony between old-school practical effects and modern horror verve, still gooey and repulsive in all the ways an Alien film should be. At one point, the camera watches, unflinching, as a phallic Xenomorph crown breaches the opening of an aggressively vaginal fluid sac. Perfect. Yet there’s an uncomfortable, “canary in the coal mine” aura to what Romulus signals about Hollywood’s near future. Now, even smart movies have to clock in their hours as brand ambassadors and nostalgia vehicles.

Call it naiveté, but I’d hoped the Alien series would be spared such dishonour, seeing as it’s so covered in the sticky fingerprints of its directors, from Ridley Scott to James Cameron to David Fincher to Jean-Pierre Jeunet and then back to Ridley Scott. Not everyone loves every instalment, but every instalment is very much its own, individual creation.

The franchise’s newest captain, Fede Álvarez, brings his own distinct pedigree. He’s a full-blooded horror man, behind 2013’s Evil Dead and 2016’s Don’t Breathe, keen to return Alien to the claustrophobia of Scott’s 1979 original. His script, co-written by Rodo Sayagues, centres on the desperate young residents of a mining colony. Gas leaks and lung disease have decimated their families, and Weyland-Yutani (the corporation behind all things nefarious in the Alien universe) have imprisoned them in unbreakable contracts.

A small crew – orphan Rain (Cailee Spaeny), her father’s android Andy (David Jonsson), who she’s come to see as a brother, her ex Tyler (Archie Renaux), his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), and couple Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu) – escape to the planet’s outer rings and a decommissioned space station with the hypersleep chambers necessary to flee and start a new life. Unfortunately, the place is also infested with Xenomorphs, the highly evolved, acid-blooded murder machines whose only instinct is to enact Freudian reproductive horrors on all life forms within their reach.

Álvarez accurately replicates the unreal beauty and scope of Scott’s sci-fi worlds, thanks to the minimalist clutter of production designer Naaman Marshall’s interiors, the analogue beeps and clicks of the film’s sound design, and Benjamin Wallfisch’s score, which nods to both Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner’s contributions to Alien and Aliens, respectively. And, Romulus, too, touches on the series’s ideas of what lies between man, monster, and machine, the natural and unnatural – and, while Spaeny makes for a fine new Ellen Ripley, Jonsson’s performance is the clear standout. Andy is radically different to Ian Holm’s Ash or Michael Fassbender’s David, but the actor shares in their fine-tuned ability to control expression to signal a shift in thought or demeanour.

Yet the callbacks and references start to stack up, to Alien, Cameron’s Aliens, to Scott’s 2012 prequel Prometheus, and even to the 2014 game Alien: Isolation. And they’re delivered with an increasing disinterest in logic, the needs of the narrative, or the desire to make Romulus feel like one part of a larger universe. One, near the end, is as insultingly absurd as a wink-to-camera Marvel cameo. Another is ethically problematic. The overall effect is something akin to cinematic necromancy. A climactic idea is presented as a major departure for the franchise. It’s actually been done before, but here it’s rendered in a way that robs of its eldritch horror one of the most alluringly foul creatures in cinema history.

Romulus was created in direct response to Covenant, the last Alien film, which was released in 2017 to mixed reviews and poor box office. I loved it, specifically as a feverish collision between that eldritch horror (more accurately described here as eldritch panic), and a Frankenstein story in which the monster takes its revenge. Certainly, that wasn’t the consensus. What’s frustrating about Romulus is to see that the reaction to unpopular ideas wasn’t to come up with more, but to simply recycle the old ones as nostalgia.

Dir: Fede Álvarez. Starring: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu. 15, 119 mins.

‘Alien: Romulus’ is in cinemas from 16 August