Space horror Alien: Romulus left us with lots to talk about. Here’s our analysis of its twists, turns and a wild third act. Spoilers ahead:
NB: This is your final warning for Alien: Romulus spoilers. If you want a spoiler-free exploration, do check out our review instead.
Having seen Alien: Romulus, certain things director Fede Alvarez has said in past interviews suddenly make perfect sense. When he mentioned in a June Q&A that he regards everything from the Alien sequels and prequels as canon, he meant it. His film may be set between Alien and Aliens, but it also heavily references Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, and owes a sizable debt to Alien: Resurrection, particularly in its third act.
When Alvarez said he was unafraid to make a divisive movie that tries to recapture some of the shock value of the original Alien, it’s now easy to see what he was alluding to: the creature birthed in the movie’s dying moments is likely to be argued over by fans for some time to come.
Having made it to Alien: Romulus’s end credits, it’s also possible to understand how Ridley Scott was convinced to hand over the keys to a franchise he’d jealously controlled since Prometheus; Alvarez is not only reverential to Alien but also the expanded lore established in that 2012 prequel. Whether fans like it or not, the black goo is back. As are the Engineers. Well, sort of.
Let’s wind things back a little, though, and talk about a few things we couldn’t elaborate on in our spoiler-free review.
That opening is quite something, isn’t it? The eerie silence as a Weyland-Yutani vessel closes in on a cloud of metallic debris in the Zeta 2 Reticuli system. The recovery of a black, distinctly Giger-esque object floating among the wreckage. And what’s that emblazoned on a piece of debris in the foreground? Nostromo…
The dastardly corporation, we learn as those retro-looking opening credits roll, has managed to recover the remains of the xenomorph that Ripley had ejected from her escape craft in 1979’s Alien. Being a ‘tough little son of a bitch’ as Ash once called it, the xenomorph had cocooned itself and waited, in a kind of suspended animation, until it was picked up by a foolish passer-by – something we theorised might happen a few months ago.
Having been taken back to the Renaissance station for experimentation purposes, the xenomorph then ran amok, killing everyone aboard (both human and synthetic) and turning part of the vessel into a breeding ground. The colossal facility is quietly abandoned by Weyland-Yutani, and left orbiting a backwater planet on which sits a mining community called Jackson’s Star.
Read more: Alien: Romulus review | A bloody, chaotic tribute to the series’ best films
Drawing on Hadley’s Hope, the ‘shake and bake colony’ from Aliens, Jackson’s Star is a brilliantly realised location. Bustling, claustrophobic and dystopian in a way that recalls Ridley Scott’s other genre staple, Blade Runner, it’s almost disappointing that we don’t spend more time here, getting to know the six characters that will drive the rest of the movie. (Some scenes in the trailers differ from those in the film, suggesting at least a couple of Jackson’s Star scenes may have landed on the cutting room floor.)
What the colony establishes, though, is a clear motivation for Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her friends to get the hell out of Dodge. The sun never shines; the mining work is dangerous to the extent that people are dying all the time; and worse, Weyland-Yutani has a points quota that has to be met before workers are allowed to move off-world. Like something out of Catch-22, that quota rises each time a miner comes close to meeting it.
Understandably, Rain’s ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) comes up with a less-than-legal plan to get themselves out of their predicament: fly the battered Corbelan up to the Renaissance, break in, and steal the cryosleep pods they need to fly to a sunnier world. Tyler talks Rain into tagging along, largely because they need the help of her adoptive synth brother, Andy (David Jonsson) to bypass the station’s security systems.
As a setting for the horrors to come, the Renaissance – broken up into two distinct zones, Romulus and Remus – is hard to fault. Reviving the utilitarian industrial design of Ron Cobb’s work in Alien, it also looks remarkably like the Sevastopol, the vessel from Creative Assembly’s ingenious videogame, Alien: Isolation (which Alvarez has said he was directly inspired by).
Alvarez and his collaborators come up with some original set-pieces within this environment; the use of zero gravity adds to the suspense in the first act, and is paid off with an inventive action sequence involving floating threads of deadly acid in the final third. (We’re not sure it’d be so easy for just anyone to turn the gravity on a space station off and on as Rain does near the end, but we’ll overlook that.)
Less satisfying is how little time we have to get to know certain characters before everything goes sideways. Rain and David immediately leap out of the plot as protagonists, not least thanks to Spaeny and Jonsson’s performances (more on those later). The other four players are less lucky; poor Navarro (Aileen Wu) was clearly intended as cannon fodder right from the first teaser trailer, and the film doesn’t waste time letting us get to know much about her.
Likewise Isabela Merced’s Kay, who’s so in thrall to the plot’s requirements that she’s barely given time to speak. We learn that she’s pregnant; she falls asleep, wakes up with no clue of what’s going on, screams and runs about a bit, and is later kidnapped by the xenomorph. Tyler and Bjorn (Spike Fearn) are your garden-variety cocksure young men, though the actors’ thick London accents and boisterous energy help give them more texture than we suspect was in the original script.
A nail-bitingly intense set-piece involving an alarm system and a flooded room full of slumbering facehuggers allows Alverez and co-writer Rodo Sagayeuz to fuse action with a neat plot turn. In order to unlock the room in which Tyler and Bjorn are trapped, Rain rushes into action, removing a chip from a (seemingly) dead synthetic and plugging it into Andy. Now with direct access to the Renaissance’s Mu-Th-Ur 9000 computer, Andy is able to override the alarm system, giving Tyler and Bjorn time to escape.
Andy’s upgrade also has the unexpected side-effect of fixing his earlier glitches, turning him from the childlike being of the first act into something more intelligent and calculating – a personality shift Jonsson pulls off sublimely. This plot development is so good, and Jonsson sells it so effectively (Andy’s a company man now), that what happens next can only be described as a frustrating distraction.
The remains of the synthetic lying face down on the floor turns out to be named Rook, and still just about functioning. And because he’s intended to be from the same line of Hyperdyne Systems synthetics as Ash from Alien, the film’s makers have opted to use CGI to make him look like the late Ian Holm.
It’s a baffling creative decision. From a storytelling standpoint, it’s more distracting than surprising. From a technical angle, it looks jarringly unlike anything else in the film, and markedly worse than the digitally-revived (or de-aged) Peter Cushing in Rogue One or Harrison Ford in Indiana Jones And The Dial Of Destiny. It looks as though the computer experts have used deepfake technology or perhaps AI to recreate Holm’s voice and mannerisms; whatever the trickery involved, it wasn’t worth it.
Leaving ethics of digitally raising the dead to deliver fan service, Rook’s appearance has no material bearing on the plot. An entirely different, flesh and blood actor could have been brought in and dressed in an outfit that recalled Ash from Alien, and longtime watchers of the franchise would have gotten the connection. Rook is another Weyland-Yutani synth, much like Ash, who simply does the company’s bidding no matter how immoral it might be.
Nor is the ghost of Ian Holm restricted to one scene; he’s one of the film’s main antagonists, manipulating Andy and alternately providing exposition, familiar taunts (“You have my sympathies…”) or thwarting his captors’ attempts to escape. Even when Rook’s face appears on a glitchy CRT television, it’s distracting.
At any rate, Rook fills us in on what Weyland-Yutani has been up to these past two decades, and there’s some logical storytelling here. Before the xenomorph (whom Ridley Scott once dubbed ‘Big Chap’) killed everyone aboard the Renaissance, its scientists had recovered a substance it calls Z-01 from the creature’s cocoon. This, it turns out, is the same mutagen/black goo that caused all the trouble in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. The movie underlines this by briefly displaying a graphic of a familiar urn from those prequels.
In the past, the corporation’s motive for capturing the xenomorph was to create some form of bio-weapon; to the best of this writer’s knowledge, the idea of using the mutagen to accelerate human evolution hasn’t been explored before – though the United Systems Military was studying xenomorphs with the hope of using them for “urban pacification” as well as “new alloys and new vaccines” in Alien: Resurrection.
Back on the Renaissance, Weyland-Yutani scientists have created their own chamber of horrors that looks like a less gothic version of the one David came up with in Alien: Covenant, or seen aboard the USM Auriga in the aforementioned Alien: Resurrection. In some respects, this could be seen as a foreshadowing of where Alvarez will take us in the third act.
Under Ash’s control, Andy takes a phial of the Z-01 mutagen with the aim of taking it back to the corporation for further study. Which sort of begs the question: how come nobody from the firm thought of sending someone else over to retrieve a few jars in the preceding 20 years? Come to think of it, if that’s the corpse of the original Big Chap dangling from the ceiling in one scene, why didn’t it think of pulling the grappling hook out of its chest? It’s slightly amusing to think of the xenomorph blundering around the Renaissance, the spike in its torso clanging against doorways and ducts as it murders its victims. Or maybe that’s just this writer’s diseased mind.
Firmly tethered to Scott’s divisive sequels though Alien: Romulus is, Alvarez evidently has a genuine affection for the original xenomorph in all its forms. Although less laser-accurate and tough than previous incarnations, the facehuggers remain terrifying in their speed and sheer number. Alvarez comes up with his own chestburster sequence that’s slower, ickier and more leering than the short, sharp shock of John Hurt’s birthing scene in Alien. The director even comes up with a new, previously unseen stage in the life-cycle: we learn that the infant chestburster sheds its skin and forms a kind of vaginal chrysalis from which its fully-grown body eventually emerges.
All of which serves to give the classic xenomorph – complete with smooth domed head, per HR Giger’s recipe – a grand entrance in the film’s second half. It’s a slimy, acid-dripping introduction, but one majorly undercut when we realise that the ship’s already absolutely teeming with xenomorphs. In fusing bits of Alien with James Cameron’s Aliens – complete with a nest of embalmed human victims – Alvarez attempts to have his cake and eat it here. (Note too how the xenomorph only really directly kills one person, at least in its adult form. Just thought we’d mention it.)
In the chaos of the survivors’ escape attempt, Kay’s rescued from the nest, but is revealed to have been seriously injured by the clumsy xenomorph during her kidnapping. As Tyler and Rain note the rate of Kay’s blood loss, Andy floats the idea of injecting her with the mutagen in the hope that it might save her life. Rain wisely shoots down the idea, though Kay must have heard the conversation amid her own cries of agony – a few scenes later, she takes the phial – which conveniently has a bunch of short needles, like a tuberculosis testing apparatus – and jabs herself with it.
Oh dear. Most audience-members could probably predict that something nasty was going to happen, and Alvarez has a track record of taking his films to outrageous places. Having escaped the Renaissance, minutes before its destruction, Rain, Andy and Kay prepare for cryosleep; but echoing earlier Alien movies, there’s a stowaway on board – in Kay’s womb.
Again, the merits of what happens next are sure to be discussed for some time. On one hand, Kay’s sudden birth is certainly shocking, irrespective of whether it crosses the boundary of good taste. On the other, the decision to have Rain run along with the object that emerges in all the blood and afterbirth – which looks for all the world like one of the eggs from the Italian Alien knock-off, Contamination – could be described as somewhat goofy.
The thing within that leathery egg (chrysalis? Mutant womb?) also grows at a phenomenal rate, presumably because Alvarez knows the pace has to be kept up in these final scenes. And the creature is certainly different: a long-limbed, spidery thing that owes a clear debt to the Newborn from Alien: Resurrection, albeit without the twitching Sigourney Weaver nose.
The implication here, however, is that Kay has given birth to a xenomorph-Engineer hybrid, with its familiar black eyes and bald head joined by a set of serpentine inner jaws. It’s a spooky-looking creature, and its black-toothed grin is the kind of out-there concept that probably shouldn’t work but somehow makes it all the more unnerving.
What happens next unfolds so quickly that a rewatch is required to grasp it all. The creature, now grown, returns to kill its own mother (or does it do something else to Kay we can’t see…?), and engages in a final fight with Rain. The film’s constant threat of bodily invasion is such that, when the pale monster stands up over the heroine, clearly revealing some sort of orifice in its groin, this writer briefly feared that Alien: Romulus was about to descend into the kind of bad taste arena previously explored by the infamous Inseminoid from 1981.
Instead, Alvarez takes a familiar tack: acid in the hull, a tussle for levers and switches, the creature eventually plummets into oblivion.
Phew.
An entertaining thrill-ride, Alien: Romulus is nevertheless frustrating in its reliance on reviving past glories. Ian Holm’s return aside, the recycling of famous lines feels unnecessary – especially Andy’s utterance of “Get away from her… you bitch,” which doesn’t sit right with the character or even make sense in its context. When Ripley said it in Aliens, it was to signal the final fight between two opposing mother figures. In Alien: Romulus, it’s just a distracting Memberberry.
Those distractions aside, Alien: Romulus is evidently made by people who love this ageing franchise, and have used old and new technology to create ideas and sequences that wouldn’t have been possible in the 70s and 80s. There’s a reason we haven’t previously seen an army of facehuggers prise open a door and scuttle round corridors, for example.
Ahead of Alien: Romulus’s release, Alvarez has said that he hopes the film will introduce the franchise to a new generation, and if it’s a hit, more sequels will surely follow. Reviews have been positive so far, and it looks as though the stage could be set for something of a revival, similar to the welcome jolt that Prey – which went straight to Disney+ – gave to the Predator franchise.
Certainly, Alvarez leaves a few threads open for future films to explore. Rain and Andy are in cryosleep; presumably, their ship also has a few black goo samples left on it (we think – in the rush of the final act, this writer lost track). Then there’s Noah Hawley’s TV series, which is set before the events of Alien. Will it tie into the lore established here in some way, or remain separate?
Oh, and one final question: a few months ago, several people (though not us) noticed that a few frames of the second trailer contained a shot of what we now know is the Renaissance crashing into a planet’s ice ring. In the distance, we can just about make out what looks like the Nostromo on the bottom right:
It’s faint, but it’s clearly the same distinctive outline as the ship from the original Alien, and quite different from the Corbelan. Obviously, the Nostromo doesn’t show up in Alien: Romulus, but the film does contain a really strange shot where Andy looks out of a window and sees a tiny shape in the distance. The same shot is in the final trailer:
It’s never explained what Andy sees here, and there’s certainly no mention of the Nostromo or any other ship floating around near the Renaissance. So what does it mean? Was it a plot point trimmed out of the final edit? A little tease for something that’ll be picked up in a future film or series? At this stage, we can only guess.
Whatever happens, Alien: Romulus was entertaining enough that a further film following Rain and Andy – both charming characters – would be a welcome prospect. Though perhaps next time it could rely less on jarring references to earlier movies, and instead emerge as its own, more unique specimen.
Alien: Romulus is now in cinemas
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