Stream It Or Skip It: 'Alien: Romulus' on VOD, a Familiar, But ...

By John Serba

My most anticipated movie of 2024 was Alien: Romulus (now streaming on VOD services like Amazon Prime Video), because the thought of director Fede Alvarez taking over the franchise was a delicious one. Alvarez’s notable previous films, Don’t Breathe and the 2013 remake of Evil Dead, should be held in high esteem for their visual acumen, unflinchingly creative displays of gore and ability to play us like a piano – all valuable skills one needs to make an Alien movie reach its potential. And Romulus at the very least does that. At the most, though, it’s a wildly entertaining excursion into familiar sci-fi/horror freakout territory, featuring committed performances from Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla, Civil War) and David Jonsson (Rye Lane) and Alvarez’s spirited direction. It was enough to scare up $350 million worldwide in theaters, and generated enough goodwill for me to place it in the same room with its classic, genre-defining predecessors, Alien and Aliens – even if Romulus might worship at their feet a bit much at times. 

ALIEN: ROMULUS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: The time is somewhere between Alien and Aliens on the franchise timeline. The place is a miserable godforsaken chunk-of-rock planet that enjoys precisely zero hours of sunlight – the kind of hell of a place that’ll make you want to go the hell anywhere the hell else. That’s where Rain (Spaeny) lives, and it’s also her predicament. She toils in the mines. Her parents are dead from toiling in the mines. Her closest confidant is Andy the Anxious Android (Jonsson), a twitchy and sensitive synthetic human. She consults with the local bureaucrat at the terminal behind the window because Rain’s met her work quota and earned her transfer outta here, except she hasn’t because the corporation – our old friends at Weyland-Yutani – just moved the goalposts. Corporations always do that in dystopias, don’t they? There’s always an alarming lack of oversight and regulation. But she isn’t without options. Her friends Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced, a long long way away from Dora the Explorer), Navarro (Aileen Wu) and Bjorn (Spike Fearn) have a plan: A decommissioned space station floats empty in orbit. Cryopods are on board. They’ll snatch the pods and climb in them and hit the snooze button and AWOL their asses outta there, to a planet with at least a teensy slice of hope on it. 

Now, I had no doubt that this would all go extremely well and as planned. Happily ever after awaits! They just have to board the station, find the pods, then realize the pods need pod juice, then find the pod juice, and in order to find the pod juice, they have to walk through a bunch of disturbing laboratory scenarios with computers and jars full of creepy things and what looks like an evil egg hatchery. Around this time we learn that Bjorn is prejudiced against synthetics, and would looooove to push Andy into the airless void, if they didn’t need him to use his droidishness to help them get past computerized keypads that control doorways and such. But does it matter if any of these characters have, you know, character? Since whatever is in the eggs is prolly gonna GET ’em, while we chuckle with goosebumpity glee? You don’t wanna get too attached, is what I’m trying to say here.

At least we feel a little something for the sibling-ish relationship between Rain and Andy. The ’bot’s all she’s got. But there’s a bit where Andy’s personality changes after a software upgrade is needed in order to get through an extra-secure computerized keypad that controls a doorway. He gets a little smarter and a little stronger and a little more confident and a little chillier and we’re like, is he more Bishop or more David or more Ash or what? To our total and absolute shock, things go poorly and not at all to plan when Rain and co. encounter facehuggers (hey, they’re huggers, so they’re as cuddly as ever!), classic franchise xenomorphs (y’know, with the hissing and the gnashing and the little toothy drooly mouth inside the bigger toothy drooly mouth) and an extra-disturbing run-in with the uncanny valley. Oh, and there’s also a countdown to impact with the siren-lights and warning horns and the Lady Computer Voice reminding everyone of their imminent demise. Assuming they don’t meet that demise by some other means first, of course.

Photo: Everett Collection/ Walt Disney Pictures

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Alvarez takes some of his Don’t Breathe plot structure (group of young adults traipses through a place through which they shouldn’t be traipsing) and crossbreeds it with lots and lots of stuff from Alien and Aliens. 

Performance Worth Watching: Jonsson is the easy breakout star here, playing two different versions of one character – he switches from sweet and pathetic and endearing to unsettlingly shrewd, although I’m not sure he ever loses our allyship. His performance is another in a tradition of standout, memorably creepy android characterizations in Alien films, from Ian Holm to Michael Fassbender and Lance Henrikson. 

Memorable Dialogue: The last thing you need to hear from a once-cuddly “artificial person”: “I’m afraid I have a new directive.” – Andy

Sex and Skin: None. Unless you wanna count the facehuggers’ attempting to penetrate characters’ mouths with their upsettingly phallic egglayer tentacle-organs. Which no one does, although the imagery is on the wrong side of suggestiveness.

Photo: Everett Collection/ Walt Disney Pictures

Our Take: Romulus opens inside a spaceship, with dashboard lights and screens and buttons and switches awakening with clicks and whirrs and hums and flink-flink-flinks, setting the tone for a thoroughly tactile cinematic experience. This is Alvarez working in loving deference to Alien franchise signatures, extending from the battered, grimy, lived-in look of the settings and locations to the stomach-churning squidge of pus and slime and gore that inevitably drips and splatters everywhere once the title creatures oh-so-disgustingly emerge from the unholy eggs and body cavities what birthed them. CGI is used relatively minimally, and everything feels terrifyingly real. Real enough to keep us in the moment, and rooting for – well, let’s be honest, our vested interest is less in seeing one-to-three of these at-best-modestly-developed characters survive this nightmare scenario than in how the creatures exercise diabolical evolutionary survival skills in their undeniably disgusting pursuit of species-perpetuation. 

This is where Alvarez excels, whether lightly innovating on familiarities – e.g., upping the quantity to dozens of skittery facehuggers instead of just two or three – or concocting a couple of suspenseful doozies of third-act sequences that capitalize on the series’ predilections toward nailbiting action and brain-spinning body horror. Alvarez’s direction is exceptional. The film looks terrific, is well-paced and inspires just enough of our investment in the story to keep us immersed, and hold us in the moment. 

In the moment for the most part, anyway, since numerous callbacks and easter-egg references to past films in the series are ruthlessly installed in pursuit of fan service. They’re distracting, but also easy enough to sidestep; Romulus is a far more enjoyable experience when you succumb to the more gently nostalgic comfort of familiar story beats (androids with questionable ethics, tick-tock-down-to-kablooey suspense arcs, horrors-of-giving-birth scenarios) that Alvarez innovates on just enough to make you feel like we’re not working through quite the same stuff you’ve always loved about these movies. It’d be disingenuous to say the film truly covers new ground, but it’s damn good at generating the exhilarating squeeze of tension and release. Alvarez isn’t just keeping a wheezy franchise alive, but giving us a reason to feel invested in its ongoing life. 

Our Call: TOP THREE ALIEN MOVIES, RANKED: 1, Aliens (by less than the length of a little mouth that leaps out of a bigger mouth). 2. Alien. 3. Alien: Romulus. (Honorable mention: the never not-horrifying auto-abortion sequence in Prometheus.) Yes, Romulus is that good! And no, your attempts to reclaim Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection from the junkheap aren’t convincing. STREAM IT.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.