I Just Saw

I just saw Alien: Romulus and it was so good it made up for every bad sequel in the franchise and has earned its place as the third best after Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). A group of young people living as indentured servants on a mining outpost owned by those dastardly villains of the series, the Weyland-Utani corp, decide to try to make a better life for themselves by stealing a ship that can take them the nine light years to the nearest human settlement. The trip requires them to siphon fuel from the Romulus, a ship floating free near the asteroid belt. But when they arrive they find out why it’s been abandoned. Hint: some very toothy parasites might be involved. And I don’t mean the Tories.

Set between Alien and Aliens (following Saw X, midquels seem popular in horror), our Final Girl is Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her supporting lead “Andy” (David Jonsson), an android built by her late father and raised as her brother. The film is easily the best since Aliens primarily because it dispenses with all of the pseudo-philosophical warbling and laborious myth-making of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), and focuses instead on developing a plot with a clearly typed cast of characters. In other words, it functions as a sci-fi horror movie with suspense and shock. In this way, it actually does better at the existential theming than its two predecessors, due to it presenting its themes as elements of a story rather than thinking itself too good to have a story.

The stroke of genius here was hiring stylish Uruguayan horror director Fede Álvarez, who also handled Evil Dead (2013) as well as the two Don’t Breathe films (2016 and 2018). Evil Dead was about as good as anyone could have made it given how limited the director would have been. Here Álvarez has a freer reign to develop his own plot, and he borrows from what used to be called the Dead Teenager Movie for structure, focusing on a group of youths vaguely conforming to slasher types. (Final Girl, jerk, nice guy, nerd, and so on.) He fleshes out these types with his co-writer and makes them engaging, which is refreshing in a post-Aliens sequel. Apparently all this franchise needed was a dedicated genre director to recapture some of what made the original work.

The cinematography is beautiful, evoking the asteroid belt, space, and inner chambers of the Romulus with a crisp and laser eye. I feel as though Álvarez had in mind Scott’s famous description of Alien as a haunted house movie in space, since that is what he’s making here, with oogly-booglies jumping at our cast down long, dark corridors. The gore is squishy and nasty, the character choices believable. The themes around artificial intelligence and just how conscious “Andy” may or not be hold your interest throughout even if the alien stuff doesn’t, which it should anyway because it’s expertly done.

Álvarez even re-does bad ideas from previous Alien films and makes them work, like the hybrid life-form from Alien: Resurrection (1997) and the cryo-chamber birthing in Prometheus, elements that he combines in a gloriously nasty sequence that drew gasps from my Friday-night audience. In short, Alien: Romulus might not be perfect, but it’s a Space Horror Movie with a capital Movie. It’s possibly the most purely entertaining pulp horror that I’ve seen this year.

Rating: 3.5/4