Directing an Alien movie in 2024, after six movies and 44 years, must feel like wandering into a kitchen the day after Pancake Day looking for flour and eggs. Every possible ingredient has surely been used, every angle exhausted. Major props, then, to Fede Álvarez for cooking up something fresh in this furiously exciting, gnarly seventh entry. He’s even found the eggs, too.
Unlike his franchise predecessors – Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher, Jean-Pierre Jeunet (side note: did the Amélie man really direct an Alien movie?) – Álvarez is a straight-up horror filmmaker and he’s a perfect pick for the job, pulling off satisfying jumps, ingenious zero gravity sequences, and camera moves that come at the dead-meats-vs-monsters action from entirely new directions.
Smartly, the Don’t Breathe and Evil Dead (2013) director and his co-writer Rodo Sayagues strip things back to basics. Like Scott’s 1979 haunted-spaceship movie, it’s a bunch of blue collar types trapped in an orbiting vessel with the universe’s perfect – and most malevolent – organism.
Romulus is set a few years after the events in Alien and a few before those in Aliens. Combining the claustrophobic tension-building of the former and the gung-ho spirit of the latter, it tracks six young colonists as they plunder an abandoned space station for the cryosleep chambers that will let them escape their dying mining settlement for a brighter future. Except, well, it hosts a few ultra-violent stowaways of its own.
Like its xenomorphs, Romulus is best when it’s streamlined and ferocious
The soon-to-be-traumatised travellers, a crew of fresh-faced, Skins-in-space Brits and Priscilla breakout Cailee Spaeny, are straight out of Alien writers’ Dan O'Bannon and Ronald Shusett playbook. Grousing, dumped-on but never self-pitying, and often braver and more enterprising than many of their Alien predecessors, they’re three-dimensional enough for it to sting when they’re dispatched in an array of gruesome ways.
As the heroine, Rain Carradine, Spaeny is a much more elfin, shier action hero than Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley. Her badass credentials unfurl so gradually that when Álvarez gives us a glimpse of her Ripley-homaging Reeboks or frames her, backlit, with pulse rifle in hand and a snarl of defiance, the metamorphosis catches you off-guard.
Even better is Industry’s David Jonsson as Andy, an android programmed by Rain’s dad to protect his daughter. A USB port in his neck provides a clever means to repurpose the character and gives Jonsson the chance to absolutely nail the same brand of off-kilter synthetic humanity as Michael Fassbender, Lance Henriksen and Ian Holm before him.
Less successfully, the franchise’s corporate villains Weyland-Yutani (likely motto: ‘Yes, we’re still doing this’) return to drive the second half of the movie – albeit via a returning character who gets unexpected and visually jarring prominence. Ideas explored in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant – the Latin name ‘Romulus’ is a clue – resurface in ways that’ll only satisfy hardcore fans of those convoluted Scott sequels. A few moments of gratuitous fan service jar too.
Like its xenomorphs, Romulus is best when it’s single-minded, streamlined and ferocious. See it on an IMAX screen and hold on tight.
In cinemas worldwide Aug 16.