Fede Álvarez has made the most frightening Alien film in decades by rebuilding the first two, piece by piece. It is expertly done and we jumped often. We also spent much of it recognising things, which is not the same as being surprised.
Fede Álvarez has made two films about people shut in a building with something that wants them dead, Evil Dead (2013) and Don’t Breathe (2016), and he treats Alien as the same job on a bigger set. Alien: Romulus sits between Ridley Scott’s 1979 film and James Cameron’s 1986 sequel and borrows from both without apology. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) mines for the company on a colony where the sun never rises; her adopted brother Andy (David Jonsson) is a second-hand Weyland-Yutani synthetic who tells bad jokes because her father asked him to. With four others they steal a ride to a derelict station in orbit, which holds the cryo pods they need for a long trip to daylight, and which is not empty. It frightened us properly more than once, and about a third of it we had seen before.
The station is the film’s best asset. Naaman Marshall builds it from the same parts as the ship in the first film: rubber keys, cathode-ray monitors, hoses that hiss, corridors slatted like a ribcage. Galo Olivares lights the colony in sodium orange through rain and the station in the sick greens and ambers of an old computer screen, so the dark in the corners is never quite black. Carlos Rosario puts the crew in jumpsuits gone thin at the knees. The creatures are mostly performers in suits and puppets on wires, Trevor Newlin among them, and Álvarez keeps them in shadow where they belong.
The set pieces work. There is a corridor full of dormant facehuggers and a temperature reading that will not stop climbing, and there is a stretch with the gravity off, a flock of the things loose, and acid blood hanging in the air in globes. We were frightened in the plain physical way: our shoulders were up for what felt like ten minutes and we only noticed when they came down. Jake Roberts cuts these sequences long enough for dread to gather and short enough that nobody stands about explaining. The middle hour is as tight as anything the series has managed since 1986.
Jonsson is the reason to see it. Andy is slow, courteous and apologetic, a machine built to be kind, and the story gives him a reason to change that we will leave vague. He plays the change in his shoulders and his diction, and the film’s one real question is which version of him deserves to get off the station. Spaeny is small, watchful and unfussy, and she does panic well, which counts for more here than heroics. Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn and Aileen Wu fill the rest of the crew as Tyler, Kay, Bjorn and Navarro. Each is given one trait and one job, and we had the running order worked out before the ship docked.
Then there is the borrowing. Álvarez and his co-writer Rodo Sayagues have laid the plot along the first film’s beats, in the first film’s order, with a late swerve into Cameron’s, and they seem to have decided this will comfort us. Often it did. A face from the 1979 film is rebuilt by computer and its mouth does not quite keep time with its words, which unsettled us more than any creature did. Later a character says the most quoted line in the series, word for word, in a situation where nobody would, and we winced, then laughed, and the film lost us for five minutes. Benjamin Wallfisch’s score has the same habit, its own low pulse giving way again and again to Jerry Goldsmith’s strings from 1979.
The last twenty minutes take a turn we will not describe. It is the one stretch where the film stops quoting and tries something of its own, and it arrives after the point where the film seemed to be finished. We admired the nerve and looked at our watch.
Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017) asked large questions and could not answer them. Romulus asks none and is the happier for it. It is also the first film in the series with nothing to add to the others, and it has decided that a good scare is enough. See it in a cinema if you can, with the sound up so the hisses count. At home it is still a good scare and a rather better quiz. It runs 119 minutes and carries a 15.
