The Alien franchise has gone through a rocky history since it’s inception back in the 70’s.  The original Ridley Scott directed film from 1979 was a breakthrough in both horror and science fiction film-making.  A truly terrifying experience that lived up to the film’s tagline, “In space, no one can hear you scream.”  No other genre film looked like it and it completely raised the bar in how to make alien lifeforms a terrifying presence on the big screen.  Many would have thought that this kind of film would be a hard act to follow, but in 1986, James Cameron brought us a sequel to the original film called Aliens that not only matched it in popularity but was also in some ways superior.  What helped to make Aliens work as a sequel was that it didn’t just try to repeat the formula of the first.  Scott’s Alien was a haunted house movie in space, using atmosphere as a valuable tool in crafting the scares in the movie.  Cameron’s Aliens was an action film set within the same universe, still featuring the same scary xenomorph aliens but using a louder action heavy scenes to drive the thrills.  And it worked.  The thing that helped to connect the thread of both films was actress Sigourney Weaver’s performance as Ripley; the sole survivor of the first film and the main heroine of the second.  Weaver’s performance in the second film was so beloved that it even earned her an Oscar nomination; unheard of for a horror based sci-fi flick.  Unfortunately, the years after the success of these first two films wasn’t kind to the series.  The making of Alien3 (1992) was a production nightmare for everyone involved and almost prematurely ended the directing career of it’s then novice filmmaker, David Fincher.  And Alien Resurrection (1997) was an embarrassing misfire that killed the franchise for over a decade.  It might have been wise to potentially just leave the series as it was and move on, just so that the legacy of the original first two classics could be preserved.  But, as it is with every well known franchise, the end is never set in stone.

There was hope for a potential re-boot of the series being able to bring back the past glory of the Alien franchise.  In the 2010’s, it was announced that a prequel film set in the same universe as the original Alien was going to be made, and better yet, Ridley Scott himself was returning to direct.  This seemed like great news, because many believed that Ridley Scott would help bring the franchise back to it’s horror roots, though those hopes may have naive in the end.  Instead, Ridley was looking at making a film that was more sci-fi based than horror.  His film, Prometheus (2012) had all the visual hallmarks of the series, but was far more of an action film than a horror film; and it didn’t even feature one of the xenomorph aliens until literally the very last scene.  Suffice to say, audiences were mixed on the results.  Some liked the fact that Ridley Scott was doing more world building in this franchise and exploring the mythology a bit more; particularly when it came to the mysterious Sentinel being hinted at in the first film.  Others thought it was a dull, methodically paced movie that didn’t deliver on the thrills and was a far cry from the roots of the series that Ridley Scott himself established.  It didn’t help that the follow-up film to this one was a far inferior sequel itself, the universally reviled Alien: Covenant (2017), which was neither thrilling nor scary.  That film was also unfortunately directed by Scott as well, and it further tarnished his reputation as the shepherd of this franchise.  For the series to move forward, it needed to find an identity once again, because so many mediocre reboots and sequels were dragging the franchise down.  It would take a while though, as the franchise was put in limbo after it’s parent studio 20th Century Fox was being absorbed into the Disney Company.  Under new management, Alien had a chance to be looked at with a fresh perspective.  The only question was, how Disney would take the still valuable IP and work with it as a part of their cinematic output.  For some, it was pleasing to see that the plan was to bring the series back to it’s horror roots.  Horror film director Fede Alverez was brought on board to bring his own unique vision to the project.  The only question remains does the new film, Alien: Romulus, bring back the same chills that made the original so scary or is it yet another disappointment that falls far from the peak of this franchise.

Alien: Romulus begins on a remote planet that has been completely colonized and exploited by the Weyland Yutani Coporation.  Among all of the exploited workers, a young girl named Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is desperately trying to work her way off planet.  She is accompanied by her “brother” Andy (David Jonsson), who is a synthetic humanoid drone that her late father save from the junkyard and reprogrammed to protect her.  After being rejected by her superiors for off planet privileges, she seeks the help of other space colonists  to give her passage.  She meets up with an old friend named Tyler (Archie Renaux) who is ready to take off from the colonized planet with his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), his associate Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and their pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu).  Just few days prior, they made the discovery of a derelict Weyland Yutani space vessel that has drifted into the orbit of their planet.  Their hope is to find still working cryo-chambers in the wreckage that can enable them to make deep space travel possible in the hopes of reaching a new inhabitable planet.  The only catch is that they need Andy’s droid clearance to access entry into the ship.  Rain and Andy agree to help them in exchange for their safe passage.  Once they reach the vessel, they find that it isn’t just a simple ship, but rather a full station, meant for research purposes.  Split into two sides, each one named Romulus and Remus, the station is a fortress and not so easy to enter.  One other complication, the station is drifting in orbit towards a ring system that encircles the planet, and they only have a short window to complete their mission before the station is destroyed.  Tyler, Bjorn and Andy make their way into the interior of the ship, finding the place to be a ghost town.  All the crew seems to have completely disappeared, and there are massive holes throughout the ship.  Some violent incident had to have happened and the crew decides to speed up their mission so as to not invite whatever caused the mayhem that destroyed the ship.  They find the cryo-chambers they need, but in the same room there are scary looking alien creatures that try to latch onto their faces.  These Facehuggers are dangerous, but as all the crew members soon learn, there are far greater dangers aboard the ship, and the mission soon becomes not just getting out of this world but just surviving long enough to get off the ship.

The bar for Alien movies can definitely be described by it’s extremes.  The original film and it’s direct sequel are absolute masterpieces of the genre where as everything that has come afterwards has been either disappointing or outright junk.  Alien: Romulus is seeking to bring the series back to it’s more grounded roots by leaning more heavily on the horror film side of the series.  The only question is if they managed to succeed.  Thankfully, I can say that Alien: Romulus is unequivocally the best Alien movie we’ve seen in almost 40 years.  But, even as I say that, I do also have to say that it is no where near perfect either.  The bar has been lowered so much over the years that being just better than average immediately puts the film in the upper half of the series.  There are flaws in this movie that did prevent it from being considered among the greats, but thankfully the pluses outshine the minuses.  For one thing, it is pleasing to see a film this in this series that actually is attempting to be scary rather than just being moody or grotesque.  There was effort towards getting this movie back to the simple horror of Ridley Scott’s original vision.  It helps that Scott is still slightly involved with this film as a producer, helping to guide this new generation in line with the legacy of what’s come before.  But make no mistake, this is thoroughly Fede Alverez’s movie, and you can tell that he put his own horror twist on this film that works very well, at least when it comes to making things genuinely scary.  For one thing, I really appreciated his use of sound in the movie.  Whether it’s the absence of it in outer space (including a very effective intro that is completely sound free) to the sudden bursts of loud noises once the mayhem starts.  You really have to appreciate how much the sound plays a role in generating the thrills, especially when there are monstrous creatures that could be lurking in the shadows.  It really is where I feel this movie definitely comes closest to getting back those roots that the series was built off of, and which have been lost ever since Scott and Cameron left their marks on this series long ago.

Unfortunately the flaw that I found with this movie is one that I see all too often with lazy horror movies.  It’s the cliché where your main cast of characters continuously make stupid decisions that end up getting themselves killed or attacked, all with the purpose of manipulating the plot.  There are a lot of out of character moments where the crew decides they are going to go into the obviously dangerous place for the flimsiest of reasons.  I don’t want to spoil too much, but there are decisions made where you know that the character is deciding to walk into a death trap and low and behold, they get themselves killed.  I have seen other horror movies do this cliché worst, but it is unfortunate to see this movie do it as well, especially after it gets so many other things right.  The other flaw of this movie is the way it shoe-horns fan service.  It takes you out of the movie when the film will suddenly throw an Easter egg at you, especially when a character recites a line that’s a catch phrase made famous by the other movies.  There’s no reason for the characters to say those lines.  It’s just there to make the audience laugh or cheer and it’s pandering.  I would have rather the movie just used it’s connection with being part of the same universe as the only thread between itself and the other movies.  Shoehorning in Easter eggs and catch phrases just seems like a desperate move to garner audience approval.  Like I said before, the movie stands well enough on it’s own without them.  Fede Alverez nails the atmosphere and the thrills of this series.  He doesn’t need the assist of fans service.  Thankfully, these elements don’t drag the movie down as a whole, and if you’re not a long time fan of the series and just coming to this film casually, these references will likely just fly over your head.  But, for someone that is familiar with the series, I did find them a bit distracting and it was one of the things that did knock the movie down a peg in terms of it’s place as a part of the series as a whole.

What does work wonderfully in this film is the craft behind it.  When I say that this movie marks a return to form for this series, that’s in response to seeing the return to old school tactics in the filmmaking process.  Unlike most other legacy sequels that we have seen, particularly in this franchise, this one is relying less on wall to wall CGI and instead uses a lot more practical effects.  Sure, there are plenty of CGI moments in this movie, but I was very pleased to see that whenever we got a close-up of the xenomorphs or the facehuggers, they were actually done with either puppetry or with robotics.  That was what made the original films so effective, that the aliens themselves were manufactured to be physically on set.  The xenomorphs themselves were sometimes even portrayed on screen with stunt actors in a rubber suit, and I was happy to see that they did that here are well.  Of course, the wide shots used for the aliens resort to CGI models, and I’m happy to say that those shots are done effectively as well.  It’s what a good action movie should do, which is to mix you effects so that it tricks the eye.  You use the CGI to show the agility of the aliens that otherwise would be impossible with practical effects, and then mix that with the up close shots of the physical puppets and you’ll get a better result in making the alien creatures feel real and threatening, which thankfully this movie does.  The movie also does a great job with it’s world building, especially when it comes to the sense of scale in the physical environments.  Fede Alverez does an effective job of conveying the epic scope of the Romulus space station, while at the same time making the tight corridors feel effectively claustrophobic and foreboding.  And there are some shots in this movie that are just outright beautiful to look at, especially towards the end when the looming ring system begins to near the orbit of the space station.  There are also some really imaginative moments in the movie that I thought brought something new to the series, especially one sequence involving the acidic alien blood.  In many ways, this film has felt the closest in a long time to being the best spiritual successor to Ridley Scott’s original classic, at least in terms of the visuals.

The performances in this movie are generally good as well, though the personalities of the characters are very thinly defined.  The easiest highlight of the film is David Jonsson’s performance as Andy.  The synthetics of the series have always been some of the most interesting characters in the series, dating back to Ian Holm’s Ash in the original film.  Jonsson manages to create a surprisingly complex character out of an android with many limitations.  He is shown to be partially functioning in the beginning, but when he is plugged, so to speak with the operating system of the Romulus station, he almost becomes a new character, and it’s really interesting to see the actor pull of those two different aspects almost like he’s playing different characters in each situation.  There isn’t a whole lot to Cailee Spaeny’s Rain; she’s pretty much there to be a substitute for Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley.  But, she does the best that she can do in the role, and she has excellent chemistry with David Jonsson in the film.  Their two characters are certainly the heart of the movie, so it is good to see the actors actually make that surrogate brother and sister dynamic work in the film.  The other actors in the movie are less well defined, but none of them are distractingly bad in their performances and for the most part are effective.  Let’s face it, these characters are just there to be lambs to the slaughter for aliens.  The movie doesn’t waste any time getting us to the gory parts of the movie so these characters don’t need to be particularly deeply defined personalities.  The movie does focus on the characters that matter and thankfully they are characters that we want to root for.  But at the same time, what we go to these movies for are the aliens themselves, and they’ve never been more complex than the deadly terror creatures that we’ve always known them to be.  The one caveat I will mention that I think might be divisive for many is the inclusion of a character loosely connected to the original film that they reference in this movie.  People are either going to love his inclusion here as an Easter egg or hate it and see it as pandering.  I was a bit iffy on it myself but it wasn’t a deal breaker for the experience as a whole, though it is another one of those things that does bring the movie down a peg.

In general, I would rank Alien: Romulus easily as the third best film in the series, though the gap between it and the two classics in front of it is vast.  The reason this gets the third spot is simply because we have been devoid of so many good films in this series that by being merely adequate enough it rises almost to the top.  What this movie gets right is it’s craft.  It has the look and feel of an Aliens film down, and it’s a great return to form for a series that sadly has lost it’s way over the years.  Just get things back to what works, which is scary aliens hunting humans in dark corridors, and that’s the bullseye that the movie manages to nearly hit.  The only thing that holds it back is the paper thin story behind it and the fact that it falls back on so many tired tropes.  I liked that the story was simple, but there has to be logic behind the characters’ motivations and sadly the movie just ends up making it’s characters look like idiots by having them resort to non-sensical actions to help propel the plot forward.  There are thankfully a couple characters that still garner sympathy, and thankfully they are the focus of the film.  I particularly was impressed with the work of David Jonsson, who brought a surprising amount of nuance to a character that otherwise would’ve been a tad bit unbelievable.  And what the movie does get especially right are the aliens themselves.  The xenomorphs are legit terrifying here, which is a welcome return to form after the unconvincing CGI versions that we saw in the movie Alien: Covenant.  It will be interesting to see what might happen next with this franchise; will it still lean into the horror aspect or will it become more action oriented.  I honestly would favor the former, because I’ve always associated Alien more with the horror genre.  My hope is that it stays in that vein in the future, but perhaps they can improve on it with a more grounded premise.  Perhaps a smaller cast of characters with which there will be more screen time devoted to building up their personalities.  Also, please refrain from shoe-horning Easter eggs and catch phrases into the film that don’t need to be there.  There are some frustrating fan service things about this movie, but I do feel that it does get a lot right as an experience, particularly in bringing back old filmmaking tactics that help to make it feel more timeless.  We’ll see what the future holds, and my hope is that Alien will hopefully become a franchise that once again brings out the terror of the unknown that awaits us in the vast darkness of space.

Rating: 7/10