Alien: Romulus Slithers Its Way Through a Fun But Familiar Entry in the Series: Review

The Pitch: On a distant Weyland-Yutani mining colony, a group of young colonists — fed up with their bleak prospects and hardscrabble lives — make a desperate bid to escape their situation by scavenging a derelict space station that’s just shown up on their scans. But when they dock, they find the Romulus-Remus station abandoned, the gravity off, and mysterious burns and resins all over the dimly lit corridors. Turns out the station has played host to the most dangerous aliens in the galaxy… and these kids are about to get far too close a look at it.

What’s In the Best Interests of the Company: Since the release of Alien in 1979, the franchise has long been celebrated (and sometimes derided) for its big swings: Shifting gears to balls-to-the-wall action in Aliens, then nihilistic Gothic grunge in Alien 3, then the bizarro French sex comedy of Alien: Resurrection.

Even Ridley Scott’s abortive prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, allowed him to mine the xenomorph mythology for deeper, weirder questions about life, faith, and creation, peppered with Michael Fassbender teaching himself how to, well, do the fingering. But years on, science fiction’s spookiest franchise returns with Alien: Romulus, which, for all its visceral scares and pitch-perfect atmosphere, plays it deceptively safe.

For one thing, much like the less-successful elements of Covenant, Romulus is hell-bent on reminding you of the films that came before: Set just a couple of decades after the first Alien, Romulus begins with the same credits font as the 1979 original. Then, a spaceship comes into view, grumbling awake in much the same way the Nostromo did: analog switches bleeping and blooping, CRT monitors crudely switching on, hexagonal corridors and puffy, cushioned insulation evoking the Ron Cobb concept art of the first film.

These aren’t the only callbacks you’ll get, either, especially as our scrappy crew of scavengers boards the Romulus-Remus space station to snatch some cryopods they think will help them survive their trip to the next system and subsequent freedom. Everything about the film’s production design is meant to echo the vibes of the previous franchise entries, from the lo-fi ’70s industrial vibe of the station to the proto-pulse rifles that become vital weapons later in the film. Even Benjamin Wallfisch’s score does its level best to emulate the grim orchestral majesty of Jerry Goldsmith’s score for Alien.

If some audio-visual nods were all writer-director Fede Alvarez (and co-writer Rodo Sayagues) leaned on to bring audiences back to the familiar climes of the Alien series, that’d be all well and good. But the script and its construction feel like a grab bag of setpieces and moments from all of the previous films thrown together, robbing Romulus of much of a distinct identity: Characters parrot famous lines from the first two films in ways that don’t feel organic to their characters, and the plot twists itself in knots to touch on references to just about every previous entry in the series, no matter how forced.