Alien: Romulus (directed by Fede Álvarez, 2024)

So there’s a new Alien movie, or a ‘new’ Alien movie, since it is really not altogether new, nor would studios greenlight anything such. It’s a cover-act, a greatest-hits rerun of all the famous moments from the previous Alien movies, with a fresh bunch of young actors: Alien: Romulus or, from the xenomorph's perspective, “Alien: NomNomNomulus”. It’s not bad, and certainly better than the dire Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017), though it’s also extremely familiar: a slow start, the first appearance of face-huggers, an increasingly hectic violent runaround on a spaceship, full-sized aliens, gore, jump-shocks, and a big explosive finale.

There’s no Ripley—the movie is Ripfree—though Ian Holm makes a reappearance, which may surprise us, given that Holm is dead and Sigourney Weaver still alive. But death is no impediment to Hollywood, where ‘Nightmare Death-in-Life’, from Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner is currently a studio executive. Little-known fact: the original Ripley actress got her name because her family had for many generations woven Sigourneys out of organic materials at their Sigourney steam-looms.

Anyway: the movie.

Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) is working for the Company, Weyland-Yutani, on a hellworld called Jackson’s Star; down the mines of a sunless dystopian planet, trying to accrue enough hours to be released from her contract. Jackson’s Star is a teeming nighttime camp of wastrals and ruffians, like something out of a Duran Duran music-video—fittingly for a movie that leans hard into the retro 1980s stylings of the franchise’s first two movies.

Young Rain’s parents are dead, and she cares for her brother—not a biological relative, but an android called Andy (David Johnsson), who was picked out of the trash by Rain’s father mended and reprogrammed, and who is now a special-needs savant, awkward and bumbling, obsessed with terrible jokes and puns. Rain finally does accrue the hours she needs and goes to obtain her release, so she and Andy can relocate to the sunny world of Yvaga. But the evil Weyland-Yutani company have arbitrarily extended her required hours: now she must work another five years before they will release her. Oh no! Worse, outside the company office a group of wild boys (“wild boys!”) are beating up Andy (“wild boys—wild boys!—never lose it/Wild boys—wild boys!—never chose this way”) and Rain must hurry outside to save him.

This puts Rain in the mental space to accept a proposal by her unreliable ex-boyfriend Tyler to join him on a risky mission to escape the Duran-Duran-music-video-world altogether. Tyler, his pregnant sister Kay, their cousin the brattish Bjorn (father of Kay’s child) and Bjorn's adoptive sister Navarro, will fly into orbit, where there is a derelict spacecraft. The plan: to use Andy’s android skills to resurrect this craft and fly it to Yvaga. Downside: the craft’s orbit is decaying and in 36 hours it will crash into the planet’s rings. That rings are some kind of hard barrier, impacting which would destroy a spaceship, is one of the radical improbabilities the movie is happy to swallow, as is the fact that the mining colony on Jackson’s Star lives in permanent night because the planet is tidally locked with its star, so half the world is forever in shade: as if this would mean a cool Alaskan night rather than a −193 °C block of permanent ice, as is the case with Mercury’s dark side. But, whatever.

This plucky band of attractive young actors go for it: they steal a shuttle, nip up into space, board the derelict ship and start to reanimate it. The voyage to Yvaga will take nine years so it’s imperative they get the cryostasis pods working so they can sleep the voyage away. I mean, nine years doesn’t strike me as impossible stretch of time to stay awake, but there you go. The arsehole Bjorn (Spike Fearn) is given a backstory whereby his mother died because a synthentic did the trolley problem, and saved X+Y people by letting X people die, which latter group included Bjorn’s mother. So Bjorn is predisposed to hate synthetics, like Andy, even though synthetics are programmed always to help and never harm humans. This goes by the board quickly in the story, though, as Andy gets a flash-drive stuck in his port that upgrades his software making him loyal only to the Weyland-Yutani company. He is no longer a joke-loving idiot-savant; now he is a cool and collected dominant personality. His previous prime directive, look after Rain, is now replaced by: advance Weyland-Yutani’s nefarious plans, although we suspect that he will have an inner crisis towards the end of the film and his love for his sister will win out. And so it transpires.

Anyway, we’re three quarters of an hour into the movie and there haven’t been any xenomorphs yet. But we know they’re coming, or why did we pay to watch this movie? There’s an anticipatory segue, with face huggers, let loose by the rebooting of the spaceship, swimming through flooded decks and scuttling along corridors (‘da fuck was that?’ says Tyler, more than once). Then it’s all face-hugging and screaming and running around. There’s a well-done chest-burster scene inside a spinning out-of-control shuttlecraft. It’s nice to see all those chunky eighties spaceship interiors and green-and-white computer screens scrolling things like “10 PRINT ‘RUN AWAY’ 20 GOTO 10”. There’s sprinting down corridors. There’s stuff in lifts. There’s not one but several “open the door! open the door!” “If I do that we’re all dead” [other side of door] “Help! Help!” SPLAT! moments.

There’s a new wrinkle in the ‘Alien’ mythography: the xenomorphs, like Predators, hunt by sensing body temperature, so equalising the room temperature to your body temperature makes you invisible to them. Seems like an advantage, though the ever diminishing crew don’t take much advantage of it. Then Bjorn, discovering the alien chest-burster in its membraneous womb growing into its full sized xenomorphosity, tries to kill it by plunging a cattle-prod in its viscera. It retaliates by pissing acid all over Bjorn, dissolving him. Not so much acid trip as Acid: RIP.

Whilst all this is going on the spaceship is falling towards the planetary rings and destruction increasingly impends. Oh no! Meanwhile the reanimated half-body of Ian Holm’s android reveals that he had previously distilled the xenomorphs down to a liquid, perhaps by putting one in a gigantic blender. This is the black goo, familiar from Prometheus. Holm calls it ‘a gift, a unique non-Newtonian fluid, life in its most primal unadulterated form’. A non-Newtonian fluid: like custard. We discover that this was the Weyland-Yutani plan all along: to replace regular human colonists with genetically engineered xenomorphic goo injected into humans to ‘upgrade them’. ‘Mankind was never truly suited to space colonisation,’ says half-Holm. ‘They are simply too fragile’. Cue gif: ‘after all, why not? Why shouldn’t I keep [the Alien franchise chundering on]?’

One such human-alien-goo hybrid makes an appearance: a ten-foot-tall pale-grey skinny humanoid with a homo sapiens face and an alien tail, who looks like a basketball player, and tries to kill Rain. This, it seems to me, is a problem: presumably Wayland-Smithy, sorry, Weyland-Yutani want colonists who work as miners and do heavy industry and so on, not play murderous basketball. How were they planning on controlling their hybrid ‘perfect organisms’? We are not told.

There’s a splendid zero-g finale with a lots of gunfire and great floating gouts of alien-acid-blood swirling and pooling. It includes one splendidly nonsensical reveal where Rain tries to escape the aliens by taking the elevator before shrieking ‘oh no! the elevator won’t work without gravity!’ whereupon there’s a shot of the motor at the top of the elevator shaft unspooling metal cable into air, like it’s a machine from a 1930s New York skyscraper. Hilarious! Then: hideous phallicface alien leering close to attractive, distressed female face—check. Saved in the nick of time—check. Fanservice recital of ‘get away from her you bitch’ line—check. All present and correct. Álvarez has said he’s has plans for a sequel, which presumably will be called Alien: Remus, or possibly Uncle: Remus, but that he wants to wait seven years before he makes it. I’d be surprised if the wait will be that long. Weialala-leia-wallala-leialala-Yutani.