By Seth Lukas Hynes
Alien: Romulus
Starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson and Archie Renaux
Rated MA15+
3.75/5
Directed by Fede Alvarez, Alien: Romulus is an enthralling, superbly-made sci-fi horror film that sadly retreads the Alien franchise too closely.
Rain (Cailee Spaeny), a young woman on a mining colony planet, joins a group of scavengers on the derelict Romulus space station, only to face the most deadly lifeform in the universe.
Returning to the visceral horror of Alien but with sprinklings of Aliens action, Romulus is undeniably an extremely well-crafted film, and Alvarez maintains gripping suspense both from the
xenomorph alien menace and the ticking clock of Romulus station’s slow crash-course to the planet below.
Spaeny is a compelling lead as Rain, striking just the right balance of brave and petrified. Rain’s android brother Andy (David Jonsson) is a sweet, almost pathetic figure who grows unsettling as his cold corporate programming takes over.
Romulus is full of amazing animatronics, miniatures and claustrophobic sets, with much of the effects team having worked on Aliens.
The art direction shows that your setting can be dark and grungy but also richly-colourful (something many modern filmmakers have forgotten), and takes clear creative cues from the acclaimed 2014 video game Alien: Isolation (technically, this is a much better video game movie than Borderlands).
A new entry in a franchise should thread the needle of satisfying fans and presenting new ideas, and Romulus sadly doesn’t have enough of the latter.
The first act feels like an effective soft reboot, but the rest of the film features overt callback to Prometheus, Alien: Covenant and Alien: Resurrection, along with the distracting return of a character from Alien.
A tense, disturbing, lovingly-crafted film in itself and certainly one of the better Alien movies, Alien: Romulus just gets carried away with the fan-service, and is playing in most Victorian cinemas.
