‘Alien: Romulus’ Is a Propulsive Rocket on Autopilot

Early on in Alien: Romulus, the camera lingers on an advertisement for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, the monolithic conglomerate whose shadow falls over every film in the franchise. It reads: “Building Better Worlds.” In the immediate context of the scene, which is set in a spectacularly dilapidated mining outpost somewhere in deep space, the motto doubles as a grim sight gag; if the sun never sets on this corner of the Weyland-Yutani empire, that’s because it never rises, either. More generally, though, the phrase points to the core mandate of a blockbuster series that ranks among the greatest of its era and cycles through visionary directors tasked with creating striking, fully realized environments expansive enough to accommodate several decades’ worth of Alien lore.

The master builder (or, if you will, Engineer) in this narrative is Ridley Scott, whose original house style—a sci-fi Gothicism bowing equally to Hieronymus Bosch and Stanley Kubrick—effectively changed the trajectory of Hollywood sci-fi. Alien’s immersive claustrophobia provided a foundation for other accomplished directors to wring their own textural and architectural variations, from James Cameron’s gleaming techno-fetishism (Aliens) to David Fincher’s maximum-security labyrinth (Alien 3) to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s soggy, retro-futurist junk shop (Alien Resurrection). Depending on whom you ask, each film is worthy on its own terms, as well as part of a larger whole; when Scott eventually returned to the premises in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, he doubled down on the material’s mythic and religious subtext, as if trying to inject a sense of cosmic significance commensurate with his own auteurist legend.

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At this point, Sir Ridley’s equity in his own intellectual property is considerable. Hence his marching orders to Fede Álvarez (the Uruguayan genre specialist entrusted with helming the latest installment), which basically boiled down to “Don’t fuck up.” The good news is that Álvarez—who has experience remodeling classics via his 2013 Evil Dead remake—has not fucked up: Taken solely as a piece of craftsmanship, Romulus is slick and solid. Between its marvelously precise production design, propulsive editing, and nicely modulated ensemble acting—drawn from a cast of up-and-comers without an A-lister in sight—Álvarez’s film has the feeling of a quality-controlled multiplex product. The problem is that Romulus rarely feels like anything more than that—and that the few moments that exceed the prevailing atmosphere of subsidized competence are also the ones that reek of questionable judgment and taste.

In terms of the Alien timeline, Romulus (which is set in 2142) has been conceived as the connective tissue between Scott’s film and Cameron’s. It’s a slightly counterintuitive course insofar as one of the structural masterstrokes of Aliens was the smack-in-the-face bluntness of Ellen Ripley’s Rip Van Winkle–ish awakening into a universe that had long since passed her by. Cameron’s film did a lot of heavy lifting in turning Sigourney Weaver’s character from an unlikely survivor into the voice of reason: “Did IQs just drop sharply while I was away?” she chides the Weyland-Yutani stooges who refuse to take her story at face value. The prevailing lack of common sense among the powers that be is a running joke in the series: No matter how many times the company attempts to weaponize (and thus monetize) the armor-plated killing machines known as Xenomorphs, it squanders more resources (human and otherwise) in the process. Hence the satisfying (and subtly funny) ominousness of Romulus’s prologue, which depicts a mostly automated interstellar expedition to excavate what is revealed to be a suspiciously alien-shaped payload from a floating hunk of debris: not a good idea.

Speaking of not-good ideas, the film’s main plot involves an impulsive, ill-fated scheme by a group of stifled young folks quite literally yearning to breathe free: Our hero, Rain (Cailee Spaeny), was effectively born into servitude on the “shake-and-bake” mining outpost called Jackson’s Star, where her parents eventually and inevitably succumbed to lung disease. After learning that her request to travel to a different location has not only been denied, but that another decade or so of hard labor has been added to her workload (“The company appreciates your service,” she’s told by a deadpan HR drone), Rain resolves to leave her birthplace by any means necessary. This means teaming up with hunky scrap metal scrounger Tyler (Archie Renaux), who’s organizing an escape party contingent on accessing a decommissioned space station in orbit above Jackson’s Star and stealing high-end company equipment that will allow their group to flee clandestinely to paradise. Initially, Tyler’s invitation suggests that he’s got a thing for Rain (and the feeling is very much mutual), but the other shoe drops in a hurry: The reason he and his group—which features his sister, Kay (Isabela Merced); pompous dickhead Bjorn (Spike Fearn); and Bjorn’s close-cropped, badass lover, Navarro (Aileen Wu)—need Rain is to secure the participation of her adopted brother, Andy (David Jonsson), a synthetic whose programming gives him the ability to bypass his parent corporation’s security systems.

Of all the abiding themes in the Alien franchise, the hypothetical humanity of “artificial persons” is among the most complex, which is why Scott, who presided over the memorably gooey heel turn in the first movie by Ian Holm’s secretly synthetic science officer, Ash, pursued it so adamantly later on in Prometheus. Michael Fassbender’s David, the blond-haired, blue-eyed, wholly ersatz Übermensch, effectively became the film’s antihero (as well as a spiritual cousin to Blade Runner’s evil Pinocchio manqué Roy Batty). The conceptual twist in Romulus—and it’s a good one—is that Andy is damaged goods: We learn that Rain’s father rescued him from a scrap heap and reprogrammed him to tell dad jokes and follow a very simple, prime directive pertaining solely to Rain’s well-being. “I’ll do what’s best for Rain,” is Andy’s soft-spoken motto, and the question of whether he’s motivated by love or circuitry hangs over the action in Romulus. Plus, the character’s careful coding as a social outsider—exemplified by selective verbal signifiers of “disability,” as well as the very pointed casting of a Black actor in the role—gives the proceedings a layer of social commentary. Andy, it seems, is both indispensable to Tyler’s plan and completely disposable in its aftermath: Not only is he told explicitly that he won’t be welcome in the bucolic new community awaiting his friends, but he claims—mechanically, but with a disarming hint of melancholy—that he doesn’t mind.

To this point in the story, one could be forgiven for thinking that Álvarez and cowriter Rodo Sayagues really have some aces up their sleeves. The irony, though, is that a narrative determined to play with ideas about artificial intelligence quickly finds itself on autopilot. When Rain and the group get to the space station—which, for symbolic purposes in this sibling-centric sequel, is divided into two wings named after the Roman figureheads Romulus and Remus—they predictably discover telltale signs of body-ripping carnage and mad-scientific malfeasance, both perpetrated by the usual suspects (the alien and the company, respectively). They also find a lone semi-survivor whose identity is not worth spoiling here, but who nevertheless strands Romulus on the wrong side of the uncanny valley—not only because the character (and the performance) has been lazily deployed as an exposition machine, but because the entire conceit of digital resurrection abuts on the sort of callow, depersonalizing exploitation that Ellen Ripley called bullshit on in the first place.

With this in mind: There’s a fine line between clever continuity and shameless fan service, and, for all its skillfully choreographed action in the middle section—during which the gang finds itself hunted first by a gaggle of facehuggers and later a fully grown chestburster—Romulus clumsily trips over it, gradually revealing itself as a spacious but hollow echo chamber of Easter eggs and dialogue callbacks (one of which is so violently on the nose that it leaves the movie with a deviated septum). The plotting, meanwhile, is propulsive but cluttered, piling on so much ticking-clock, skin-of-your-teeth peril as to become exhausting. With each potentially lethal complication, Romulus paradoxically becomes less intense; it reminds us that what made the first Alien so great was its embrace of a certain base, primal simplicity.

Of course, the other thing that made Alien (and Aliens, and arguably Alien 3) great was Weaver, a genuine icon whose terse, tight-lipped charisma has been oft imitated—including, pointedly, by Noomi Rapace in Prometheus and Katherine Waterston in Covenant—but never duplicated. Spaeny, though, comes closer than most, probably because there’s nothing imitative about her performance: Instead of simply striking badass postures, she occupies Rain and her various anxieties—whether about Andy’s unsettling mix of strength and fragility or her own terror about dying before she ever gets to see a real sunrise—from the inside out, and her introverted performance gives the movie around her a little bit of soul. The same goes for Jonsson, even if the script ultimately doesn’t know what to do with his character beyond using him as a prop in the slam-bang homestretch. As for the slavering, acid-dripping, nonhuman stars, they’re always welcome, but while Álvarez integrates the full panoply of both mechanical and computer-generated effects with aplomb, he weirdly bricks what one would imagine to be, at least for him, the easiest part of the assignment. Whatever one thought of Evil Dead 2.0, it was—in a good way—a landmark in 21st-century gore, the cinematic equivalent of a pulled-pork smorgasbord, with meat falling off the bone. There’s lots of flesh ripping and head splitting in Romulus, yet nothing here matches the visceral kick of the genuinely disgusting “backburster” bit in Alien: Covenant or the hilariously grotesque stomach-stapling interlude in Prometheus, which belongs in some kind of body horror hall of fame.

For many fans—and a few critics—time has been kind to Prometheus, recasting what was initially received as a convoluted flop as a deceptively complex meditation on faith and spirituality. Setting aside that “misunderstood masterpieces” are a dime a dozen these days, Prometheus is, if nothing else, a tangibly weird movie—one riddled with its maker’s eccentricities. By contrast, Alien: Romulus is so smoothly impersonal that it’s unlikely to become anything like a pop-cultural punch line—or, for that matter, to be resurrected in the future as some sort of underrated classic. To give credit where it’s due, Álvarez has built an on-screen world, but in the end, the best you can say about it is that it reminds us of better ones.

Adam Nayman is a film critic, teacher, and author based in Toronto; his book The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together is available now from Abrams.