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Film: Alien: Romulus
Format: Streaming video from Disney Plus on various players.

In the world of science fiction, there are few film franchises that are more storied than the Alien franchise. The reality, though, is that this is based almost entirely on the first two movies, Alien and Aliens. Those two movies are extremely highly rated, and with good reason. The other films in the series have been okay (Prometheus, Alien: Covenant), disappointing (Alien³, Alien Resurrection), or actively dumb (both Alien vs. Predator movies). Despite this, I always go into each film in the franchise with expectations. And so it was with Alien: Romulus.

I’m glad I did, because this is a real return to form for the franchise. I didn’t realize it until I watched this, but what has been lacking from the Alien films in general since 1986 is fear. The first two movies have genuine terror moments in them, and since that time, the franchise has relied more on jump scares and horror moments that simply don’t work. Alien: Romulus is scary, and that’s what I’ve been looking for.

In many ways, Romulus is a sequel to the original Alien. If the films are watched in chronological order rather than release order, Romulus comes between Alien and Aliens. We’re also not going to pretend that Weyland-Yutani is anything other than a terrible company. This is established in the previous films, of course, but here we’re going to see this on a much larger level. Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) works on a W-Y colony world as a farmer, and has finally put in enough time to leave and go to a different colony world. But because Weyland-Yutani is made of evil, her contract has been extended, and rather than farming, she is going to be put in the mines, a virtual death sentence with accidents and viral outbreaks.

Desperate, Rain and her malfunctioning synthetic “brother” Andy (David Jonsson) team up with a group to try to get off-planet. This group includes Rain’s ex Tyler (Archie Renaux), Tyler’s sister Kay (Isabella Merced), their cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn’s adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu). The group has found evidence of an abandoned ship in orbit around their planet. Hoping that it will have functioning cryogenics, the group commandeers a ship, bringing along Andy because he will likely have the ability to communicate with the ship’s operating system.

It turns out that it’s not a ship but a derelict station, and since this is an Alien movie, it’s not hard to figure out why it’s derelict. As the group attempts to find the equipment that they need to travel for nine years in cryosleep, they inadvertently release a horde of facehuggers and the fun truly begins. They’re now going to be directly pursued by xenomorphs, and at the same time, they need to deal with the fact that the station is on a direct intercept course for the planet’s rings, which will abrade the ship and anything on it like 30 grit sandpaper.

Essentially, Alien: Romulus has everything you might want in a franchise film. There are genuinely good scares here, as there should be for the franchise. We’ve got an enemy that we already are familiar with in the xenomorphs, and we’re going to have them in numbers as we did in Aliens. We’ve also got the pressure of a time limit—even if everyone manages to avoid the xenomorphs (and you know they won’t), they have to be off the ship soon or they’ll be ground down into paste.

There are also some clear throwbacks to the earlier, better films. Where Prometheus opted for more modern film technology, giving us a film that took place 30+ years before Alien with technology that looks 100 years after, Romulus has that dirty, chunky look that the original film did. The computers look old, and everything has large, tactile buttons. The space station feels lived in, which feels accurate. There’s also a character who is a throwback to an earlier franchise cast member. I won’t spoil the surprise.

There’s a bit of fan service here, too. Lines like “Get away from her, you bitch!” are going to show up at times, and there will be shots that are clear homages to iconic moments from the earlier films.

There’s also some new horror happening here. There’s a great existential moment when we learn what Weyland-Yutani was really trying to do—accelerate human evolution—and there are going to be some grave consequences of this, resulting in what might be the most disturbing creature from the entire series.

This was good. It’s exactly what the franchise needed. It’s not a froofy, intellectal exercise the way Prometheus wanted to be, and it’s not focused on cheap scares and cheaper theatrics. No, this is ther eal deal, what a movie like this should look like.

Why to watch Alien: Romulus: This is what the whole franchise should be like.
Why not to watch: It's disappointing how substandard a lot of Alien films really are.