Alien: Romulus: a terrifying return to the visceral menace of the original

After the ponderous metaphysics of Prometheus (2012) and slightly too much robot flute-playing in Alien: Covenant (2016), the Alien franchise returns under the director Fede Álvarez, who sure-footedly revamped The Evil Dead (2013) and provided the thrills of Don’t Breathe (2016). Álvarez delivers a back-to-basics approach for Alien that is a standalone retelling of the primal plot of Scott’s original but full of echoes and call-backs to prior outings of xenomorphic mayhem. It is the first film in the series to be developed under the new ownership of the Alien IP by Disney.

Alien: Romulus is inserted into the series timeline between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986). It starts on a mining colony, the labourers indentured to the evil Weyland-Yutani Company and being poisoned by the toxic environment. There is a strong Blade Runner feel in these early scenes, and it expands on a mining scenario explored in the effective 2019 anniversary short film, Alien: Ore, directed by Kailey and Sam Spear.

Here a bunch of disenchanted young people decide to hitch a ride out on an abandoned spaceship drifting into their planet’s orbit. This is, as always, a bad idea. They have stumbled into another disastrous aftermath of the Company’s attempt to monetise this monstrous Other.

The young cast, headed by Cailee Spaeny as Rain, the Gen Z Final Ripley Girl, don’t have much time to establish character before they are hurled into acid-damaged crawl-spaces and baroque laboratories. Most space is again given to the ‘synthetic’ person on the small crew, but unlike the mannered performance of Michael Fassbender in the last two films, this time David Jonsson gives some shading to the double personality of the android Andy, struggling as always between programmed directives. There is more of the human jeopardy that the Prometheus films lost to their bombastic scale. Despite the director’s intent to focus on human dilemmas, one of the most poignant surprises of Romulus is the place Ian Holm has in the plot, a digital reanimation of the actor who played the synthetic Ash in the first film, and who passed away in 2020. The visuals might be a little shaky, but it is uncanny to hear that distinctive voice again.

Holm’s digital resurrection aside, the film has been promoted as a turn away from over-reliance on CGI and back to fully built sets and practical effects, using many of the animatronic and puppeteer designers involved in James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). There are many nods to Ridley Scott’s penchant for ‘layered’ sets and miniatures. The computer screens and weapons are all evocatively retro, and the engagement of actors with various face-huggers and H. R. Giger’s iconic adult xenomorph effectively adds visceral menace to the jump-scare encounters. Sometimes you see in the face and gestures of Spaeny not just the ghosts of Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley from different moments in the first four films, but also of Noomi Rapace’s Shaw.

Álvarez, who co-wrote the story that was pitched personally to Ridley Scott for approval, steals lots of shots and even reworks iconic lines of dialogue from earlier in the series. This is crowd-pleasing for fans, perhaps, but sometimes these lines are delivered with unexpected bathos, as if aware we are seven films deep into this universe.

The chest-bursting scene from the 1979 original was so utterly traumatic that it feels as if cinema has been compelled to repeat this originary horror ever since as a way of mastering it. Repetition can risk diminishing returns, however, so Álvarez does innovate with some new kinds of nasty birthings, mainlining on Giger’s overt horror at the female physiology of reproduction. The final hybrid creature, bloodily birthed by a pregnant crew member, is reminiscent of Alien: Resurrection (1997) – not entirely happily – but also clearly owes a debt to the 1980s OTT body horror aesthetic that revels in escalating absurdity.

Since 1979, the franchise’s hybrid of science fiction and the Gothic has been a way of checking in on two abiding themes that push at the boundaries of what it means to be human: the development of machine intelligence and biological threats to bodily integrity. Prometheus tended towards cod philosophising on AI and God-like creativity; Alien: Romulus seems much more interested in a return to the politics of the body. Perhaps this responds to an America where increasing restrictions on the right to abortion feels much more immediate and under threat in the 2020s than the underwhelming banalities (so far) of ChatGPT. The evils of the Company’s attitude to human bodies continues to mean the series can produce biting commentary.

 ► Alien: Romulus is in UK cinemas now.