I'm on the record about loving Prometheus and generally liking Alien: Covenant. So it would be incorrect to say Romulus is the Alien movie I've been waiting for. But for those who found the last two entries' discursions into philosophy and theology off-putting, Romulus returns to the original's horror roots.
What I found even more refreshing was the film's world-building. Set between Alien and Aliens, Fede Alvarez's spin takes place on a derelict mining colony. With no visible sunlight, short life expectancies and horrible living conditions, this is another hell created by the evil Weyland-Yutani corporation. With excellent storytelling economy, it's immediately clear why someone would risk prison time - and even death - to scavenge a decommissioned space station.
This desperate crew includes Rain (Cailee Spaeny), her android companion Andy (David Jonsson), and siblings Tyler (Archie Reneaux) and Kay (Isabela Merced). They hope to steal enough equipment for an unauthorized journey to a gorgeous, mostly uninhabited planet. But the problems start long before the face-huggers and xenomorphs show up. With secretive crew members, failing technology and an imminent impact with a debris field, things go from bad to worse once they locate their prize, and inadvertently release a lab full of hungry specimens.
Romulus is relentlessly scary throughout its runtime, and features arguably the scariest sequence in the entire franchise. But it falls short of the high bar set by the films it's set between because of one critical error in plot and special effects. Without spoiling anything, the film brings back a character whose performer has long since died. Had it simply cast a similar-looking actor, this choice could have worked. But the filmmakers do the same thing attempted in Rogue One: using shoddy CGI to mask the face of the poor stand-in. It's a double failure because using that particular character has no impact on the story, and the VFX in these scenes are the only ones that look bad.
Otherwise, Alien: Romulus is a strong, sick and scary entry in this 45-year-old franchise. But less fealty to what came before could have made it legendary.
