Alien: Romulus First Impressions

Having just gotten home from the cinema I want to give my first impressions of the new Alien film; Alien Romulus. This is the first new Alien film in seven years, and the first new film since Disney brought Twentieth Century Fox, which means Romulus is important. If this film flops, then the profit obsessed Disney may just abandon this IP, which is a scary thought. 

Thankfully, like Prey with the Predator franchise, Romulus is a wonderful return for the Alien franchise. The plot works both as a standalone story and a sequel to the original 1979 Alien. It works as a sequel as it sees the Wayland-Yutani corporation recovering the wreckage of the USS Nostromo. They bring this onboard the Romulus-Remus Research station. But then the film also works as a standalone story as we have an all-new cast of characters that end up facing the universe’s biggest dick head.

Rain and her adoptive synthetic brother are trapped within the Wayland-Yutani mining colony of Jackson's Star. While he’s not human, Andy is the only family that Rain has left after her parents died from complications of working within the mines. She does have her friends, all who have also lost parents to the dangers of mining. They very much want to escape the planet in order go somewhere safer. It’s clear that the company will never allow any of them to leave. Rain has worked enough hours to entitle her to be redeployed to another colony. When she tries to arrange this redeployment, she is told that the hours needed have been increased due to a worker shortage. I love this. It really ties back to the worker-rights theme of the original 1979 Alien film. It’s obvious to everyone that the company never intends to let Rain, Andy, or any working-class person leave this awful life. Just like Dallas, Kane, Ripley, and the rest of the Nostromo crew, Way-Yu sees Rain and her friends as expendable.

After Rain’s work contract is extended, she meets up with her ex-boyfriend Tyler, who introduces her to the rest of the cast. He explains that they have found an abandoned ship in orbit. With Andy’s help, they will be able to steal the cryo-chambers onboard. With these they would all be able to leave Jackson’s Star and make it to Yvaga, a planet with much better living conditions. So, with not much of a choice left to her, Rain decides to go with her friends. They make their way to the ship which turns out to be a research outpost. It’s here that they find the Xenomorphs, and the action begins in earnest.

Jackson’s Star is not a wealthy colony, and this is mirrored in the old school bulky monitors displaying 8-bit interfaces, that all feel ripped right out of the first film. The colony itself shares a lot of its visual design with Hadley’s Hope from Aliens. The Romulus station looks a bit fancier but it’s still not the most high-tech we’ve seen within the series. That is until near the end when our characters find a lab where Way-Yu have been experimenting on the Plagiarus Praepotens found within the Facehuggers. This lab is as fancy as all hells. This visually shows us what the company values. The living and working conditions of its workers are given almost no budget, but the Xeno research is given the best lab money can buy.

I also love how much Romulus pays attention to the extended universe of the franchise. While we haven’t had any films since Alien Covenant in 2017, we have had plenty of novels, a tabletop RPG with a few canon campaigns, and a couple of video games. The name Plagiarus Praepotens was first used within the novel ‘Alien: The Cold Forge’ by Alex White. It’s what the facehugger deposits within its host, and eventually develops into a Chestburster. It’s a variant of the black goo pathogen we saw during ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Alien: Covenant’. We’re also told that Yvaga III, where our characters intend to go, doesn’t allow synthetics. This might hint at it being a UPP colony as they have outlawed human-like machines within their space.

I’m still not one hundred percent sure how I feel about the final act. I don’t want to go into any spoilers, but I thought it was heading in one direction but then it ended up going somewhere else entirely. All I will say is that I was expecting to see a Neomorph and instead ended up with something else. It’s not bad but it pulls from a part of the franchise I thought would be left alone. I enjoyed it. It was most certainly done better than when it was attempted before. But it felt like a strange direction to take the story. Honestly, I’m still trying to wrap my head around it. If you know, you know, ya’know?

Ultimately the film itself may end up being one of my favourites in the franchise. I’ve only seen it once so I can’t place it too well now, but I’d say it’s up there with ‘Aliens’ and ‘Alien Covenant’ so far. Either my second or third favourite Alien film. I can’t stress just how much I enjoyed Romulus. It feels wonderfully faithful to not just the films that came before it but also the extended media.