Cailee Spaeny in Fede Alvarez’s Horror Sequel

Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, respectively from 2012 and 2018, were classy efforts to steer the franchise in a different direction, as far as possible from the silliness of two disposable Predator mashups. But while the prequels were admirably ambitious, they were too bogged down by mythology and windy philosophy to be fully effective. Fede Alvarez makes the smart decision to go back to the origins with Alien: Romulus, setting his standalone entry in 2142, between the events of Scott’s ageless 1979 original and James Cameron’s equally durable 1986 sequel, and including so many callbacks to both that certain moments almost play like part of a reverential remake.

Alvarez’s love and respect for those two movies is evident throughout and even if his pedal-to-the-metal style is closer to the hard-charging combat action of Aliens, the claustrophobic sense of entrapment and escalating terror gives it a definite kinship with the slow-burn scares of Alien, if not the control or complexity. A final-act development lurches into overblown and slightly daffy extreme sicko horror, but there’s enough that works, especially in terms of sustained tension and big juicy frights, to give the xenomorph-hungry what they want.

Alongside the lobster-like facehuggers that develop into perfect killing machines with heads like motorcycle fuel tanks, gloopy extendable jaws and a nasty habit of bleeding acid, the archvillain of the series has always been capitalism without conscience. Heartless and exploitative, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is willing to sacrifice as many underpaid workers’ lives as necessary to secure its coveted asset, alien creatures to be used for some kind of biological weapons research. In Alien: Romulus, unchecked capitalism is literally killing people, no xenomorph encounter even required.

The movie opens on Jackson’s Star, a grungy colony with zero hours of daylight, where WY controls a mining industry that presses colonists into indentured servitude. When Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) has reached her work quota and applies for a travel permit to relocate with her brother Andy (David Jonsson) to a planet with sunlight, an unsympathetic clerk informs her that quotas have been expanded and she’ll need to work another five or six years before she can leave.

We learn almost straight off that Andy is a synthetic, discarded by the corporation once more advanced biomechanical humanoids became available. Rain’s late father rescued him from the trash, reprogramming him with just one directive — to do what’s best for Rain. Both her parents died of lung disease from the mines, a common occurrence. Harsh conditions, hailstorms, rising temperatures and the emergence of new diseases every cycle mean that many colonists in their 20s like Rain have been orphaned.

That factor paves the way for Alvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues to inflict alien mayhem on a significantly younger ensemble than the franchise norm. The small group includes Tyler (Archie Renaux), an ex-boyfriend who still has feelings for Rain; his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), who has been keeping her pregnancy a secret; hotheaded jerk Bjorn (Spike Fearn), whose antagonism toward Andy stems from a synthetic’s role in his mother’s death; and Navarro (Aileen Wu), a tough techie with piloting skills.

One significant lesson not learned from Scott’s original is the minimal time spent establishing these characters as distinct individuals. But since most of them won’t be around long enough to matter, perhaps that was the point.

Having become aware that a decommissioned WY ship with functioning cryopods is floating in space not far off, supposedly with enough juice to get them to their destination planet, the group convinces Rain to join them in escaping Jackson’s Star. They also need Andy to come along to access corporation security codes.

The ease with which they take off from the oppressive colony in a hulking utilitarian spacecraft raises questions. But the visceral sound design provides plenty of distraction, making the audience feel every clanking industrial noise and juddering movement, every pummeling of turbulence and rocky landing in the pit of their stomachs.

On arrival the group discovers that their planned means of escape is not a ship but a sprawling space station called Renaissance, with twin modules dubbed Romulus and Remus. Urgency is built in via the alert that the station will crash into the ring system surrounding the mining planet in a matter of hours and be destroyed, prompting regular computer-generated announcements on the remaining time before the impact event. But they confidently anticipate being in and out in 30 minutes max.

Of course that’s not the way it goes, with one setback after another before their presence stirs the parasitic facehuggers and sends them skittering in search of a human host. The familiar guessing game of who gets picked off next and how gruesomely is less interesting than Alvarez’s skill at incrementally turning up the tension until it reaches fever pitch and stays there.

Along with the nerve-shredding sound, a big assist in that area comes from cinematographer Galo Olivares’ agile camerawork and Benjamin Wallfisch’s haute horror score, incorporating echoes of Jerry Goldsmith and James Horner’s music for the first two movies.

Once the threat is unleashed, there are the usual close calls, betrayals, cowardly retreats leaving others stranded and selfless acts of courage, particularly from Rain, who becomes the stand-in for Ripley. After impressing in Priscilla and Civil War, Spaeny proves to be a compelling lead, vulnerable and ruled by her emotions to a large extent, but also a technically savvy quick thinker with formidable survival instincts.

Alvarez makes some notable tweaks to xenomorph behavior, including a much slower chest-bursting scene that prolongs the agony in more graphic detail, revealing a creature further along in its development. The script also ups the suspense by finding a temporary measure for the human prey to remain undetectable, and the introduction early on of an automatic gravity-generator reset at regular intervals foreshadows an imaginative way for that to factor in later.

Probably the most divisive element, which would be a spoiler if it hadn’t been leaked and discussed online, is the use of an AI voice and facial rendering of Ian Holm as Rook, a Romulus crew synthetic — or half a one, after an alien acid bath — rebooted by Rain to get them out of a tight spot.

Considering that the late Holm’s android character, Ash, was destroyed 20 years earlier in Alien, it’s a little puzzling that WY would build a physically identical model to carry out their mission. Beyond its function as pure fan service, the choice also seems in questionable taste given the contentious debate around AI-generated digital replicas during last year’s SAG-AFTRA strike.

Rook does serve, however, to bring contrasting shades to Andy’s role by confusing the synthetic’s loyalties, adding sibling tension with Rain and allowing the terrific Jonsson (best known for the HBO series Industry) to blur the lines between the sweetly mild-mannered protector and the single-focus company operative.

The taste Alvarez showed in his Evil Dead remake and Don’t Breathe for third-act crescendos featuring rampaging abominations and nutty reveals is again in evidence here. In what will likely be a love-it or hate-it element, the movie goes bigger but for my money not better with a frantic finale that ventures into hybrid-species territory, an idea that already yielded mixed results for director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and writer Joss Whedon in Alien Resurrection.

A new monster variant certainly ratchets up the ick factor, but when the creature hatched out of H.R. Giger’s original concept art is such a perfect specimen, both biologically and in iconic design terms, radical embellishments are not needed. The crossbreed mutant is scary for sure, but also far more generic than the xenomorphs we love to fear.

The creature designs have always featured suggestions of reproductive imagery, which Alvarez and his team savor in ways both amusing and horrifying. It sometimes seems almost like vulva-palooza. And when a wounded xenomorph generates a puckering slit that fires globs of acid like poison darts, it’s pretty much a weaponized vagina.

Excesses and debatable missteps aside, Alien: Romulus delivers thrills that no doubt will have squeamish folks covering their eyes at strategic moments. One of the movie’s key strengths is Alvarez’s return as much as possible to the kind of practical visual effects that were available to Scott in 1979, going digital mainly for subtle enhancement.

Production designer Naaman Marshall has overseen what look to be massive builds on soundstages in Budapest as well as extensive backlot construction for Jackson’s Star, the dystopian planetoid outpost that opens the movie in richly textured gloom. From the rust-bucket transporter that gets the group to Renaissance to the labs, corridors, airlocks and elevator shafts of the abandoned station, in various stages of disrepair, the movie makes enormous gains from creating multi-dimensional environments shrouded in unsettling lighting.

For the xenomorphs themselves, Alvarez also goes largely back to basics, using a combination of full-scale animatronic models, puppetry, stunt people wearing animatronic heads and CG. The creatures remain among the most truly petrifying movie monsters in history, and the director leans hard into the sci-fi/horror with a relentlessly paced entry that reminds us why they have haunted our imaginations for decades.