Alien: Romulus Review

Rain Carridine (Cailee Spaney) and her humanoid "synthetic" brother Andy (David Johnsson) join a band of frustrated youngsters on a renegade mission to steal cryochambers from an abandoned spaceship hovering above their space colony of Jackson's Star, a sunless mining outpost of megacorp Weyland-Yutani. Their plan: escape to Yvaga, the nearest colony where the "sunsets are beautiful" and humans aren't tied into corporate slavery.

But their supposedly easy task of pilfering equipment is interrupted when a spate of scorpion-like slimy "parasitoids", defrosted from their containers, attack them. One eventually plants itself on Navarro, the hauler's pilot, gluing onto her face, choking her in an Anaconda-grip. Longtime fans of Alien will know the creature as a Facehugger and also that its tongue (tentacle?) has wormed its way deep inside Navarro's mouth to "seed" her to produce more of itself. As more Alien-lore creatures crawl out of the metalwork, the crew scatters through the maze-like hallways of what they discover to be an R&D spacecraft with a "Romulus" wing.

Once you get past the existential questions that plague a franchise film ("why do we need this?"), Alien: Romulus emerges as a grisly, goopy body horror-filled sequel true to its Alien DNA. There are Xenomorphs, the bug-like, fangy, alien life-forms lurking in the shadows. And splayed bodies of old crew members dangle from ceilings in whom the Xenos once gestated. The mangled torso of a synthetic named Rook is the only surviving thing on the spacecraft. Rook (likeness of late Ian Holm) becomes the crew's unreliable guide through Romulus's secrets. In particular, its vials of bio-liquid that Rook calls Prometheus Fire, that combines Xeno and human DNA intended to upgrade humans (always a good thing, right?).

For all its technical spiel about aliens, humans and androids, Alien: Romulus, set after the events of the 1979 original, is a flimsy survival drama. Like a parasite, it sucks up the essence of its predecessors without contributing anything of its own to the lore. On the philosophical elements of the franchise, it dabbles rather superficially. Take the scene where Andy must make a decision between saving one person or risking two lives; it is an undisguised reference to the famous Trolley Problem, whose answer the story seems rather distracted by. You end up preferring the film's pulp-y chase sequences with its ticking clock - "45 minutes until the spacecraft crashes into Jackson's Star's planetary rings... 30 minutes until..." - to its pseudo-intellectual musings.

It is the skin-crawling "chestbursting", or the hideous childbirth scenes, that save the film's oft-faltering pace. Topped off with a few true-blue action sequences like the one in which Rain unloads a volley of bullets in a zero-g chamber into an army of facehuggers, and then tries to maneuver around the eddies of their bone-melting acid blood. Scenes like this catapult Romulus to a standing that is a cut above recent Alien flops.

Cailee Spaney manages to eke out remarkable depth in her pedestrian character. We know little about Rain except that she is an orphan and that she feels protective of her synthetic brother. Yet, she seems to have mastered the art and science of killing Xenomorphs - a fact never explained in the film. But because Spaney mounts an expression of stern resolve, one would rather duck behind her for protection than her considerably suaver, fitter, taller male counterpart Tyler, played passably by Archie Renaux.

Spaney is helped immensely by her scene partner David Johnsson who plays her glassy-eyed android brother Andy. Their shifting sibling relationship may be the only bit of heart inside the cold, metallic plotline. Andy's "directive" - the optimization function that dictates his actions as a synthetic person - adds a bit of intrigue. We know how humans are prone to react in a scene - run, scream, stab etc. - but Andy is a wildcard.

Alien: Romulus delivers its goods with the studied precision of a corporate franchise feature. Yes, the sets are impressively claustrophobic. And the visual effects are very convincingly creepy. You get the sense that it has been workshopped to death. After all, director Fede Alvarez has a database of seven films - a mixed bag of superhits, so-sos and duds - from which to glean insights on what worked and what didn't. For fans of the franchise, just getting an Alien film that doesn't suck may be enough. As a bonus, they get a few Easter eggs to keep the chat forums churning. But for a new viewer, stepping into the Alien world on the Romulus spaceship may feel (in the spirit of Andy who loves a good dad joke) a little alienating.