Review: Alien: Romulus

Director Fede Alvarez drags the Alien franchise back to its horror roots with the most frightening installment since the 1979 original.

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Fede Alvarez is probably the reason you are reading this review right now. I don't mean this specific review, although that is certainly accurate since it is a review of a movie he directed, but the reason that I am writing about horror movies online at all. I've chronicalled my post-high school lapse in horror fandom before, but suffice it to say there was a good fifteen year period that I really didn't pay any attention to the genre. I loved plenty of eighties horror from my youth, and my personal favorites such as Dream Warriors and Evil Dead 2 have been cemented for the better part of my life at this point. Around ten years ago, however, I was attending a Halloween party (dressed as "Macho Man" Randy Savage, natch) and Alvarez's reboot of the Evil Dead franchise was on in the background. I was equally captivated and repulsed, and found myself struggling to take my eyes off of the screen. For the first time in forever, a horror movie had captured my interest. Around that same time, a new wave of classics were being released into theaters, and I let my curiousity lead me to renting It Follows, and then The Babadook, and before I knew it I had agreed to join Scott on his ambitious project to write about a horror movie every day during the month of October. Clearly, I haven't looked back since, and Alvarez's bloody reimagining of a favorite from my youth was pretty much the catalyst.

Naturally, when I found out that Alvarez was going to tackle another horror movie that I grew up loving, I was excited to give it a try. Romulus is not a reboot of Alien, but rather another entry into the universe that was first imagined by Ridley Scott nearly fifty years ago. Just as he did with Sam Raimi's Evil Dead, Alvarez taps into the fundemental horror of Scott's creation and presents something that is both scary and fresh with it. Ever since James Cameron's initial sequel, Aliens, the franchise has flirted with action movie trappings, and eventually grand, sci-fi philosophizing, at the expense of the core horror elements that comprised so much of its original identity. Some of those movies are good (Aliens is great, even), but it always felt like there was an untapped well of terror that could still be mined from the property. With Alien: Romulus, that horror identity is back in the forefront. This is a film that knows how to build tension within the trappings of a space setting - using dark passageways of a derilict spacecraft, malfunctioning machinery, even gravity and the lack thereof, to put its characters in difficult situations that seem to be fraught at every turn. It also understands the inherent scarieness of the H.R. Giger designs for both the Xenomorphs and the face huggers. Giger's work is fundamentally, uncomfortably sexual, and the undercurrent of that sexuality imbues the violence here with stomach-churning impact. It is one thing to recognize the original film as horror and attempt to revive that legacy, but its something else to truly understand why it is scary and to anchor to those elements so firmly. That is what Alvarez does here, and what seems to be his superpower as a filmmaker.

I'm not going to dig too far into the plot here, but you have a rag-tag and generally likeable crew of laborers who are keen on escaping their indentured servitude at the hands of the Weyland-Yutani corporation, and see an abandoned spacecraft they discovered as their way out. Unfortunately, the spacecraft was less "abandoned" and more "the scene of a horrific slaughter at the hands of a Xenomorph". You can imagine the broad strokes from there. One interesting dynamic that the movie leans on is the relationship between chief protagonist Rain and her "brother", Andy, who is actually a partially damaged android that her father took pity on and adopted when she was younger. I find it fascinating that the Alien frachise has always invested in such a rich exploration of artificial life, even in comparison to its sister franchise The Terminator*. Each entry seems to tackle the subject from a different, interesting angle that also incorporates philosophies and lessons from prior films. As far as the pacing and flow of the movie, I found it to be perfect up to the last twenty minutes or so. I won't spoil the ending, but it didn't fully work for me, which is partly because everything up to that point did feel so perfectly encapsulated and I didn't actually think it was necessary. That said, it's a pretty big swing, which I appreciate, and I have seen commentary from people who absolutely loved it, so mileage may vary. The only other negative I can muster for Romulus is that some of the call-backs to prior movies feel forced and a touch jarring, particularly in a time when nostalgia-peddling has supplanted art as the primary output of the movie-making industry in America. Still, these are minor quibbles for a film that is probably my favorite horror project that I've seen from 2024 so far.

*Obviously, the Predator franchise is a close sibling to Alien, and they even share a universe. I think The Terminator belongs in that mix, as well. Both Terminator and Alien started off with an unvconventional sci-fi take on what are clearly horror films, before huge action-movie sequels helmed by James Cameron propelled them into a never-ending cycle of sequels and prequels of wildly varying quality that are still going today.