David Jonsson and Cailee Spaeny star in Alien: Romulus.
Photo / Disney Studios
David Jonsson and Cailee Spaeny star in Alien: Romulus.
Photo / Disney Studios
Review by Emma Gleason &Ethan Sills
An action-packed return to the franchise’s horror roots, the new sequel Alien: Romulus revisits the facehuggers, xenomorphs and Weyland-Yutani Corporation.
A young cohort of colony workers led by Rain, played by Cailee Spaeny, are facing bleak futures. They hatch a plan to escape the planet, but an abandoned space station isn’t as desolate as it seems.
Directed by filmmaker Fede Alvarez, the movie is out in New Zealand cinemas now.
Ethan Sills is an entertainment reviewer for the Herald and Emma Gleason is deputy editor of entertainment and lifestyle.
OPINION
Emma Gleason: First things first, I’m a bit of an Alien fan. It’s one of my favourite science fiction franchises (alongside Dune and Blade Runner). I loved the original, and the newer, more divisive instalments in the canon, so I was pumped to see Alien: Romulus - and to go to the movies with you, Ethan.
Ethan Sills: I’m not as well-versed in this franchise as you. I’ve seen Alien and Aliens - they are both undeniably classics, regardless of your thoughts on the genre - but I haven’t seen the other ones that follow that general storyline as I think the general consensus for them is “not good”. I did see Prometheus out of curiosity as well, but whatever Ridley Scott was aiming for there wasn’t quite for me, so I skipped out on Covenant as well.
Emma: Okay, I do think they’re worth your time; they add a lot to the lore, and while stylistically and tonally quite different to the industrial Giger-ness of the first films, I liked them a lot. I was intrigued to see where we’d be going for this new film following all the big, meet-your-maker themes of Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant, and what a new director, Fede Alvarez, would bring to the canon.
Ethan: I can’t say Romulus was high on my 2024 watchlist, but there was some effective marketing with that trailer. It definitely seemed like a return to the space horror roots of the original, so seemed like it’d be worth dipping my toes back in for.
Emma: I haven’t seen the trailer! I went in blind. Totally agree on the return to horror. I’ve always felt the films were best when they focused on that genre. As far as horror conventions go, Romulus is a real creature feature. The facehuggers and xenomorphs are back, and they are terrifying. What was your first reaction?
Ethan: They were terrifying. I am not a fan of horror movies generally - I find them a bit tired, predictable, always the same jump-scares or people acting stupidly. And there certainly is some of that in this movie as well, which I’m sure we’ll get to - but the atmosphere of this movie, particularly with the abandoned space station setting, added more of a chilling aspect to the movie. And yes, as soon as the facehuggers appeared, I am happy to admit I was deeply unsettled by them. The fact they kept practical effects there just made them feel more real, and a lot of the staging of the moments involving them just added to the tension in those scenes.
Emma: The alien creation was really exceptional; they were even more visceral, scary and disturbing than in past instalments.
Rain (Cailee Spaeny) faces a xenomorph in Alien: Romulus. Photo / Disney Studios
Emma: As well as the focus on horror, this film felt like a return to the energy of Ridley Scott’s first Alien film. That vision of claustrophobic spaceships, grimy industrial space, and that predator versus prey dynamic are things I’ve always loved about this franchise, and I think they were executed well in this new film.
Emma: As we saw in Alien, set on the commercial space hauler Nostromo, Aliens’ marine grunts and terraforming, and Alien 3′s penal colony, the space of the Alien universe is working class, blue-collar and pretty grim. They really leaned into that for Romulus, which opens on the hellish mining colony of Jackson, where people are stuck in indentured work contracts for “the company” (Charles Bishop Weyland’s infamous Weyland-Yutani Corporation) and there’s no sun and people keep dying from overwork and novel viruses. Call me nihilistic, but it felt much more believable than some Star Trek utopia. Galactic capitalism, baby, what could go wrong?
Emma: I love seeing that world-building in the colony; the mess hall, the flea market and the red-light district. I wish we saw more of Jackson.
Ethan: I did like that initial setting, and it was a simple way of establishing how bleak Rain’s life is. I do think it could have dwelled there a little longer, but the whole first act is purely about setting up the rest of the movie - it’s not too interested in lingering on much.
Emma: It presented a pretty grim life, and our young protagonists are all facing bleak, short futures. How did you feel about the cast? Cailee Spaeny was great, I thought - I loved her in Civil War - and I liked the younger brother, he felt believably jaded and angry.
Ethan: Spaeny as Rain and [David] Jonsson as Andy are the two clear standouts in this movie. Again, I don’t think their past relationship is established enough for the movie to hinge on it, but the two are given the most fleshed-out characters, and they have great chemistry together as Andy changes during the movie.
David Jonsson is android Andy in Alien: Romulus. Photo / Disney Studios
Emma: I loved Andy, and Jonsson put in a great performance. The synthetics are always interesting plot devices in this universe - more morally challenging than some of the humans (thinking of Rook, and David).
Ethan: The rest were quite expendable, though. It’s one of the things I don’t like about horror movies, in a way, is that you know most of the characters are going to be killed off, so it’s hard to get invested in them. Rain - in a similar vein to Ripley and Elizabeth Shaw - just has “final girl” energy throughout, and it’s easy to follow her. There is one good moment early on when the characters turn on each other, and the way the seeds had been sown earlier does allow that moment to hit well, but this very quickly becomes a movie about Rain and Andy, and everyone else is along for the ride.
Emma: The relationship between Rain and Andy was really moving. Other characters felt less connected or fleshed out. I feel like we knew next to nothing about the pilot Navarro, played by Aileen Wu.
Ethan: A lot of them are just plot fodder to move certain elements along, aren’t they? On that, though, what did you make of the story itself?
Emma: The film’s action unfolded at a clipper pace. As soon as they’re on that infested hunk of metal - hurtling towards the planet’s icy rings as time runs out - things start to go sideways.
Ethan: I thought the “ticking clock” element was quite strong - it gave the film more urgency and was something different from what I’ve seen of the franchise, to have this deadline and external threat they had to try to outrun. I also liked how everything that happened was largely driven by the - admittedly poor - decisions of the main group.
Emma: It’s not long before we see facehuggers, and the mighty xenomorph. All horrifying. Since the very first film in the franchise, there have been parallels drawn between the design of the aliens (and the mechanisms of their life cycle) and human genitalia. These references felt even more explicit in this one, I think.
Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and a xenomorph in Alien: Romulus. Photo / Disney Studios
Considering you haven’t seen all the films, did you have enough background knowledge to appreciate all the references? I feel like Romulus offers different viewing experiences depending on how much you bring to it; there’s a surface enjoyment, you could go in and enjoy a scary sci-fi, but the established world-building and canon are there too. While it was definitely a departure from the esoteric philosophising of the more recent films, there were plot points that explicitly referenced that, so it does reward deep knowledge.
Ethan: I think I’ve seen enough of the franchise - particularly with how “the company” hangs over every part of this [universe] - to appreciate how the story developed over the second half of the movie. I think it is trying to walk the line between the more philosophical tone of Ridley Scott’s prequels and the action set pieces of the original two movies, and it handles that well, but on a surface level, this is more of a sci-fi horror-action movie than anything.
Emma: Fans will be rewarded with all the callbacks in the film. So many callbacks. Too many callbacks?
Ethan: Rewarded, or pandered to? There was a big cheer at the screening we went to when one of the franchise’s most iconic lines was reimagined, but it felt like a pale imitation of the original. I get nostalgia is key, particularly to an old franchise like this, but I don’t think people need to be quite so heavy-handed in making references, particularly when the references come often. Even the very end of the movie felt quite similar to a lot of what has come before.
Emma: What about the end of the film? Without giving too much away, the final chapter is quite full-on; I expected it to go there, after some plot revelations early on to do with Kay, played by Isabela Merced, but I was surprised it went as far as it did. Should they have finished it sooner? I feel like they could have left that part for the next film.
Ethan: I did think it was dragging a bit by this point, but the final 10 minutes definitely feature the most unsettling part of the movie. I’m still not sure how I feel about the very big swing they took, but it’s certainly going to be the most memorable - or memeable - part of the movie. And it’s going to fuel my nightmares.
Emma: They’re definitely setting it up for a sequel, right?
Ethan: 100%. Who knows how it’ll fit into all the other movies that have come after, but given where it suggests things are heading, there could be avenue to do something a bit different with another instalment - leave the mining planets and space stations behind, and find a different environment to put a different spin on this [setting].
