Before it had a name, the xenomorph of the Alien series had a nightmarish presence. Its gruesome and iconic life cycle, established 45 years ago in Ridley Scott’s Alien, is eternally disturbing. After erupting from a glistening yonic egg sac as a nymph with a scorpion-like tail, the creature attaches to the head of its victim. Then it impregnates the person, plunging a phallic organ down their throat through what appears to be its own mouth—a fiendish kiss. Next, it goes limp, drained by the act. Briefly. Soon after, it emerges engorged from the host’s chest, fatally barging through their ribs. From there, it grows in size, hunger, and menace, killing rapaciously until someone, usually a plucky woman, expels it into the vacuum of space.
In the first two films of the series, the creature offered a buffet of metaphors. At its core, the xenomorph represented the vast unknowability and hostility of the universe, which no amount of human engineering can truly overcome, even on Earth. “The perfect organism,” as one character describes it, also embodied the uncanny, its monstrous intersexuality, bipedal frame, and cold sentience channeling the entire animal kingdom, an omni-chimera. Further still, the beast personified survival, its twisted evolutions and outsmarting of technologically advanced humans demonstrating an impressive resourcefulness.
Thrillingly, these many meanings were enhanced by the people and androids the xenomorph stalked, who had more interiority and personality than typical horror movie fodder and had more blue-collar charm than the standard sci-fi cast of scientists and soldiers. They strutted through the films’ meticulous sets, which narrowed the vastness of space into claustrophobic shafts and tunnels, with the nonchalant swagger of stevedores. From the scores to the editing, Alien and Aliens pulsed with ideas about birth, death, work, and the cosmos, robust hearts of darkness. (Speaking of Joseph Conrad, one of the ships in Alien is named after his novel Nostromo.)
The latest installment, Alien: Romulus, is more of a dusty hall of fame. It takes place between those two films, chronologically, and attempts to restore glory to the storied franchise by going “back to its roots,” as the marketing materials boast, but Romulus mostly confirms the series has devolved into the perfect Hollywood organism: I.P. Its endless callbacks, cameos, and Easter eggs drain the story and the titular alien of intrigue and fun. Watching it, I wondered why horror franchises, the original I.P. giants, have largely been spared talk of Hollywood destroying originality. Despite fresh talent in front of and behind the camera, Romulus offers the same old tired story beats and ideas.
Director Fede Alvarez, to his credit, is a believer. “I was able to walk through a Weyland-Yutani spaceship that’s designed in the style of [Alien and Aliens concept artist] Ron Cobb,” he gushed to The Hollywood Reporter. “I got to be in this world that Ridley created and encounter these creatures face to face.” Alvarez’s fidelity to the series is so intense that he reportedly recruited puppeteering and animatronics crew from past Alien movies to work on his film, and got the idea to make the cast a bunch of young adults from watching a scene from the extended cut of Aliens that shows a bunch of kids. The director, who previously helmed Evil Dead (2013) and Don’t Breathe (2016), has certainly done his research. Unfortunately, fealty is not vision.
The film starts off with some promise. After a wordless open in which scientists with a cultist air retrieve a xenomorph from the wreckage of the Nostromo, the story switches to a grungy mining colony on a sunless unnamed planet. The colony residents, who appear haggard and cloaked in shadow, radiate misery. Light is sparse and sooty, underscoring the dreary mood. But orphan Rain (Cailee Spaeny) navigates this malaise casually, accompanied by Andy (David Jonsson), an android she considers her brother. Rain is at ease because she’s fulfilled her contract with the colony’s corporate overlords and is ready to ship out to a planet with sunlight, which she’s never seen. But her evil employers don’t hold up their end of the bargain, leaving her stuck.
Luckily, her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) recruits her and Andy into a scheme to escape the drab planet. The ragtag crew, which includes Tyler’s sister Kay (Isabel Merced) and cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn’s girlfriend, Navarro (Aileen Wu), plans to raid a space station orbiting the planet. It has sleep chambers they can use to hibernate during the yearslong journey to their sunny dream destination. Rain agrees, then they’re off, venturing into the realm of tediously familiar Alien happenings.
The station, of course, turns out to be full of complications, from xenomorphs, to an evil android that resembles the late Ian Holm’s Ash from Alien, to a dastardly chemical modeled after the black goo of prequel Prometheus and prequel sequel Alien: Covenant. (Got that? Romulus is an “interquel” by the way.) Alvarez’s horror chops keep things somewhat lively as the allusions to other Alien films noxiously pile up. The station is still and cramped, and the camera often crawls along the floor or hovers above, amplifying the feeling the characters are being hunted. An A Quiet Place–like scene requiring Rain and Tyler to be completely silent as nymph xenomorphs scuttle around is nervous fun.
Scenes like this suggest that the “roots” of the series, as Alvarez understands them, are terror and disequilibrium. The adult xenomorphs are notably moist and slick, slobber dripping from their gaping jaws, blood glazing their oblong heads. And characters frequently fall, lurch, and stumble as they move through the ship, always off-balance and disoriented. In the film’s best scene, Rain and Andy must kill xenomorphs in zero gravity, and then dodge drifting clouds of their acidic blood. The sequence is nail-biting, and one of the few moments that hinges on characters’ relationships, as Rain gets the idea from Andy telling a dad joke, which her dad programmed him to do. Alvarez seems determined to make the films scary again.
That goal works out texturally but not quite narratively. Alien movies are a set of conditions—creepy libido monsters, a spooky ship, evil companies and their robot minions—and Alvarez undoubtedly has his own ideas about how to arrange them. But his remixing is slight, always loyal to the series staples, such as the grisly birth of a xenomorph through Navarro’s chest and the tongue-flicking of the xenomorph. These are the moments when the score swells and the camera gawks. There’s no interest in life as a space miner or as a robot.
Despite Spaeny’s higher billing, the star is Jonsson’s Andy, who is programmed to protect Rain, but has his prime directive overwritten at one point to prioritize the corporation. The character swings between brotherly charm and cold machine logic in ways that heighten the ambient danger. In one scene, the trolley problem plays out grimly, with Andy deciding to let Kay be abducted by a xenomorph and then apologizing to Rain and Tyler for his choice. His strained but intimate relationship with Rain is clearly meant to be the heart of the film.
But this bond also is a retread, inspired by characters Ellen Ripley and Bishop in Aliens, and David and Meredith Vickers in Prometheus. Romulus is ultimately a film in which familiarity is the prime directive. Alvarez has said so himself: “If Alien was a band, then we wanted this to be the concert where we play all the hits and then a few more new songs, so they go, ‘Wow, that’s pretty good!’”
It’s not. You can see the gears turning in every scene, and feel the film dutifully avoiding, well, alienation, the unknown, the discomfiting. In some sense, this orthodoxy might be protective. “I love all of those movies. I didn’t want to omit or ignore any of them when it comes to connections at a story level, character level, technology level and creature level,” Alvarez has said, embracing the series’ less-revered entries. Linking them all together through reams of references, in this sense, is an act of recovery.
That’s sweet, I guess, but not especially curious. Great sequels use the groundwork laid by their forebears to build up, out, away, in some new direction. Those that traffic in the familiar, like, say, Aliens, 10 Cloverfield Lane, or Prey, use that recognition to play with viewers’ perceptions. Those films are exciting because they refract rather than repeat, going left when you expect them to go right. Nostalgia can do so much more than appease and flatter. It can misdirect, it can subvert, it can nauseate. But in the I.P. era, filmmakers, studios, and audiences ask it only to comfort. Isn’t that the opposite of horror?