‘Alien: Romulus’ Treads Into Terrifying New Gynecological Territory

There’s never been a terrible Alien movie (no, the Alien vs. Predator spin-offs don’t count), and that streak stays alive with Alien: Romulus, a seventh series entry that, chronologically speaking, takes place between 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens.

A throwback that faithfully channels its illustrious predecessors while simultaneously adding a few wrinkles to its familiar mix, Fede Álvarez’s sequel, which hits theaters August 16, proves that, 45 years after the xenomorph first terrified audiences, there’s still plenty of acid-bloody life left in the franchise’s monstrous bones.

Sixty-five million light years from Earth, Rain Carradine (Priscilla and Civil War’s Cailee Spaeny) dreams of the sunshine that never peeks through the storm clouds above Jackson’s Star Mining Colony. Rain wants to escape this gloomy and grimy planet with Andy (David Jonsson), a glitchy (and thus “adolescent”) android who was programmed by her late father to protect her at all costs and, concurrently, to tell corny dad jokes. Andy faces discrimination from the locals, but Rain views him as her “brother”—a surrogate sibling relationship that replaces prior Alien films’ mother-child undercurrents.

That said, if Alien: Romulus is primarily about the loyalty and affection that bonds brothers and sisters, there remains plenty of birth- and sex-related imagery throughout, including a late abortion sequence (involving a phallic stun gun and a vaginal alien cocoon) that pushes the material into gnarly new gynecological territory.

When her travel visa is revoked and her work contract is upped an additional five years, Rain is despondent. Fortunately, her luck changes, at least briefly, when she visits Tyler (Archie Renaux)—a boy for whom she appears to have a romantic history—and his cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), sister Kay (Isabela Merced) and friend Navarro (Aileen Wu).

All of them are sick and tired of their conscription in conglomerate Weyland-Yutani’s intergalactic expansion, and Tyler appears to have found a way off this dreary rock: a derelict ship that’s drifted into orbit. Tyler’s plan is to fly up to the craft and enter it with the assistance of Andy, who as a Weyland-Yutani model can grant them access to its cabins and, in particular, to its cryo-sleep chambers, which they intend to use for a voyage to the bright and sunny world of Yvaga III.

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Álvarez opens his tale (co-written with long-time collaborator Rodo Sayagues) in the silence of space before segueing to the cacophony of the mining colony, and he subsequently exploits clamor and quiet for suspense. As with Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic, human operations amongst the stars are defined by weathered, rusty, and wet technology that clangs and clatters, rumbles and roars, like ancient mecha-beasts awakening after long slumbers, and he lends everything—from enormous engines and steel walkways to sliding doors—a weightiness that sells this sci-fi reality.

Spaeny and her supporting cast’s performances are similarly rooted in heavy weariness and despair, although it’s the glimmer of hope for a better tomorrow that propels the Ripley-esque Rain and her comrades on their mission to the decommissioned ship—which, it turns out, is actually a giant research and development outpost.

It's no shock to learn that this facility’s main purpose was studying xenomorphs, and that Rain and her friends are in for a dreadful introduction to the H.R. Giger-imagined creatures, whose blood is fatal and whose slimy tongues featuring even smaller, ferocious mouths.

Nonetheless, Álvarez entrances and disorients with vast panoramas of tiny pods flying above massive fantastical worlds, floating and rotating camerawork (courtesy of Galo Olivares), and a Benjamin Wallfisch score that harkens back to Jerry Goldsmith’s memorable musical themes and helps set a suitably ominous mood.

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Better yet, his centerpieces are expertly conceived and executed, beginning with a trip to a cryo chamber (to retrieve fuel for their sleeping chambers) that leads to the release of scores of xenomorph face-huggers, and results in Rain—in order to save everyone from certain death—replacing David’s brain module with that of a “dead” android.

(Warning: Minor spoilers ahead.)

Alien: Romulus’ big twist is that the ’bot from which Andy receives his new module (and with it, a reboot and “adult” system upgrade) boasts the face of Ian Holm, who famously played the nefarious android Ash in Scott’s Alien. Like his ancestor, this artificial intelligence is intent on fulfilling Weyland-Yutani’s goal of retrieving a xenomorph for all sorts of profit-making purposes, and in its evil cause, it enlists Andy, who becomes torn between his allegiance to his corporate maker and to Rain.

Álvarez and Sayagues’ script trades in customary ideas about the nature of life, love and evolution, just as it explicitly shouts out to the story that came before it. If those attempts at contextualizing this film within the larger series occasionally feel clunky—especially since the CGI used to resurrect the late Holm is both impressively accurate (right down to his devious smile) and still unconvincingly phony looking—they feel no more fan service-y than this endeavor as a whole, whose primary directive is wringing horror out of a tried-and-true formula.

Álvarez repeatedly devises creative methods of putting men and women in peril with the xenomorph, be it scenes that hinge on the sudden disappearance of gravity or a finale that revolves around Kay, whose secret pregnancy is, from the moment it’s announced, destined to beget unholy madness.

Alien: Romulus doesn’t quite do justice to its signature baddie; no matter the numerous close-ups of it staring into the face of its prey, the xenomorph is never given the mythic stature it was granted in previous outings. Even so, the film’s CGI is excellent and so too is its set design, with every corridor drenched in shadows and mist, every lab lit by glaring fluorescent light, and every alien egg dripping with goo and opening with squishy squelches.

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Ultimately, the most surprising thing about Alien: Romulus is that, with its climactic creature, it finds a way to subtly tip its cap to Scott’s underrated prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, with which it shares an abiding fascination with androids, here embodied by a scene-stealing Jonsson. Álvarez’s contribution to this sci-fi saga doesn’t buck convention so much as lean into the elements that have long made the franchise a standard-bearer. However, despite its somewhat limited ambition, it gets its scream-worthy job done, and in its homage-y closing notes, it also suggests a promisingly perilous path forward.

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