Movie review: Alien: Romulus starts strong but gets old fast

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If you cast about for critical opinions on the newest Alien movie (number seven in the franchise, not counting spinoffs, crossovers and Spaceballs) you’ll find a lot of references to it being a return to the 1979 original, to its horror roots, to its practical effects, etc. So why even call it Alien: Romulus? Why not just go with Alien: The Return?

Well, because there is a lot that’s new in this one, although most of that is front-loaded into the film’s first half. The further along you go, the more it starts to resemble older Alien films, until the final act turns into a rip-off (or should that be Ripley off?) of some of the iconic original’s and its superb sequel’s best moments.

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So let’s start with the wondrous, world-building opening scenes, all gritty and grimy and analogue. Rain (Cailee Spaeny, as excellent here as she was in this summer’s Civil War) is trying to leave a dreary off-world mining colony where the sun shines for zero hours a year.

Her friends have found a derelict spaceship in orbit, and plan to commandeer it and use it to travel somewhere more clement. With the help of her brother — actually a humanoid robot, played with empathy-inducing gravitas and sadness by David Johnsson — they manage to board the craft.

It turns out to be more of a space station, equipped with the cryo-pods they’ll need to make the years-long journey to a new world. (Alien is that rare sci-fi story that both understands that it can take a long time to travel between the stars, and uses it to narrative advantage.)

Thus does co-writer and director Fede Alvarez (Don’t Breathe, 2013’s Evil Dead reboot) set up a series of nested timelines. To avoid another six years on the colony, and power their cryo-pods for a nine-year trip, Rain and her comrades (including the pregnant Kay, played by Isabela Merced) have 36 hours to ransack the Romulus before it crashes into a gorgeous planetary ring. Whoops, make that 47 minutes!

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It all seems quite doable until the looters accidentally disturb a nest of alien facehuggers (such a cute name for such a nasty creature) and are forced to run for their lives. Andy, Rain’s android companion, tries to help as best he can, but human prejudice and implacable machine logic keep getting in his way.

Meanwhile, the xenomorphs do what they’ve always done best, trasmogrifying into a terrifying array of killer creatures, sometimes at a speed that seems biologically impossible, but whatever.

It’s gory and creepy rather than flat-out terrifying (which is fine by me as I was never one for jump-scares anyway), and while there’s clearly a healthy dose of computer-generated trickery, there are also some seemingly practical effects, as when a cut-in-half robot is perched atop a table, just where you’d expect him to be if a human were playing him and had to hide their legs.

Romulus also provides some intriguing connective tissue with other films in the franchise, whose wonky timeline of release dates and chronology requires a white board rather than a review, but here goes.

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Basically, this chapter takes place 20 years after the events of 1979’s Alien, which means Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is still in her 57-year cryo-slumber that will culminate in 1986’s Aliens. But Romulus is also set after the events of the Ridley-Scott-directed Prometheus and Covenant, so there’s a reference to those films as well.

Geektastic as all that may be, you don’t need to be an Alien completist to enjoy this latest frightfest, which leans heavily on the characters of Rain and Andy, and their relationship. Other than Ripley herself, the franchise’s various conflicted simulants — played over the years by Ian Holm, Lance Henriksen, Winona Ryder, Michael Fassbender and others — have reliably proven to be its most interesting characters, more human than human if I can borrow a phrase from an alternate universe.

You can also enjoy the movie’s retro-future elements — Alvarez and the film’s designers clearly poured a lot of time and effort into crafting Andy’s tiny SIM card and mini-CD-ROM brain insert. (Why they also decided the Romulus station needed a giant elevator and also a funicular and a huge airport-style escalator is more of a mystery.)

In fact, the less you know about the Alien movies, the more you’ll enjoy what may look like original elements in this one. That may seem like backhanded praise, but it’s also an inescapable facet of such a long-running franchise, decades in the making and covering centuries of time. Everything new is old again.

Alien: Romulus opens Aug. 16 in theatres.

3.5 stars out of 5

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