Alien: Romulus

So says Ripley in Alien³, which was released in 1992 and seemed, at the time, to be the final entry in Ridley Scott’s seminal sci-fi franchise. The arrival of Alien: Romulus in theaters today might have fans of this enduring, ever-evolving saga feeling the same way. But while purists will argue that none of the later entries have come close to matching either the 1979 original or 1986’s Aliens, the fact that the franchise refuses to die is nothing if not apropos of the aggressive life form at its center.

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How viewers react to Alien: Romulus will partly depend on how they responded to Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). Fede Álvarez, late of Don’t Breathe and Evil Dead, ditches the grand ambitions and lore-heavy philosophizing in favor of a return to the industrial, working-class vibe of the first film. This is a good thing. The eponymous creature has been described throughout the series as a “perfect organism,” and while Romulus has its flaws — namely the same overreliance on fan service and callbacks that has come to define franchise fare in recent years — its barebones approach makes for a gritty return to form.

Its barebones approach makes for a gritty return to form.

In some ways, it evokes the spirit of the original even more overtly than Scott’s two prequels, which isn’t a knock on those installments so much as it is a testament to Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues’ clear reverence for the source material. They know they’ve been entrusted with something precious and treat it with all the care of a rare specimen in a lab.

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The story begins on an oppressive mining colony run by Weyland-Yutani, the soulless megacorp that has long been this world’s secondary antagonist. Located 65 light years from Earth, Jackson’s Star is shrouded by so much ash and cloud cover that it receives no direct sunlight. Little surprise, then, that Rain (Cailee Spaeny) wants to get out of her endless contract and leave — even if it means going along with her friends’ ill-advised plan to use five cryopods in a derelict Wey-Yu vessel hovering above the colony. One needn’t be an Alien devotee to know that there’s more aboard the spacecraft than abandoned tech.

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The ensemble’s downtrodden, owe-my-soul-to-the-company-store plight makes them easy to root for, especially Rain’s “brother” Andy: a synthetic (he prefers the term “artificial person”) whose halted manner of speech only makes the endless stream of dad jokes he’s programmed with more endearing. That isn’t all he was programmed with, however, and vacillating from one directive to another makes him a compelling wildcard.

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David Jonsson is exceptional in the role, complementing Spaeny’s energy and making their characters feel like two halves of the same whole even and especially when we aren’t sure to whom his ultimate allegiance lies.

A few things are expected — nay, guaranteed — in an Alien movie.

A few things are expected — nay, guaranteed — in an Alien movie. Chief among them is a heroine modeled after Sigourney Weaver’s iconic Ellen Ripley, who anchored the first four films before signing off for good. Noomi Rapace and Katherine Waterston’s one-off protagonists weren’t on the same level — who is? — but let it not be said that they weren’t worthy successors. Ditto Rain, ably acted by Spaeny and giving the impression that we might not have seen the last of her. Romulus is technically an “interquel” set between Alien and Aliens, leaving space for it to branch off on its own like a newly discovered genus.

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Not that there’s much new here. Romulus has the same skeleton as its predecessors, but Álvarez fleshes it out with blood and guts so adroitly that it hardly matters. He does so largely via practical effects, including the xenomorphs themselves, which will come as welcome news to anyone who’s grown weary of CGI and green screens. What is new under this shrouded sun is a xenomorph variant that violently emerges in the third act and is as gloriously gnarly as any other creature birthed by the franchise. And that might be the highest praise one can bestow upon an Alien movie.