Alien: Romulus (2024)
Romulus is a nice 'back-to-basics' approach to the franchise that has proven successful compared to more derivative attempts to expand on franchises, which we saw in Jurassic World or Star Wars: The Force Awakens as opposed to both of their sequel movies. And in that regard, I do really think Romulus is a nice take on the franchise while also building up the world of the 2100's.
That said, it is admittedly just Alien-meets-Prometheus with the CGI budget and effects of a modern-day movie. The movie does feel a lot more tense being that these are a bunch of teenagers with absolutely no proper equipment, unlike the space marines of Aliens or the exploration teams of Prometheus and Covenant. It honestly feels very much unfair on the side of our protagonists, in the same vein of how the original salvage crew of the Nostromo was.
The movie does start off with a relatively long sequence of introducing us to the teenagers that are about to be put through hell, people in the hellscape work colony of planet LV-410. We start off with Rain Carradine, who should have worked off her duty to the company but just gets extended in what's essentially enforced slavery. She also has an adopted brother, a malfunctioning android called Andy, which the movie shows a lot of scenes of the two of them behaving like a family. The movie also makes Andy very lovable, treating him as essentially someone on the autism spectrum. They go to meet a bunch of other teenagers ready to escape -- her ex boyfriend Tyler, Tyler's pregnant sister Kay, and their cousins Bjorn and Navarro. It's clear at this point that Bjorn is a piece of shit that doesn't care much for androids, which drives a fair chunk of the movie's interpersonal plot.
Just like Alien was, this movie starts off slow as we get introduced to the world around our main characters. It's a nice slow burn, even if I do admit that I cared more about the world these guys are living in as opposed to the actual characters themselves.
They commandeer a hauler to reach an abandoned Weyland-Yutani station -- twin installments called Romulus and Remus, intending to steal cryostasis pods so they can escape the hell of the slave-camp world. While Rain is all for getting her android brother out with her, but the rest of the group are aligned in basically abandoning Andy once they've made use of his hacking capabilities in the station.
Of course, the station was abandoned because it was experimenting with xenomorphs, and things get progressively creepier as our little teenage salvage team go deeper and deeper into the station and find signs that it wasn't abandoned willingly. The ominous prologue scene of the movie tell us that they apparently recovered the body of the Alien from Alien, and experimented on it, apparently going far enough as to get it to reproduce and create Facehuggers. These Facehuggers were the ones that were initially released, leading to a very tense locked-room scenario as the Facehuggers skitter around like spiders and move through the water unseen.
In panic, Rain pulls off a control chip from the Romulus's damaged (and insane) android, Rook. This allows Andy to help the group get free from the Facehuggers, but he goes fully robotic, losing a lot of his previous charm... and his allegiance shifts to Rook and Weyland-Yutani. During this sequence, Navarro gets attacked and impregnated by a Facehugger, and it is quite heartbreaking to see the family not accepting 'no, she's a lost cause' as an answer.
Rook, who's driven slightly mad by isolation, damage and desperation, gives some exposition about where the original Alien cocoon came from, as well as the experimentations that happened. Rook also reveals that some of the Facehuggers did make it into adulthood, and it's the acidic blood from these xenomorphs that blew up Remus. As all of this is going on, in some really nice space scenes, Romulus's orbit is slowly decaying as it is about to slam onto the Saturn-like planetary rings of LV-410, which is a nice visual treat.
The cowardly Bjorn attempts to escape with Navarro and Kay, but the larva within Navarro bursts out of her chest in a very brutal sequence. This causes the teenagers' ship to crash into Romulus and accelerate the station's descent into the LV-410 rings, which I can best describe as an airplane descending slowly before an inevitable crash. The alien from Navarro begins to wreak a bit of havoc, cocooning itself and molting into a larger form. The grief-stricken Navarro attacks it, only to die when a spray of acidic blood melts his face off.
The pregnant Kay manages to escape the crash site and run all the way to a door where Rain, Tyler and Andy are waiting... but Andy, driven to cold logic by the chip, notes that the xenomorph is actually playing and using her as bait. Despite Tyler and Rain's protests, Andy coldly refuses to open the door, and the xenomorph abducts Kay.
Rook (and via him, Andy) gives an ultimatum that's tied to a theme that was in the original Alien -- corporate greed at all costs. They want our heroes to retrieve a fluid called Z-01 from the Facehuggers, which would allow them to genetically alter humans to live and thrive in space. Faced with no other choice, Rain and Tyler have to play along. They are armed with guns now, but they are also untrained, and shooting the hull of the space station risks decompression.
The newly born xenomorph has discovered the xenomorph nest with many other adults, and in an attempt to protect the others, Tyler sacrifices himself as bait. Kay also almost dies from her injuries, but Andy gives her a dose of the Z-01 fluid to allow her to heal rapidly. Andy himself is also incapacitated, but Rain refuses to give up on him -- eventually restoring the chip and returning him back to his original personality.
During the process of rescue, the Romulus continues to fall apart and this leads to a rather fun (if nonsensical) sequence of acid blood floating around while Rain and xenomorphs try to navigate in zero gravity. Rain turns into a bit of a deadshot here, able to shoot all the xenomorphs while they flounder around in zero-g. It's probably an action scene that takes me out of my immersion a bit, if we're being honest.
As they escape Romulus while it is destroyed, we get one final action scene as, just like Prometheus, we get some pregnancy-inspired horror as Kay gives birth. The Z-01 mutates her fetus into a monstrous human-xenomorph hybrid that is called the Offspring. The Offspring honestly looks way more human than xeno, looking more like a malformed human from Dark Souls or something. Having a human face allows it to look particularly creepy when it starts making expressions. Ultimately, after a bit of a tense sequence, Rain and Andy distract it long enough before opening the bay doors and dropping the Offspring into the rings of LV-410. The movie ends with the two of them entering cryostasis as they go on their little journey to Yvaga III as planned.
Ultimately? Again, it's a good standalone movie, but I don't really think it does anything particularly new. It's quite derivative and as neat as it is to see a brand-new monster design, I did feel like we could've had... more? It is thrilling, though, so I can't fault the movie on that end.
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