Erie, Pa. – “In space, no one can hear you scream.” While that may be true, Alien Romulus director Fede Alvarez sure makes sure you do it anyways. As a long-time horror fan, I was familiar with Alvarez’s work beforehand, particularly his remake of The Evil Dead (1981), which was released in 2013. I was also quite familiar with – and excited by – his affinity for gore, and Alien Romulus does not disappoint in that department at all. However, where the bloodiness succeeds, the plot falls flat, dragging in between its bombastic action scenes.
When it comes to its standing as a reboot, it does quite a bit right. One of the things that often turns me off from remakes or reboots, horror ones especially, is that they often try and reinvent the wheel (the 2010 remake of A Nightmare on Elm Street [1984] is a perfect example of this). Alien Romulus, instead, takes on a far more familiar tone. Something I appreciated is how it does not treat the audience as uninformed. It doesn’t try to conceal its horror like the original, which practically perfected the suspenseful horror/thriller, instead openly acknowledging it from the very beginning. After all, there is no need to hide its terror, we, the audience, know all about the Xenomorph.
However, one of Alien Romulus’s greatest strengths is its leading characters: the adoptive brother-sister duo of Andy (David Jonsson) and Rain (Cailee Spaeny). The pair live and work in the Weyland-Yutani-run mining colony of Jackson’s Star. After a failed attempt at emigration from the harsh conditions of her work, Rain agrees to help her friends – a stereotypical band of misfits – to break into an abandoned spacecraft for its cryostasis pods. These would enable Rain and company to escape Jackson’s Star for good.
Spaeny, fresh off the role of Priscilla Presley in the Sofia Coppola directed biopic Priscilla (2023), brings a sensitive resiliency to her role in a way like Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in the original without exactly copying her. On the other hand, Jonsson gives the android Andy a good balance of humanity and machine – a far different portrayal of androids than the original film. In this age of AI being an everyday thing, it is an interesting take on the character for sure. Whether it promotes or condemns extreme AI usage, I’m still unsure, but it provides an interesting dynamic all the same.
As far as the other characters go, they are the weakest aspect of the movie. Films, especially suspenseful ones like this, rely on their characters and dialogue to keep intrigue alive throughout the slower sections. Which means poorly written dialogue can truly make or break a movie, and it turns this movie into a real slog to get through. Much of the dialogue ends up extremely repetitive, and early character interactions leave a lot to be desired. This, despite some very well-done interactions between Rain and Andy, is the biggest pitfall of the film and makes it incredibly boring outside of high-tension action scenes.
Despite its faults in writing and pacing, Alien Romulus is a solid entry in this 50-year-old franchise. Fans of the franchise will appreciate it through its various callbacks to previous films and how it doesn’t try and redo what’s been done before. Those who aren’t fans of the franchise but enjoy overall goriness, like me, will also find appreciation in Alvarez’s emphasis on blood and guts. Overall, I find Alien Romulus to be interesting enough to make the film worth watching once it begins to stream.
