Alien: Romulus (2024)★ 7.3/10

-Great idea to make a crossover between High School Musical and Alien, what could go wrong?

*The crossover:

The story reportedly takes place in-between “Alien” and “Aliens”, specifically, 20 years after the events of the first film. The film opens in 2142 on the perpetually dark planet known as LV-410, a mining colony, film’s protagonist, Rain Carradine, an orphaned colonist and miner discovers to her dismay that her work contract has been deliberately extended by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. During her sleeping cycle, she dreams of living on a beautiful planet that is filled with clean air and water, rich with vegetation. Realizing that she is never going to get off this planet through legal means, she is determined to do it illegally.


Together, with her surrogate brother, Andy, a malfunctioning android reprogrammed by her late father, they pay a visit to see some of her old friends, her ex-boyfriend Tyler, his pregnant sister Kay, their cousin Bjorn, and Bjorn’s adopted sister Navarro. Like Rain, all of them have lost their parents from cancer, the result of working in the mines and are determined not to end up like them. The gang come up with a plan: There is an orbiting Weyland-Yutani space station called the Renaissance, an abandoned facility that is split into two modules; Romulus and Remus. They will leave their hell-hole of a planet, board a ship, head over to the space station, recover the remaining fuel and other supplies they will need to survive their multi-year trip to Yvaga III, a supposedly idyllic planet that is unaffiliated with Weyland-Yutani. Only there is one problem, the space station is on a decaying orbit which is set to collide with LV-410’s planetary rings and they have only hours to accomplish their goal.


What happens after is a series of tense and suspenseful moments that kept me engaged such as when the group encounters a heavily damaged android named Rook who looks suspiciously exactly like the android Ash from the first Alien movie (with a CGI rendition of the late Ian Holm) where Rain upgrades Andy’s security access with a control chip taken out of Rook in an attempt to properly control the station, but this advantage comes at a price: this reprogramming shifts Andy’s loyalty from Rain to Weyland-Yutani. And another highlight is when Rain and Andy are surrounded by xenomorphs and Rain disables the station’s gravity, while allowing her to shoot them without their acidic blood from burning down the hull as she and Andy cleverly make their escape from the Romulus section of the station. A common theme throughout this series is characters are repeatedly manipulated and endangered by the unscrupulous megacorporation Weyland-Yutani Corp, which seeks to profit from the aliens and that is certainly present in this movie.


The two British teenage actors, Archie Renaux (Tyler) and Spike Fearn (Bjorn) with cockney accents were terrible, I couldn’t understand a damn word they were saying! It was like they were talking with food stuffed in their mouths. Normally, I don’t have a problem understanding British actors with cockney accents but these two dreadful actors really challenged my ears, as well as my patience. In fact, the second time around I saw this movie I had to turn on the captions to make it a more pleasant viewing experience. And that’s the thing: When one of your main protagonists requires them to speak a lot of dialogue and you as the viewer are having great difficulty in understanding them, you have a problem.


On the other hand, Cailee Spaeny as Rain Carradine is engaging as the film’s protagonist, she’s no Ripley but she’s smart, pragmatic, and likable enough for you to care about her. However the real star of this movie is David Jonsson as Andy, the android. He does an excellent job of switching in-between good and bad android with subtle facial expressions, this guy is going to be a star. You really care for Rain and Andy and hope they will make it alive to the very end.


Directed by Uruguayan director, Fede Alvarez, who directed such hits as the “Evil Dead” remake and “Don’t Breathe” does an excellent job of creating a creepy and spooky look of the space station Renaissance and there is a lot of really good world-building on the planet LV-410 where we get to see the movie from a civilian perspective. The film is gorgeous to look at and consists of mostly practical special effects, and the cinematography is great. The soundtrack by Benjamin Wallfisch is very appropriate and feels like a worthy continuation of the late-great Jerry Goldsmith’s Alien soundtrack. The first hour is the best part of the movie but after that, it turns into complete schlock. It attempts to take the best elements of the first two alien movies by turning it into a roller coaster ride but just when you think the ride is over, it goes on and on and on. By the time it rolls to credits, you feel exhausted.


If you're a fan of the Alien movies, you will like it but if you're not a fan, wait until it comes out on DVD or streaming service.

Quite scary

A opressão sonora que senti nesse filme foi de apertar o coração, e de arregalar os olhos afim de compreender melhor o que rolava diante de tanta escuridão. Trabalho de som muitíssimo bom. Trama tensa e aflitiva como o tema deve oferecer. Uma maravilhosa experiência sensorial para se ter no cinema, o que potencializa todos os aspectos. Creio que se tivesse visto na TV, em casa, não teria o mesmo resultado. No mais, algumas decisões um tanto previsíveis, mas ok.

Me gustó la dirección. El efecto de la gravedad en los momentos exactos está de 10. Me agradó que nuevamente la protagonista sea una mujer, donde vemos que más allá del instinto de supervivencia, su inteligencia se hace presente en cada suceso.

Esta película es inquietante y completamente interesante. Nos sumerge en su atmósfera, permitiéndonos temer por el bienestar de los personajes. Los sonidos, la colonización, las criaturas... Esta entrega de Alien está a otro nivel.

Una porqueria esta pagina

Entretenida con tufillo a la original.

Fede Álvarez vuelve a tomar una franquicia en declive donde ni su propio creador había podido generar algo interesante, para revivirla, si bien sin la genialidad del material de origen, si con mucha dignidad y suficiente identidad como para mantener el interés para una nueva saga de la franquicia.

Tiene muchos aciertos. Prestaron mucha atención al detalle con los efectos prácticos. Llenaron la fotografía de sombras y aprovecharon los espacios cerrador para generar la misma claustrofobia que en las primeras entregas. Usaron todas las ideas de las peliculas anteriores y las unieron de forma coherente con una trama mucho más simple y con personajes aún más relacionables. Este último es su mayor logro.