Alien: Romulus: A Familiar Haunted House in Orbit

Fede Álvarez had a problem the moment he signed on to direct Alien: Romulus: the Alien franchise has spent four decades trying to either remake Alien (1979) or remake Aliens (1986), and both roads are worn bare. His solution is to split the difference. Alien: Romulus sets itself between those two films — in 2142, after the Nostromo’s crew died and before the events of Aliens — and then raids both for parts. The result is a movie that knows exactly what it is and mostly delivers it, without ever quite becoming its own thing.

Trailer, via 20th Century Studios.

Six Colonists and the Corbelan IV

The setup is lean and mean. On Jackson’s Star, a mining colony on the perpetually dark planet LV-410, Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) learns that Weyland-Yutani has forcibly extended her work contract. She wants out, and she has a plan: steal cryostasis chambers from a derelict station and make the nine-year run to Yvaga III, a planet unaffiliated with the company.

Her crew is six young colonists — Rain, her adopted brother Andy (David Jonsson), her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux), Tyler’s pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced), their cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn’s adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu). They commandeer the hauler Corbelan IV and dock at Renaissance, a station split into two modules, Romulus and Remus.

It is a clean premise, and Álvarez, who co-wrote the script with Rodo Sayagues, uses it well. The station is a haunted house in orbit. The colonists are not scientists or soldiers. They are kids who cannot afford to be careful.

Facehuggers in the Fuel Room

The horror escalates fast. Tyler and Bjorn go after cryostasis fuel and trigger a lockdown, releasing dozens of facehuggers. One of them impregnates Navarro. From there the film runs on the franchise’s familiar machinery: an infection, a birth, a hunt through corridors.

Álvarez directs this section with real skill. He understands that the xenomorph is scariest when you cannot see it, and he holds back longer than most modern horror directors would. The film’s first hour is genuinely tense, and the practical creature work — Trevor Newlin in the xenomorph suit — gives the monster weight that CGI often cannot.

The cast is solid. Spaeny carries the film with a quiet, watchful performance; she is a real movie star and the camera knows it. Jonsson is the standout as Andy, an android reprogrammed by Rain’s late father to serve as her surrogate brother. His arc — from loyal sibling to something colder — is the film’s emotional spine, and Jonsson plays both registers without overplaying either.

Rook and the Ian Holm Problem

Then there is Rook. The damaged science officer android on the Romulus is voiced by Daniel Betts, but his face is based on the likeness of the late Ian Holm, who played Ash in Alien (1979). Legacy Effects built an animatronic head and torso from a headscan Holm made during The Lord of the Rings trilogy, enhanced in certain shots by CGI and deepfake AI from Metaphysic, with Betts’ dialogue filtered through software to match Ash’s voice.

This is the film’s most debated choice, and it is worth being precise about why it unsettles. Rook is not a performance. He is a reconstruction, and the film uses him to deliver exposition about the cocoon recovered from the Nostromo wreckage and the experiments that reverse-bioengineered the facehuggers. The character works as a plot device. He does not work as a character.

The uncanny quality is not a bug — it is thematically apt for a franchise about androids who mimic humans. But it is also a reminder that the film’s most striking element is borrowed from a better movie.

The Offspring and the Final Act

The third act introduces the human-xenomorph hybrid credited as the Offspring, played by Romanian former basketball player Robert Bobroczkyi in full body prosthetic makeup from Legacy Effects, with a CGI tail. The creature is genuinely grotesque, and the film’s final twenty minutes are its most visceral.

But the Offspring also exposes the film’s central limitation. Alien: Romulus keeps reaching for images from earlier, better Alien films. The cocoon from the Nostromo. The facehuggers. The chestburster. The android with divided loyalty. The hybrid. Each one lands, but each one also reminds you that you have seen it before, and that the earlier version was doing it first.

The film’s best original idea is its economic one. Rain and her crew are not explorers or scientists. They are indentured workers trying to escape a company that owns their contracts. That is a sharper, more contemporary premise than most Alien films have bothered with, and the film is at its strongest when it leans into it.

It does not lean in often enough.

What Works and What Does Not

Here is the ranking of what Alien: Romulus gets right, from most to least:

1. The facehugger sequence in the fuel room — a model of escalating dread, with the lockdown, the swarm, and Navarro’s impregnation all landing in quick succession.
2. David Jonsson as Andy — the film’s best performance and its only real emotional arc, tracking his shift from Rain’s brother to Weyland-Yutani’s instrument after she upgrades his security access with Rook’s control chip.
3. The production design — the Romulus and Remus modules feel lived-in and dangerous, and the practical xenomorph gives the film a physicality that the franchise’s weaker entries lack.
4. Cailee Spaeny as Rain — a star turn that the script does not quite deserve.
5. The Offspring — effective in the moment, but a retread of a beat the franchise has hit before, and hit harder.
6. Rook — a technical achievement that never becomes a character.

The film’s weaknesses are structural. Álvarez is a gifted director of set pieces, but the script never finds a reason to exist beyond connecting the dots between Alien and Aliens. The film is a bridge, and bridges are not usually the most interesting part of a journey.

The Score

Alien: Romulus is a good Alien movie and a familiar one. It is better than most of the franchise’s recent output, and it is made with obvious care for the original films. But it is also a film that keeps looking backward, and the franchise has been doing that for forty years.

The practical effects are worth the ticket. The cast is worth the ticket. The film’s willingness to be a horror movie first and a franchise entry second is worth the ticket. What is not worth the ticket is the sense that you have seen this exact movie before, made by someone else, with a better script.

It received an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects, and that nomination is deserved. The film grossed $350.9 million worldwide, and that number is also deserved. A sequel is in development, and that is the part worth watching — because the film’s ending leaves the franchise in a more interesting place than it found it.

Alien: Romulus premiered in Los Angeles on August 12, 2024, and was released in the United States by 20th Century Studios on August 16. It runs 119 minutes. It is the seventh installment in the Alien series, and it is set between Alien and Aliens.

The tagline is “In space, no one can hear you.” The film understands that. It just does not have much new to say about it.

Alien Romulus · Cailee Spaeny · Fede Alvarez · horror movies · movie review · xenomorph