In the Flesh: Alien: Romulus

Alien: Romulus doesn’t work without David Jonsson as the android Andy. The synthetic person’s transformation from a shaky, well-meaning adult child who lives only to protect his surrogate sister, Rain (Cailee Spaeny), to a sad-eyed arbiter of life and death aboard the titular space station is far and away the most compelling arc on display here. Jonsson’s body language is exquisitely subtle in both incarnations, first reticent and gentle, then quietly commanding and freighted with melancholy. He turns a good role into a great one, salvaging the cast from its teen heartthrob doldrums and injecting every scene he’s in with a tension and sense of gravity his co-stars can’t muster even when working in tandem. Otherwise, what you’ve got here is a fairly standard Alien plot: scruffy nobodies stumble across the infamous creature, die horribly, escape on their spaceship, and a lone survivor faces off against a stowaway horror before escaping in the nick of time.

Much of the film’s second act suffers from a heavy reliance on an AI deepfaked Ian Holm as the malevolent android, Rook. The ghastly recreation is remarkable not just for its ugly implications for labor ethics but for its shockingly poor execution. In a film so committed to practical effects craftsmanship, boasting perhaps the first truly terrifying original creation since Prometheus’s vaginal squid monster, it stands out like a sore thumb, compromising Romulus’s aesthetic integrity and cohesion. It goes hand in hand with a smattering of leaden, joyless callbacks to lines from previous franchise entries, up to and including a lifeless repetition of “Get away from her, you bitch” appended to an action sequence already marred by poor pacing. When the film’s art direction goes its own way, though, it finds intermittent greatness, never more so than with the shocking, hideous creature it conjures for its final sequence.

Director Fede Alvarez occasionally gets caught up in a “more is more” approach that makes Cameron’s Aliens look restrained by comparison, and while a lot of his ideas work, at times the screen is simply cluttered, and for every dazzling action sequence or moment of nail-biting suspense there’s a clunker where the film’s pacing and the scale of what Alvarez wants to express just don’t cohere. His early facehugger sequences are a frustrating mix of terror and drawn-out, flaccid choreography with so much back and forth as to who’s going to get impregnated by the little horrors that the nauseating tension gives way to repetition and boredom. “Caught between a flawed but vigorous artistic vision and a crippling reliance on past glories” isn’t exactly a new development in the annals of franchise filmmaking, but you could do much worse than Alien: Romulus.