‘Alien: Romulus’ (2024)

I somehow never got round to watching ‘Alien: Romulus’ at my local cinema (and there’s a big question over whether anyone will watch anything there ever again but that’s another story) but after a few weeks of waiting for the price, on Prime Video, to come down, ‘Romulus’ suddenly became affordable and that was my cue to grab a copy, order a pizza in and give it a watch.

I’ll be honest, I’m more of a ‘Predator’ fan myself but I’ll never pass up the chance of watching an ‘Alien’ movie and the prospect of an ‘Alien’ movie directed by the same guy who directed the ‘Evil Dead’ remake was an intriguing one to me.

So, slice of pizza in hand, I started watching and…

While scavenging a derelict space station, a group of young colonists looking for a better life find the most terrifying life form in the universe instead. And there may well be something even more terrifying on board…

As I’ve got older, I’ve found that my natural ‘movie run-time tolerance’ peters out at about an hour and half. Any more than that and I’m looking at my phone or sometimes, even at the ceiling. Not many films can pass that mark and still hold my interest; the good news here is that ‘Alien: Romulus’, while not a perfect movie, kept me engaged and I’d say it’s a very solid addition to the franchise as a whole.

‘Romulus’ achieves this by just sticking to the basics and making sure that it does these very well. There are nods to the wider franchise but no getting bogged down in creating lore that isn’t necessary. At the heart of every decent ‘Alien’ movie are hapless humans being hunted through a rundown landscape by a vicious xenomorph and if you do it right, that’s really all you need, that and a little commentary about how the mega-corporations, running the galaxy, are just as voracious. ‘Romulus’ has all of this and while it doesn’t quite hit the heights of the first two movies, there was plenty there to keep me going in terms of high stakes and a nice bit of tension coupled with some xenomorph jump scares. Sometimes you can see them coming but to be fair, if you’ve seen a few ‘Alien’ movies already then half the fun is knowing what’s coming. Well, that was it for me, your mileage may vary though.

Did ‘Romulus’ really need to roll out a certain iconic line? Nope, that line should have been left where it was but on the other hand, I will always have time for an android that rolls out Dad Jokes to try and alleviate the hell of living on a Weyland-Yutani planet. Minor quibbles really, like I said up at the top of the post, ‘Alien: Romulus’ isn’t going to trouble either of the first two movies but may help you get over ‘Resurrection’ at the very least. A solid addition to a franchise that needed a break.