Released: 16th August 2024
Seen: 9th February 2025
2017 is the last year that we had a new instalment of the Alien franchise, a film that made about 250 million worldwide but didn’t get the best critical reception. It still made money and still had its fans (I counted myself among them at the time of its release) so it was almost inevitable that we would get another sequel where another group of people would happen upon a xenomorph colony and get their shit fucked up by the iconic acid-blooded creatures. Sure enough last year we got such a film with Alien: Romulus, the 7th entry in the long-running franchise which dared to ask the question “What if a bunch of people found the original ship from Alien and there were still aliens on it who would like to face fuck them all to death?”.., an important question that the film deftly answers.
Alien: Romulus picks up several years after the original Alien with a young woman named Rain (Cailee Spaeny), her surrogate brother and android Andy (David Jonsson) who have just learned that Rin’s contract with the evil Weyland-Yutani corporation has extended her work contract which forces her to decide to try and escape. With the help of her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux), sister Kay (Isabela Merced), cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Bjorn’s adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu) she goes off to find a ship that has cryo chambers with enough power to keep them all in stasis for the nine-year journey to Yvaga III where they hope to start a new life… unfortunately the ship they end up trying to take over is just crawling with facehuggers who want to hug faces and make a whole bunch of xenomorphs who can then kill everyone on board which makes things a little awkward for our heroes.
Alien: Romulus feels like an Alien movie that’s playing all the hits and doing it well. Everything you know and love about the Alien franchise is here, from the androids who look fully human but are also highly susceptible to being turned against the humans by the company that built them to the incredibly tough female characters that carry this franchise like it’s nothing. From scenes of glorious practical gore designed to make you squirm to creative uses of the sci-fi setting to create unique horror set pieces, Alien: Romulus has done its homework and is presenting the best version of the franchise elements that make this franchise work. Is some of the stuff presented here pretty much identical to things we’ve seen in other movies in this franchise? Sure, but that’s kind of the thing with every franchise and if it’s done well then that’s never a problem and here it’s done very well.
To be so bold, Alien: Romulus might be the film with the scariest set of facehuggers that we’ve seen in a while. These little creatures are an absolute staple of the franchise, as they should be since without them we don’t get a xenomorph to play with but this batch of facehuggers feels smarter and scarier than before. They move in packs, they sneak around, they are going to hug your damn face off if that’s what it takes and it’s terrifying. In fact – and this is slightly problematic – they may end up being scarier than the actual Xenomorphs are. There are a few moments when it does feel like the film is leaning into our existing knowledge of the Xenomorphs in order to make them scary instead of just showing off why these things are fucking terrifying. Part of what helped make the Xenomorphs terrifying is that they could get just about anywhere and were completely relentless and here there’s an implication that just seeing a gun might scare them off. It’s a bit of a tradeoff but one that mostly works cos it lets us be scared of every stage of this creature’s lifecycle instead of just the big final version.
Alien: Romulus is also just a stunning film to look at, every single scene is a grand display of what can be done in a sci-fi setting visually. The ships look well lived in, futuristic in a way that doesn’t feel silly and when we get to the climax of the film, some shots are so horrifyingly gorgeous they will take your breath away. It’s still able to horrify with some of its visuals, especially when it comes time for one of the creatures to do something to the fleshy humans, but it’ll also look damn good while it does so which is a triumph. There’s a particular moment late in the film involving the infamous acid blood of the Xenomorphs that exemplifies that combination of beauty and horror so well with more tension than most other films out in the last year.
A lot of that work that makes the stunning visuals is down to the VFX department who are nominated for an Oscar this year and damn if they don’t earn it. Some of these shots are literally and figuratively out of this world in terms of creativity and brilliance. The shots set outside the main ship are stunning, the way they make the creatures move is brilliant, every little thing that’s clearly relying on the VFX team is stunning to look at and it’s clear why this film has a nomination in this category. On a technical level, it’s an undeniable triumph in terms of blending CGI with practical effects to create something spectacular.
On a moral level, however, there’s a major element of Alien: Romulus that makes me want to be violently ill and it gnawed at me the entire time I was watching this film (mild spoilers but… the film is a year old, this is such an early plot point that it feels like it has to be mentioned and the discussions around this were everywhere last year so it’ll be OK) In the original Alien film, there’s a character called Ash played by Ian Holm, a character who acts like a secondary protagonist and ends up being the central focus for the film’s critique of capitalism (the idea that Wayland Yutani would be fine sacrificing all of the people on board the ship if it meant they could make money from the Xenomorph). It’s a legendary character with several great scenes performed greatly by the legendary Ian Holm… Ian Holm passed away in 2020 but he appears in Alien: Romulus, not even as Ash but as the randomly identical character Rook who is also meant to be only for the company.
Now, to be fair to the filmmakers, Ian Holm’s estate did sign off on this use but that doesn’t change the fact that an actor’s likeness has been recreated for seemingly no reason after his death to tell a new story. The choices made here were not Ian Holm’s, the performance is not his but it uses his face… this is why there was an actor’s strike not too long ago, precisely this kind of thing was argued as a major problem and it just feels wrong. It’s not like it needed to be Ian Holm’s character, this film is a sequel to Prometheus so if they wanted a morally bankrupt robot character I’m sure Michael Fassbender would’ve been available to do this instead of this bout of cinematic grave-robbing. Again, they got permission from the estate so it’s not like they’re doing anything legally wrong but it still feels messed up that Ian Holm’s image is being used in a film he never knew was even in the works for no reason other than to forge a semi-connection to the original (one that’s already there cos… ya know, it’s an Alien movie, we don’t need the same robot from the first one). If this kind of thing is a hard-line issue for you I get it, this character is in so much of the film and for the life of me I can’t figure out why it had to be that specific character. On a technological level, it looks so much like Holm that it’s beyond impressive… but I’m also sure it looked impressive when Pandora opened up her box, and once that thing is open it’s damn hard to close it.
Alien: Romulus is a very fun movie with a lot of great scares and atmosphere, bolstered by a bunch of strong performances by a cast that is great at bringing this wildly intelligent set of characters to life and putting them in danger without making them seem stupid. It’s no wonder this film made a ton at the box office and has a nomination for its effects because it is a genuinely great movie, it just sucks that a major element of what can be pointed to as an example of that greatness involves the digital recreation of an actor who has long since passed away and had no real say in his own performance. If you can get past that problem then you’re going to enjoy this film but it’s a problem I find very difficult to get past because once the studio system gets the hang of how to do this, there’s no limit to what they can do and that thought is scarier than any Xenomorph will ever be.
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