Alien: Romulus (2024)

Let me be straight with you: Alien: Romulus had me gripped for most of its runtime, and then it threw it all away in the final act. That's the kind of ending that lingers, and not in the good way. You walk out the door replaying what went wrong rather than buzzing about what went right, which is a shame, because plenty went right.

For the first two thirds or so, this is a genuinely effective piece of horror filmmaking. The claustrophobia is real. The tension is earned. There's a tactile nastiness to the environments, all rusted corridors, failing systems and dark corners that the camera refuses to illuminate until the last possible moment. If you've been missing that particular flavour of dread that the best entries in this franchise do so well, there are long stretches here that scratch that itch properly. I was leaning forward in my seat. I was buying into it.

The problem is that "buying into it" requires the film to hold up its end of the bargain, and Romulus starts breaking the deal almost from the off in terms of originality. It leans very heavily on Aliens, not just in tone but in structure, and while there's nothing wrong with drawing inspiration from one of the greatest action horror films ever made, there's a difference between inspiration and imitation. Too often here it feels like the latter. You can feel the mechanics of older, better films clicking into place, and that predictability undercuts the suspense even as the film is genuinely trying to generate it.

The characters don't help. They're functional rather than compelling. You're rooting for them to survive in the way you root for anyone in peril, but I couldn't tell you much about who they are beyond their roles in the plot. Compare that to Aliens, where you could write paragraphs about any one of the marines, and you start to feel the gap. When the horror lands here, it's almost in spite of the character work rather than because of it.

And then there's the ending. I won't spell it out for anyone who hasn't seen it, but the introduction of a xenomorph-human hybrid in the final act is a choice I found genuinely baffling. It feels tacked on, a bid for spectacle that the film hadn't earned and didn't need. Worse, it pokes holes in established lore in ways that are hard to ignore once you've noticed them. The franchise has always been at its most frightening when the xenomorphs are kept close to their original design. There's a reason those creatures still work after all these years. Fiddling with that formula in the way Romulus does here doesn't feel bold. It feels like a miscalculation. I was reminded of how Futureworld similarly stumbled when it reached too far beyond what had made its predecessor unsettling, trading creeping dread for a concept that didn't quite land.

None of this makes Alien: Romulus a bad film, exactly. It's competent and often more than that. The craft on display is solid, the atmosphere holds up for long enough that fans of the franchise will find things to enjoy, and there are individual sequences that remind you why this universe still has the power to unsettle. But it's a film that seems frightened of doing anything genuinely new, and when it finally does swing for something unexpected, it swings in completely the wrong direction.

Three stars. Worth a watch for the atmosphere and the tension it manages to generate before the wheels come off. Just be prepared for that ending to take the edge off whatever goodwill it builds.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2024  | Watched: 2025-04-10

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Disney Plus
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Buy: Apple TV Store · Rakuten TV · Amazon Video · Google Play Movies
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

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Stream: Hulu
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Buy: Amazon Video · Apple TV Store · Google Play Movies · YouTube
Physical: Amazon US

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