Perhaps the most notable aspect to mention about Alien: Romulus is how gorgeous the film looks. From the opening shots of a Wayland-Yutani vessel investigating the wreckage of the Nostromo, to the shots of the alien hive infesting the Romulus vessel, this is a movie that glistens and wows at every turn. Fede Álvarez’s use of puppeteering, lighting and framing makes for perhaps one of the best-looking Alien movies since the franchise’s 1979 debut.

Visual delights aside, this is also a film that’s well designed in terms of its thrills. Much like Álvarez’s work on the 2016 thriller, Don’t Breathe, the man knows how to maintain tension between scenes. While it takes a while for the horror to begin in full (as has become custom with most Alien movies), from the second act onward, Romulus does a terrific job of placing its antagonists in perilous situations. Creeping through rooms packed with face huggers, attempts to free a pregnant woman from a room housing a Xenomorph, and zero-gravity glides through acid-laden corridors make for many a moments that leave many cinema goers clutching to their seats.

Establishing gripping set pieces amidst a sea of appealing cinematography are characteristics Álvarez has demonstrated during prior projects to this one. I’d like to conclude this perhaps goes a fair way toward explaining why established Hollywood bigwigs have handed him the keys to so many sacred horror properties in recent years, however there are other characteristics to consider which make this a slightly more puzzling fact. I say this because for all his strengths, this director’s weaknesses are considerably startling; weaknesses that are also very much also on show throughout Romulus.

One such weaknesses is character development, or lack thereof. Much like Don’t Breathe, Romulus does a poor job of designing characters we can care for. It’s not so much that I expect our protagonists to be rays of sunshine that light up our lives whenever they are on our screens. It’s still possible to care for messy and flawed folk, provided they muster intrigue and believability. This isn’t something that’s offered up to us here, as we are treated instead to a roster of folk lacking in the persona department. With exception for David Jonsson’s outstanding portrayal of Andy the android (get it?), most of the characters in this movie are presented as kids without personalities, or straight up prats. We get very little to latch onto from the start, and while there are some hints of character development once the collective encounters the Xenomorph nasties, such growth is obliterated along with them before any chance of their personalities forming takes shape.

Instead of building up a group of believable, realistic, detailed, nuanced or complex folk, Álvarez applies a tactic utilised in that of Don’t Breathe; exposit tragic origin stories. We’re supposed to care for Cailee Spaeny’s Rain because her folks died of labour-induced lung cancer. Likewise, Bjorn might be a bigoted tool toward androids, but his parents died in a mining accident.  Kay might be a little light on personality, but she’s pregnant. Such skin deep attempts to muster.empathy for this group of uninteresting heroes doesn’t go far enough in making us care for them. The script practically begs us to feel bad for them, trying to get us on board with their cause without fleshing them out as real people. At best, this is an attempt to make us feel for these people in a limited timeframe. At worst, it is just lazy writing.

I’m not suggesting Rain, Bjorn and company need to become loveable scamps for us to want them to live. Flawed characters attempting to escape perilous situations don’t need to be painted as angels for us to care. It’s certainly possible to engineer likeable assholes, particularly if you give us three-dimensional characters who embark on redemption arcs throughout the duration of a narrative. Cameron’s 1986 sequel, Aliens provides us with a solid example of this. That movie gave us plenty of jerks who we ended up rooting for. Take Bill Paxton’s Hudson as one such case. The man goes from an overly confident fool, to a panicked liability, to a hero holding the fort in less than two hours. Heck, even slimy suit Burke comes across as a fleshed out creep; demonstrating a man so consumed by the corporate system paying his bills, he’d unknowingly lost his humanity along the way. Sure, Burke was a spineless monster, but he’d grown oblivious to his own twisted selfishness in a manner that felt relatable to a lot of real-world corporate creeps.

Alien: Romulus doesn’t have a problem because its heroes aren’t baskets of delight. It has a problem because the characters feel as though they are lacking actual character. When the most believable and interesting character is the artificial humanoid amongst your group, it’s perhaps it’s fair to say you’ve got trouble on your hands.

While faulty character development dampens the potential for Alien: Romulus to truly shine, it isn’t the only negative factor dragging it down from greatness. Another flaw is the film’s desire to overwhelm way far too many ideas. Considering Dan O’Bannon’s original Alien script managed to fold a whole heap of hefty concepts into a seemingly simplistic narrative (sexuality, capitalism, motherhood, exploitation and 20^th century gender roles, to name but a few), the 1979 original appears to have set a benchmark which all of his contemporaries appear either keen or pressured to outdo. This varies depending on the sequel in question, whether it’s applying new thematic ideas (Alien 3 and its use of religion), or incorporating new elements to the Xenomorph life cycle (see all entries for some variation on this). We saw this pressure applied perhaps most prominent to that of Covenant and Prometheus, in which Ridley Scott attempted to bolt on hefty new themes about life, death and existentialism. The final product of that prequel line-up made for two features that felt bulky, clumsy, confused, unfocused and pretentious.

Romulus doesn’t try the exact same trick as Scott’s prequel attempts; however it does try and attempt some relevance by striving to stitch together the prequels, sequels and original in a manner that feels as distracted as it does heavy-footed. It wants to earn its place by fusing heaps of pre-existing ideas, which sacrifices some of its originality for the sake of callbacks. To a degree, this does almost work. The scenes in which we have a variant of the Ash android (a CGI recreation of Ian Holmes, that’s about as problematic as the Peter Cushing resurrection in Rouge One: A Star Wars Story), chronicling Peter Weyland’s discovery of the engineers in 2093, up to the destruction of the Nostromo in June 2122 does help to make these movies feel as though they exist in the same timeline. This is largely achieved through Álvarez’s remarkable skill at attaining a level of visual continuity toward that of the original in a manner that a majority of Alien’s sequels have failed to achieve. I always felt that the prequel movies felt as though they belonged to an alternative timeline to that of the Ellen Ripley Alien Tetralogy. The looked and felt as though they operated in a different universe. Álvarez’s worldbuilding does a terrific job of making this movie feel as though it’s set in both the original and prequel timeline, producing the most convincing argument that all seven Alien movies are set in the same timeline. This means that when we do find ourselves in the midst of an Ash variant referencing the events of the prequel series and original, it functions as an effective bridge that ties everything together.

The problem is, the attempts to weave further sequels and prequels does not end there. This film furthermore gives us alien hives, nods to Ellen Ripley’s wardrobe and mannerisms, one liners from “future” movies in the franchise, and a barmy mash-up of Prometheus and Alien Resurrection folded into the back half of the third act. All of which turns what started out as an effective and tightly plotted horror movie, into a mishmash of references that dominates the movies’ overall identity. The latter half of the second act, not to mention the disastrous third act, makes for a montage of callbacks and nods that overshadow any attempt at originality on show here. It feels as though Álvarez has stitched together all his favourite moments from prior entries and edited them into a singular narrative. It weakens the credibility of his own movie, diluting the tension and visual beauty demonstrated by distracting with cringe-inducing winks to its audience.

This doesn’t simply water down Romulus’s script, but makes itself blind to the flaws of what it’s doing. Mashing together the climax to Alien Resurrection and Prometheus together might have sounded unique and exciting on paper, but in practice, it makes for an absurd final act looks dumb and tonally dissonant from the rest of the film. The big reveal was comedic enough to cause the entire cinema room I was in to cackle as the full former Xeno-man crawled into shot. It’s a cheap looking, tonally absurd scene that drains all the tension Álvarez built during the run-up to the creature’s reveal.

Romulus is at its most interesting when it’s trying to tell a focused horror story involving a bunch of kids trapped on a ship with a newly birthed Xenomorph. It’s at its best during these earlier moments of the film because it allows Álvarez room to focus on building tension and cultivating a glorious-yet-horrifying atmosphere. As soon as he starts trying to weave together surrounding entries in a remarkably inconsistent franchise, it’s as though he takes his eye off the ball, committing error after error amidst the distraction of it all.  

Álvarez appears to have fallen victim to trying to impress by doing too much with this entry. Romulus pitched to both the studio and audience as a stand-alone project intended to function separately from the baggage of prior attempts to revitalise to the franchise. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way, it lost its mission statement and became distracted by the very cannon it attempted to isolate itself from. It’s as though it couldn’t help itself, trying desperately to thread itself into the mainline movies through idea colliding, homage spamming and sequel bridging. It turns itself into a hub for all prior movies to tether themselves to, making for a messy and distracted film.

Is Alien: Romulus a terrible movie? Certainly not. The visuals and tension alone make for some frankly excellent moments during the earlier stages of the movie. It’s a film that functions well and looks glorious from a directorial perspective. The problem lies with its screenplay, which is polluted with too many concepts, distracting references, a desire to thread an inconsistent franchise together, and a collective of under developed characters. While Álvarez constructs a great-looking movie, he brings with him a script that doesn’t quite make for a fantastic finished product. While far from the worst in the franchise, it’s also certainly far from the best.