One hallmark of the xenomorph—the titular alien of the Alien films—is its adaptability: No matter how hostile the environment, the monster finds a way to endure. So, too, have the Alien movies evolved since the first entry’s release, in 1979. The franchise has successfully spanned both decades and genres, offering viewers a haunted-house flick, a full-blown action-adventure film, and prison-break thrillers. They are always “horror” films, in that it would be horrible to be on a spaceship with the alien, yet a perverse charge arises from watching an unsuspecting character’s face get a little too close to something that will inevitably put a tentacle down their throat. Most of the films share a similar formula, but for all the familiar beats, their goopy scares still delight and disgust—a reaction rooted, perhaps, in their endlessly reinvented villain.
Alien: Romulus, the latest installment, retreads some of this territory. Billed as an “interquel,” set between the events of the original Alien and its sequel Aliens, the film plays more as a best-of compilation than a new vision. Like the crew of the Nostromo from Alien, the group in Alien: Romulus consists of working-class misfits, grunts on a far-off base who have lost their family members to mining accidents or disease. Romulus focuses on Rain (played by Cailee Spaeny, coming off star turns in both Civil War and Priscilla), an orphaned worker with no one other than Andy (Industry’s David Jonsson), an old android her father programmed, to look out for her. They play parents to each other: Rain tries to protect Andy from being beaten or teased, and he supplements their dreary existence with corny dad jokes. Although she’s clocked more than enough hours to get a transfer to a planet with better conditions, Weyland-Yutani, the company she works for, denies her request.
Luckily for Rain, she runs into an old group of friends on their shared base: the hunky Tyler (Archie Renaux); his newly pregnant sister, Kay (Isabela Merced); the foul-mouthed Bjorn (Spike Fearn); and his girlfriend, Navarro (Aileen Wu). This somewhat inexplicable crew (a few have Cockney accents) has discovered a decommissioned ship hovering above the atmosphere, and if the friends want to get off-planet without company approval, all they have to do is pinch some equipment. These characters, like those in the original films, have no special skills: They’re the kids of miners with more shared annoyances than intimacies, and the awkward, snappy rapport of high schoolers in the same detention group. Although the murderous alien is the films’ ostensible villain, Weyland-Yutani—an omnipresent monolith that’s sort of like if Tesla bought Netflix and was also the hospital—looms large over Alien’s grubby dystopia. These are bored, unmotivated workers exploited long before they’re fighting for their life—and when given the chance to save them, the company always chooses the bottom line over humanity.
At times, Alien: Romulus comes off like a lazy retread for viewers who soured on Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, the more existential prequels from Ridley Scott, the original director. (The new movie goes so far as to revive an old character—played by an actor now dead—via CGI, in a bit of technologically iffy fan service.) But as the first hour meanders toward the inevitable outcome of something going wrong, the movie finds another level through what the xenomorph has come to represent. It’s not only that the xenomorph attacks anything in its sight, but that everyone in its sight is out of luck. The world in the Alien films has tumbled into a disarray far past what a labor union might solve. The corporation won; the workers live on a planet with no sunlight, where they rarely get a day off, and if they try to escape, they will likely be murdered by what lurks in space.
That powerlessness also manifests in matters of biology: Any person, of any gender, can fall victim to the facehugger, the nascent form of the xenomorph that impregnates its targets by wrapping its body around their face and inserting an egg. We’ve seen baby xenomorphs burst out of chests, but also backs; there’s little to no control over this phenomenon, and only once the victim starts feeling spacesick do they realize what’s happening. That the alien is virtually indestructible and ever adapting to new threats on its existence is why Weyland-Yutani retains interest in the specimen, and why it’s so willing to sacrifice its employees. This fealty to corporate progress could, in theory, be a bummer—but the Alien films have always managed to be a pretty good time. For audiences, a collective catharsis comes from the relative sameness of each film—that no matter the traumatic backstories of or relations among these characters, they’ll all be sprinting from the same predator.
Because when the characters fail to outsmart the alien, they fail in similar ways: by refusing to quarantine a sick crew member, wandering into one wet corridor too many, peering into holes and eggs and oozing slits alike. Yet the humans do tend to come out on top, through grit and luck and animalistic instinct. To beat the alien, the sole survivor has to start thinking like one. Eventually, the alien almost feels like an underdog—it may represent some predatory evil, but it’s also kind of a loser, defeated often by a single person in a stroke of spontaneity. The Alien films have always touched on heady, pessimistic visions of a future overrun by capitalism and genetic experimentation, but they’re also movies about a human beating a monster—shooting it, setting it on fire, throwing it out of an air-locked door into the void of space.
To that end, it’s fun to watch Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez devise new obstacles for the series’ multi-limbed creatures to try out. Álvarez is perhaps best known for the Don’t Breathe films, about thieves who break into the house of a violent blind man with a honed sense of hearing, and the director is at his strongest when building out the soundscape of futuristic sites of decay. Even the sound of a computer rebooting has an element of jump scare in his hands. Alien: Romulus really shines when it plays like a straightforward Alien movie—and doesn’t pander to the demands of franchisable intellectual property. There’s yucky pleasure to be had in watching these young people flounder, all while the alien molts through multiple hostile futures, waiting to be reborn.