Alien: Romulus (2024)

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In today’s landscape of tired, rehashed IP slop that seems to dominate the market for the better part of the last decade, it’s rare to see a film rise above the low-hanging fruit of nostalgia bait and fanservice callbacks. Alien: Romulus, despite being a brighter spot in the long-running sci-fi horror franchise’s tumultuous and inconsistent history, unfortunately never seems interested in building an identity outside what has already been accomplished.

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On a positive note, the film opens strong, giving us a beautiful yet haunting showcase of visual storytelling as we watch the xenomorph from the original Alien(1979) being recovered by a Watland-Utani vessel and thawed out for further testing. Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe, Evil Dead) masterfully combines space’s cold, silent emptiness with stellar lighting and practical effects, setting the tone expertly. This hot streak continues as we meet our main character and Ripley stand-in, Rain (Cailee Spaeny), and her android companion, Andy (David Johnson), on one of Wayland-Yutani’s mining colonies. The industrial retro-futurism of each set perfectly sells the dystopian atmosphere of this technocratic hellscape and fits right at home within the franchise’s other iconic locations.

While unable to reach the originality of H. R. Giger’s vision, the film still deserves to be recognized for its quality and commitment to authenticity. Alas, as soon as our characters leave the planet and the actual plot subsequently begins, most of this fantastic direction is overshadowed by choices that left me scratching my head in pure annoyance.

The perfect distillation of the problem with the film is the abhorrent use of CGI to zombify late actor Ian Homles into “playing” Rook, an android that looks and sounds just like Ash from the original Alien film. Not only does it look awful, I physically cringed every time that poorly rendered abomination was on screen, but it is an absolute waste of a character as he is only brought back to be a glorified exposition-dumping machine. The irony of this idea being greenlit for a franchise about the unfettered exploitation of corporations on their workforce is not lost on me.

Adding insult to injury, this is only the first of many soulless callbacks and references to the previous films. Another glaring example is the constant mirroring of Ripley’s iconic moments, from Rain copying Ripley’s iconic entrance to using her iconic one-liner from Aliens, which doesn’t even make sense in the scene’s context. It doesn’t stop there either, as whole plot concepts are lifted and rehashed, such as the fakeout ending from the first Alien, ripping it wholesale without genuinely recognizing what made the original so special.

As you might have noticed, I’ve mentioned little of the other characters/victims in the film. This is because, outside of a few exceptions such as the android Andy, most other characters are but shallow archetypes that barely merit mention. However, it must be repeated that David Johnson shines as Andy, flipping the switch from a twitching, endearing brother figure to a cold, heartless company drone with scary finesse.

Ultimately, the need to sprinkle a little bit of everything from past installments in the franchise ends up being a double-edged sword for Alien: Romulus. While these inclusions can raise the quality of some of the more poorly executed ideas from past installments in the Alien franchise, it simultaneously stumbles to match the novelty of the iconic moments within the very franchise it tries to reuse. What we’re left with is a film without much of its own identity to stand on.