Movie review: 'Alien: Romulus' takes series in bold directions

LOS ANGELES, Aug. 14 (UPI) -- Alien: Romulus , in theaters Friday, is a relentless, thrilling entry in the saga. Like in most of the sequels, fans will debate some of its choices, but this entry offers admirable creative takes on the franchise.

Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her android, Andy (David Jonsson), work on a mining planet run by Weyland-Yutani, the company for which Ripley worked in the 1979 film. Rain's friend, Tyler (Archie Renaux), brings word of a decommissioned space station.

Tyler proposes stealing the station's cryosleep pods so they can escape to another colony because Weyland-Yutani keeps prolonging their contract due to miner shortages.

Writer-director Fede Alvarez, with co-writer Rodo Sayagues, creates a new corner of the oppressive world of Alien . The franchise established Weyland-Yutani considers its workers expendable, so imagine how they treat the ones who aren't astronauts.

The opening scenes on the planet suggest an entire world that exists there, and the full IMAX frame shows a lot of activity going on in the background. The gang of youths going on an adventure harkens back to the '80s movies, for which shows like Stranger Thing s are nostalgic, albeit too violent and graphic for kids.

But, once Rain and her friends board the Romulus station, it of course becomes an Alien movie and the focus becomes making it out of Romulus alive, let alone making it to another colony or any social parable.

Still, Romulus uses all of the accouterments of Alien for new suspenseful sequences. The characters encounter the creature, recovered from the remains of Ripley's ship, the Nostromo, for the first time, but Alvarez and Sayugues have new ideas.

So aliens at each stage of evolution pursue Rain and her friends, with their acid blood a deterrent to killing them lest they burn a hole into the void of space. The film relentlessly alternates calamities between the creatures and the environment.

Rain and Andy discover equipment used in previous Alien movies, but they have to use it with different limitations, given that Romulus is in a state of disrepair. A zero-gravity sequence is a particular highlight.

But, one reference to the original Alien requires a visual effect so bad that it should have been more obscured to maintain some mystery. The hubris of repeatedly cutting back to the fully lit effect in closeup makes it even more egregious.

The idea behind it is sound, and even shots of it on a blurry video monitor suggest that's as far as it should have gotten. Alvarez's confidence in that effect is misplaced and once it is no longer a spoiler, it will be regarded as a new benchmark for visual effects whose ambitions exceed their ability.

Aside from one glaring misjudgment, Alien: Romulus is one of the series' more ambitious and satisfying entries. It is also perhaps the first standalone entry since it neither explores the origin of the alien nor continues the Ripley story so it can focus on its own characters.

Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.