Reviewed by Alicia Glass

Spoilers lurk in empty space stations too!

A gang of space colonists trying to scavenge cryo-sleep pods from a derelict space station come across the remnants of monstrous creature experiments the Weyland-Yutani Corporation was conducting there!

Following the current trend plaguing films with a long-running franchise, Alien Romulus is an interleaved sequel, which is to say the film is set timeline-wise between the events of the first Alien blockbuster and the excellent sequel Aliens. Everybody got where we are? Then make sure your futuristic ray-guns are fully charged so you can take on the Xenomorphs in Alien Romulus!

Meet Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her adopted synthetic “brother” Andy (David Johnson), who wants desperately to get off-planet and avoid the mines and further indentured servitude, which is a good deal harder than it sounds. So Rain gets together with other disgruntled colonist folk like herself – Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Navarro (Aileen Wu) – and hatch a wacky plan to swipe some cryogenic sleep pods so they can safely smuggle all of them to a nearby-ish idyllic planet system where they might live freely. This sort of trip normally takes years, hence the cryo-sleep pods. And Rain’s would-be commando pals all think it’s a pretty safe bet that this derelict space station they’ve found would have a bank of still-functioning cryo pods, so it’s off to play scavengers we go!

The space station is indeed derelict, but it’s hardly empty. With the knowledge that the place was owned and operated by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation that’s all we the audience need to know, but our poor scavengers can’t make heads or tails of the clearly scientific experimental rooms, devoid of human presence but again, definitely not empty. And after a few rounds of catch-me-if-you-can with a roomful of facehuggers, our scavengers come across someone, something if you want to be a jerk about it, that might actually be able to help them.

They manage to get the synthetic android Rook, the upper half of him at least, semi-functioning, and that’s all it takes for them to get a crash course in corporate greed and one particular aliens physiology and future potential, for Rook is still very much a Company man. And this means scavenging whatever information they managed to retain from their terrible experiments on the xenomorphs and their facehugger proto-form to get to the Weyland-Yutani Corporation by whatever means necessary, including co-opting and brainwashing fellow synthetic Andy to help him.

The choice to use CGI and animatronics, built by Legacy Effects, and the visage of the late excellent actor Ian Holm for the countenance of the synthetic Rook was an interesting choice. It does keep a certain kind of continuity going in the Alien world and kind of cements where we are in the film timeline more, but I think the same effect could have been obtained with a different actor just as well.

So the facehuggers are loose and the bigger scary-as-hell forms are starting to emerge and attack our scavenger crew, and somehow the pregnant Kay manages to get herself implanted by a facehugger, and the inevitable question of human-xenomorph hybrids begins in earnest – only a few hundred years before when it happened in Alien Resurrection.

The whole human-xeno hybrid storyline, the proto-mashup thing that looks to me like they took an Engineer from Prometheus and gave it Xenomorph bones, how quickly they adopt the need to shoehorn the two mismatched worlds of Prometheus and the Alien films into another Alien movie is entirely aggravating and unnecessary. The atmosphere of traditional Alien-style horror we came to love a very long time ago from Ridley Scott was carrying the movie just fine up to this point of sudden human-xeno pregnancy, traumatic birth, and the emergence (and thankfully, death) of this thing they simply called “the Offspring”. Again, the insistence to try and mashup two very different film worlds is unneeded and more likely to turn fans off both franchises. At least, former Romanian basketball player Robert Bobroczkyi and his more-than-7-foot-natural-height played the part of the Offspring, with only the tail being CGI’d, lending some vague manner of brief believability to the creature.

It’s not as though the Alien films actually need a whole lot in the way of humans we care about, especially if there’s a pack of Xenomorphs scrambling around the station, or a fleet of green-slimed eggs that most definitely don’t have chocolate inside waiting to jump-scare the audience into oblivion. But if you’re going to have at least half the story be about the humans and their plight first, it would be better to give them something to make them less generic than “red-shirt A”, to try and give us the audience a reason to groan in sympathy when a chestburster is born, instead of cheering for the baby xeno to go feast already! And to be fair, the first three acts of the film are quite good, in the OG Scott manner of silence-space-screaming horror that is now a genre standard. There is an almost long-standing non-tradition of being dissatisfied with the endings to the latter Alien movies anyway.

Find out what happened to our scavengers and see if Rook takes all the pawns in Alien Romulus, in theaters now!