Alien: Romulus Review

Fede Alvarez knows exactly what he is making, and for long stretches that discipline is the whole pleasure. The station is built rather than rendered, the corridors are narrow and wet, and the sequence in the flooded facehugger lab is the tensest twenty minutes the franchise has produced in decades. Cailee Spaeny plays Rain as tired instead of heroic. David Jonsson gets the one genuinely new idea in the film, an android whose personality shifts when his directives do, and he plays it with real sadness.

The photography is dark in the good way, lit by helmet lamps and emergency strobes, and most of the creature work is practical. The problem is that the picture is assembled from parts other Alien movies already used. Beats arrive in a familiar order, famous lines are handed to new mouths, and one resurrected face from the original crew splits critics badly, since the effect calls attention to itself at the exact moment the story needs a viewer inside it.

The first act takes too long to leave the mining colony and the ensemble outside the two leads is thin. What lands is craft. Alvarez stages terror in confined space better than anyone the series has hired since 1986, and the scares are earned even when the frame around them is borrowed.