Alien: Romulus Review
A return to form per se for the Alien franchise; this new iteration brings the claustrophobic scares.
Denied passage off of her mining world, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her symbiote Andy (David Jonsson) team up with Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu) to steal the cryo-pods from a passing decommissioned ship, and travel to a new system. The only problem is that once they gain entry to the overhead ship, they realize the terrible truth: they aren’t alone in there.
Director Fede Alvarez certainly learnt from the criticisms of the last two Alien outings; here grounding his film almost entirely within the confines of a single ship. It’s heart racing, fear inducing, scary stuff, and there is plenty on offer to make the fans of the sci-fi horror aspects of this franchise enthused.
The cast - an array of young talent augmented by a somewhat terrifying (not for the reasons you want) older cameo - are all fine. None really stand out except for Isabela Merced as a scream queen, and David Jonsson as the android Andy. Jonsson in particular gives a wonderfully nuanced performance that brings a whole world of depth to his not-quite-human character.
Visually, this is a stunning film. The cinematography is frequently astounding, but it’s matched by a wonderful respect for the set design, and a wonderful freedom with the sound design. This is the sort of movie you’ll easily slip into when the world looks this detailed and real, but also one you’ll want to watch in a quiet cinema when it sounds this amazing.
Alvarez discards a lot of the bigger questions that Ridley Scott was asking in his last two sequels, and to be fair there is a feeling that maybe in the long run that will make this movie one that pops to mind less readily; after all, it is somewhat of a rehash of the first two films. The constant push for Spaeny’s Rain to be compared with Sigourney Weaver’s iconic work, particularly when Rain as a character has not earnt the level of badassery Ripley did and we’re forced into thinking it with constant costume design and hair and makeup callbacks, does grate a little. But ultimately, this is the sort of movie that will get your heart racing and is a wonderfully scary, bloody, gory and gruesome time in the theatre.
