‘Alien: Romulus’ review: chest-bursting reboot is as thrilling and scary as the original

The Alien franchise has, let’s face it, been struggling for life for decades. Prequels like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant and the much-maligned Alien vs. Predator hybrid films have given us nowhere near the power of the original movies by Ridley Scott and James Cameron. Which is probably why director Fede Álvarez made the smart decision to set his movie Alien: Romulus in between Scott’s 1979 original Alien and Cameron’s gun-heavy ’80s sequel Aliens. Suddenly, gloriously, it feels like we’ve been cryogenically frozen and transported to the midway point between the two.

The film takes us to the Jackson’s Star Mining Colony, where we meet Rain (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny) and Andy (David Jonsson), a “synthetic” android who was rescued and restored by Rain’s father and is now like a brother to her. Armed with terrible dad jokes, Andy has but one directive: to look after Rain. But things aren’t exactly going well for her, and she discovers that she must continue working for the Weyland-Yutani Corporation (remember them?) in the mines for a further five or six years before they will release her.

Rain spies a chance to escape this drudgery when she hooks up with some pals who are planning to make an exit stage left and blast off to a faraway planet. Leading the mission is Tyler (Archie Renaux) and his younger sister Kay (Isabela Merced), joined by the sweary Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and capable pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu). All they need to do is get some cryo-pods to sleep through the nine-year journey that awaits them; luckily, just such equipment is residing on a decrepit space station, recently intercepted.

When they climb aboard this enormous vessel, with its hangers named ‘Romulus’ and ‘Remus’, it doesn’t take long for them to realise that they are under attack. Of course, they have no idea what these creepy-looking, tentacled facehuggers are, or what happens when one implants its seed inside of a human. Crafting a thriller that is tense and taut, Álvarez truly understands what makes an Alien movie breathe, while also expanding on the mythology of the series. Here, we get to see more of Weyland-Yutani, and how all motivations are, ominously, “to do what’s best for the company”.

In the relatively fresh-faced cast, the stand-out performer is surely Jonsson, the British star of the BBC show Industry, who gets to give two very different turns as Andy, especially after he receives an upgrade and new directives. There’s also an AI recreation of a familiar character, much in the way Peter Cushing’s Tarkin was brought back to life in Star Wars spin-off Rogue One, that works well, both technically and narratively.

With spot-on production design that really captures the worn-out feel of space travel that the Alien films so perfectly showed, the practical and visual effects, bringing that acid-dripping bitch back to life, are also superbly realised. With a gets-right-under-the-skin score from Benjamin Wallfisch, this is an Alien film for the ages. Finally, someone has made a movie that comes close to the brilliance of Ridley Scott and James Cameron.