Well, I settled into my seat for Alien: Romulus prepared for a ride that might soar or clunk—either way, I was ready to have my nerves worked over. You go to an Alien movie these days with more than just popcorn and a sense of dread; you come armed with a small arsenal of skepticism. Fede Álvarez, bless him, shoulders the Sisyphean task of giving the xenomorph mythos another go, determined to please both sweaty-palmed newcomers and the crusty acolytes who have studied Giger’s monsters as if they were cave paintings. What we get isn’t a catastrophe—far from it. But if your idea of greatness means trembling, wide-eyed awe, Romulus won’t have you seeing gods in the horror flicker. It’s good, yes—just not unforgettable.
From the jump, Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues know exactly what franchise jitters feel like. They want to honor the Alien cathedral but can’t stop themselves from adjusting the pews and installing a few slick neon signs. The abandoned space station is as close to a haunted house as the 22nd century has on offer—leveraging every claustrophobic corridor and flicker of shadow for maximum anxiety. The film looks remarkable. All the dim-lit corridors, rusted edges, and clanging metallic echoes—clearly they’ve lavished love and cash on making it tactile. The practical effects, bless their slime and chitin, do what CGI never manages: they worm under your skin. You can almost smell the metal and feel the airlessness. For a brief spell, I believed again.
Cailee Spaeny, so good she almost convinces you her character Rain Carradine hasn’t read all the previous screenplays, drags us into her world—an orphan-turned-miner, clinging to the only family she has left: an android, Andy (David Jonsson), who’s more endearingly malfunctioning than half the humans in Ridleyville. Their bond gives the film its beating heart, and Spaeny delivers on battered resilience—her face a catalog of want, anger, and dogged hope. Jonsson brings a warmth to Andy that feels almost dangerous; when a movie robot makes you fret more than the people, something’s working.
But oh, when Romulus tries to square itself as another link in the Alien mythology, things get stickier. The sheer pressure to please the uninitiated—this “please like me” grin pasted over every decision—saps the narrative of the franchise’s signature nihilism. The script wants you to walk in cold, devour the terror, and walk out with only minimal homework. I suppose that’s sound box-office logic in an era of endless cinematic universes, but doesn’t it also feel a little cowardly? When did Alien become so concerned with not offending our intelligence—or our memories?
If you’ve tramped through the dark with Sigourney Weaver and dealt with chestbursters under your own ribs, you’ll recognize the feints and echoes. The plot—scrappy young scavengers on a derelict who stumble into corporate evil and monster mayhem—has the skeleton of classic space horror, but not the flesh. The movie keeps reminding you it remembers where it came from, but does so the way an overeager student recites Shakespeare: the beats are hit, but the blood’s not there. I kept thinking: if you want to be reverent, go all the way—otherwise, why not break ranks and make something new, something fit to sweat beside Alien rather than cower behind it?
Case in point: Rook, the science officer android, arrives as a near dead-ringer tribute to Ian Holm’s Ash, right down to the mannerisms and drifting, clinical menace. For a minute, I was charmed by the audacity, then unsettled by the confusion—are we doing homage or retcon? The resemblance borders on the eerie, thanks to some combination of animatronics, AI, and, inevitably, CGI, all engineered to drag the ghost of Ash blinking back into the digital sun. But in aping the original, the character never becomes more than a spectral echo, a gesture toward old glories rather than a new sinister marvel. In all the franchise’s best moments, androids are philosophical disputes with skin and hidden directives; here, Rook is just a puzzle piece with uncanny eyes, a totem of the past shuffled in to pad out the present.
The broader cast fares well, given they spend most of the running time dodging jaws and corporate duplicity. Archie Renaux (the forlorn ex) and Isabela Merced (the pregnant wild card) fill in survivor archetypes competently, and the supporting gang provides precisely the right amount of twitch and terror. Still, outside the reticent Rain and the recalibrating Andy, you’re left wishing for more meat on these bones—more messy drama, more reasons to mourn what’s lost when the station inevitably goes to hell.
The film’s rhythm is all anxious staccato—every story beat slotted in to keep the breath short and the blood high. Sometimes, though, that manufactured haste gets in its own way. Characters make choices that serve not sense but story: oh, that old horror chestnut—“Don’t open that door!”—except, of course, they always do. The tension, when it works, is real and delicious, but too often we’re let down by action that feels dragged along by the necessity of tropes, not by characters living on the razor’s edge. The climax thunders and convulses—aliens hiss, blood burns through bulkheads, and everybody’s shrieking—but I longed for a moment where emotion, not just threat, curled around the survivalist panic.
We get just enough character arc for Rain and Andy to anchor the film emotionally, but the rest are left circling the drain. I kept wishing for another ten minutes spent digging into schisms and fears, instead of hurrying from slaughter to corridor to last-ditch plan. There’s a cruelty in how little time we’re given to care before the body count forces us forward.
At bottom, this is a film that’s desperate to prove it can do the old moves with new feet. And it mostly does, with style, sweat, and a sly affection for mutilated flesh. If you want tension, spectacle, and enough viscera to fertilize LV-410, you’ll get your fill. But if you dreamed that Alien: Romulus might rise above its own DNA, you’ll find it content to bask in the genetic memory of what once was. For casual viewers, this is a raucous, heart-thumping night at the movies—a competent evolution of the haunted house in space. For the die-hards, it’s a curious letdown—a film with gleaming tools and little appetite for blood-deep invention.
As the credits roll and the last drop of adrenaline pulses out, you’re left with a well-executed spectacle that dazzles even as it dodges its own heritage. Romulus survives—but it never mutates. I suppose that’s the central problem: the film pays tribute at the altar of Alien but is too reverent to spill any new blood on the tiles. You’ll have a good time—but you might leave hungry.
