Considering how vast and detailed the dingy setting is, it feels like a missed opportunity that the creatures don’t wreak havoc on the colony itself. But Alien: Romulus lives up to the promise as a spooky space haunted house movie, packed with clever twists, breathtaking suspense, and popcorn-dropping scares. By relying on live-action effects rather than digital ones, Alvarez makes the aliens more nightmarish than ever. He’s wise to keep them hidden most of the time, expertly ratcheting up the tension with muffled metallic sounds and glimpses of silhouette, but whenever a monster emerges from the shadows, he makes unsettling use of the series’ trademark imagery of nasty slime and squishy births.
In fact, my main complaint about Alien: Romulus is that there aren’t enough aliens. Alvarez is so determined to pay homage to some of the franchise’s previous films that he can’t help but toss in concepts and plot threads from throughout the series, not the least of which is the iconic Xenomorph, which is somewhat underused. It’s also easy to forget which characters are still alive, which spaceships they’re on, and what the rules are regarding room temperature and artificial gravity. The stripped-back simplicity of Scott’s first Alien film has yet to be matched by any of its successors, Scott or not.
But Alien: Romulus trumps most of its competitors: Though it’s over-inflated in a few areas and isn’t a “perfect organism,” to borrow a phrase used by Ian Holm’s android character in Alien, it’s closer to perfection than any film in the series since 1986’s Alien.
★★★★☆
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