Divalicious Review! Alien: Romulus is Aliens Remixed—The Good and the Bad
By Caroline Cao | August 17, 2024 | Celebrity & Culture
If you were to cut the two-hour Alien: Romulus into two halves of a steak, one side is a chore to chew. But once you get to the other slice, it’s delicious.
Admittedly, Alien: Romulus starts slow. While the slow burn is an effective strategy (the original 1979 Alien did this well), there are some same-ole-same-ole’ scares and a sometimes overactive ramped-up score (by composer Benjamin Wallfisch). But most of Romulus at least functions as an Alien movie—and then it blows your mind with a bonkers turn.
A young colonist-laborer, Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny from Civil War and Priscilla), wants nothing more than to ditch a gas-fuming colony with Andy (David Jonsson), an adopted brother who’s a humanoid android she rescued from a scrap heap. She gets a chance to ditch the colony and flee to a tolerable planetary life when acquaintances recruit her and her android for a heist upon an abandoned floating spacecraft, the Romulus. Ghastly creatures—leftover from the first Alien film—wander aboard.
This is also director Fede Álvarez‘s (who co-wrote the film with Rodo Sayagues) second go at continuing a beloved franchise following the 2013 Evil Dead. Romulus transports the franchise back to its chilly pure horror roots, whereas Prometheus and Covenant were horrors with contrasting genre brushstrokes.
While Romulus is thankfully a standalone story that happens to be situated between the timeline of the first film and James Cameron’s Aliens, I’ll be remiss to mention a wrench in the gears of Romulus that is the digitally zombified face and voice of a late actor that nearly got me groaning at the screen, “Just recast and leave them in peace.”
The sets and shots may be brimming with moneyed practical effects, dark atmosphere and greedy xenomorphs with their acidic bile, but the Romulus can feel bogged down by its nostalgic remixing. There’s a smidge of inertia around less compelling supporting players, but Spaeny and Jonsson shine together in the film’s final hour when their escape is pared down to a two-hander survival.
Spaeny finds her bite as a torch-bearer for the franchise, a formidable successor to Sigourney Weaver‘s Ellen Ripley, but Jonsson’s performance hits as a brick of pathos. Without spoiling too much, the way Jonsson hunches and stiffens his body and expression under pressure gives us the impression that his android character is always guarded against violation—a perhaps iffy subtext furthered by the casting of a Black person as an abused android.
The film’s close calls aren’t just about their survival, but whether their own bond can survive their personal conflicts. They’re a little more than enough to anchor the heart of this horror film. I wanted to see them both escape the xenomorphs.
Alien: Romulus releases in theaters on August 16.
Photo credit: Disney
