There have been a pile of Alien movies over the past 45 years, from crossovers with Predator to the Prometheus spinoffs and an upcoming TV show. Still, it's impossible not to compare any new installment to 1986's Aliens — a perfect film that remains a high-water mark for both sci-fi and sequels that overshadow the originals.
With that mighty legacy to deal with, Alien: Romulus succeeds on every level, latching onto viewers' faces and implanting us with a creepy good time.
Leaning hard into the horror elements of the franchise with Evil Dead director Fede Álvarez at the helm, Romulus begins a bit like Star Wars' similarly successful recent chapter in Andor, with a story of oppressed labourers toiling under the tight control of a shadowy bureaucracy on a grim alien planet where they have never seen sunlight.
Rain (Cailee Spaeny, who is having a huge recent run between this, Civil War and Priscilla) and her kindly synthetic sibling Andy (David Jonsson) team up with some fellow labourers and attempt to escape their circumstances by stealing some cryosleep pods from a wrecked spaceship and heading to a more hospitable planet. Of course, this is an Alien movie, so you can probably guess why the ruined spaceship was abandoned in the first place.
Romulus has beautiful space scenes, nasty-ass monster design, a claustrophobic vibe within the bleakly utilitarian spaceship, and canny social commentary that touches on class struggle, corporate greed, and fears about rapidly upgrading AI. But even better than Romulus's brains is its brawn, as this is really all about the primal thrill of watching Rain survive one close call after another, as she constantly defies death while evading monsters that keep ramping up in danger and disgustingness. Alien has always specialized in a particularly invasive form of body-horror gore — remember the abortion scene from 2012's Prometheus!? — and Romulus doesn't disappoint on this front, as characters are dispensed with in ways far ickier than your average cinematic bloodbath.
Chronologically, Romulus takes place in between the events of the first two Alien movies. It's been long enough since I watched them that I don't remember how exactly this one slots between those films, but this doesn't matter in the slightest, as Romulus works nicely as a standalone story. Aside from one slightly clumsy callback to Aliens, this film is an impeccable example of how to build off a legacy franchise without being too beholden to lore or nostalgia.