We’re going back to the future in all its gory.
I mean glory. Well, both.
Director/co-writer Fede Alvarez’s “Alien: Romulus” is a rousing and blood-spattered slice of space horror that works as a standalone story while echoing many of the elements of the two classics that kicked off the franchise and have never been topped, not even close: Ridley Scott’s “Alien” (1979) and James Cameron’s “Aliens” (1986).
With “Romulus” taking place in the year 2142, squarely between the events of “Alien” and “Aliens,” the talented Álvarez and his team have pulled off an impressive feat of world-building that pays homage to the production design and creature effects of the first two movies. The result is a film that has a cool and retro and kind of 1980s vision of the future that feels authentic to the timeline.
“Alien: Romulus” opens on Jackson’s Star, a grimy and unforgiving mining colony with zero daylight and about the same level of hope for its inhabitants, who have been born into a life of hard labor, with disease lurking everywhere. Cailee Spaeny’s Rain is a 25-year-old independent spirit who has lost her parents and is accompanied everywhere by her “brother” Andy (David Jonsson), a synthetic who was programmed by her father to look after her and also to tell a steady stream of “Dad jokes.” (The somewhat hapless Andy is supposed to be a big brother, but Rain is looking after him most of the time.) Desperate for a way off the colony, Rain agrees to join a group of young miners on a mission that will take them to a decommissioned space station called the Renaissance, with the ultimate goal of escaping Jackson’s Star forever.
We don’t get much more character exposition here than you’d find in a standard slasher movie. Instead of climbing into a truck and heading for a cabin by the lake, this gang boards the Corbelan IV, an industrial ship that’s like an upgraded version of the Nostromo from “Alien,” and head off to space. In addition to Rain and Andy, the crew includes:
— Tyler (Archie Renaux), a classic antihero type who is Rain’s ex-boyfriend.
— Kay (Isabela Merced), Tyler’s sister, who is carrying a secret.
— Bjorn (Spike Fearn), who hates synthetics and is that guy in horror films who is always screwing around and being a jerk.
— Navarro (Aileen Wu), the tech-savvy pilot of the ship.
Archie Renaux (left) and Cailee Spaeny in “Alien: Romulus.”
With the moody score by Benjamin Wallfisch and the space-noir cinematography by Galo Olivares helping to establish the ominous tone, “Alien: Romulus” has a tension-inducing slow build once the crew docks at the Renaissance, which is comprised of two modules: Romulus and Remus. As the crew moves about, we see a number of foreboding signs and callbacks, alerting us to the hell they’re about to experience before they see it coming. (There’s also a bold return to a certain key element from the first film — a move that is jarring and weird and not entirely effective at first, but eventually plays well.)
For much of the second act, “Alien: Romulus” is basically a slasher film in space, with some familiar and terrifying extraterrestrial creatures relentlessly hunting down the crew, leading to a number of fantastically grotesque sequences — a face hug here, a chest burst there, that kind of thing. With the expansive sets and the reliance on practical effects whenever possible, the bloodshed and the horror are visceral. Rarely does it feel as if the characters are in front of a green screen, staring at a tennis ball, with the effects to be filled in later.
Some of the characters are so thinly drawn, there’s not a lot of emotional investment in their fates. It’s actually the synthetic Andy who experiences the biggest transformation (we’ll just leave it at that), which gives David Jonsson the opportunity to play more emotional notes than just about anyone else, and it’s a brilliant performance. Cailee Spaeny does fine work as Rain, though she looks like she’s in danger of toppling over when she wields a Pulse Rifle and is occasionally overshadowed by all the bloody chaos.
“Alien: Romulus” sometimes plays like little more than a greatest hits mashup of the first two films, but that’s enough to carry the day.