Don’t breathe and Evil Dead director Fede Alvarez takes the reigns for this next chapter in the Alien franchise.
Acting as a soft reboot for the series after Ridley Scott’s aborted prequel trilogy (2012’s Prometheus and 2017’s Alien Covenant) the film has Scott on board as producer and the franchises creator also acted as creative advisor to Alvarez during production.
With a cast of young up and comers, Cailee Spaeny takes on the lead role of Rain Carradine, a Weyland-Yutani employee on the LV-410 colony of Jackson’s Star.
Brit David Jonsson is Rain’s adopted brother Andy, a malfunctioning android reprogrammed by their late father.
When her work contract is forcibly extended, Rain and Andy join her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) on an unlawful expedition to a derelict spacecraft in order to retrieve cryostasis tubes that can help them escape to a brighter future.
Unfortunately for the group, which also includes Isabela Merced’s Kay, Spike Fearn’s Bjorn and Aileen Wu’s Navarro, the spacecraft is actually a research station that had been studying a very dangerous and rather familiar Xenomorph.
Finding the vessel abandoned, the runaway teens go about retrieving the stasis pods, using Weyland-Yutani software inside the synthetic Andy to access the ships systems, but once they stumble upon a lab housing a cluster of face-huggers, events take a turn for the worse.
Set between the events of 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens, Alvarez takes elements from both films, initially building a claustrophobic dread, before the carnage and bloodshed commences. There are peculiar nods to 1997’s Alien resurrection and Scott’s more ambitious prequels in there as well, and as a result the film does resemble a bit of an Alien Greatest hits package.
Spaeny is an engaging lead and it’s easy to imagine her fronting future films in the franchise, but the real star is Jonsson. The East Londoner, who broke out in last years charming rom com Rye Lane, is fantastic as Andy, the kindhearted but defective android brother of Rain. Playing the character as coded autistic, before a software upgrade turns him into a colder more malevolent robot, Jonsson excels in both personas, portraying them as virtually completely different characters. The rest of the cast, unfortunately are a little too disposable to have any lasting impact.
Alvarez brings his horror sensibilities to proceedings and delivers some inventive action sequences, however the film is let down by a couple of glaring moments of fan service that are unnecessary and completely misjudged.
Those toe curling moments aside, Romulus is a serviceable enough entry into the Alien franchise. It delivers on gory thrills, but plays it too safe and never pushes the boundaries beyond what has come before.
⭐️⭐️⭐️
Paul Steward 18/08/24
X @grittster