I Can’t Lie to You About Your Chances, but You Have My Sympathies: Alien: Romulus (2024) and the Plague of Legacy Sequels

“This company isn’t going to give us nothing; we have to take it.”

My first reaction upon finishing Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus was that I could understand why so many people seemed to enjoy it. At first blush, Romulus feels like a return to form for the franchise, whenever it isn’t just ghoulishly wearing the skins of its predecessors like a Halloween costume.

Despite being one of the most recognizable and marketable brands in the business, the Alien saga hasn’t had an uncontroversial installment since at least 1997 – and honestly more like 1986. Plus, Romulus marks the first product to spin out from the line since Disney acquired Fox (and with it the Alien franchise) in 2019.

Which makes it perhaps unsurprising that Romulus often plays like a “greatest hits” of the series up to now. Those who are familiar with my film opinions will know that I don’t have a high regard for legacy sequels – to put it mildly. To me, they are usually little more than an advertisement for the IP, an opportunity for fans to do that Leonardo DiCaprio pointing meme when they recognize Easter eggs while corporations hang onto licenses and rake in merchandising dollars.

And Alien: Romulus is certainly no exception. While the final film may not be quite as callback-poisoned as early trailers made it appear, there are nonetheless countless groan-inducing instances of shots, lines, plot points, and sequences lifted wholesale (and often nonsensically) from the previous films in the franchise.

Though there may be dumber ones, the most egregious of these involves bringing back the late Ian Holm through some grotesque deepfake necromancy, an act that is both disrespectful and ultimately superfluous, as there’s no actual reason for that character to be Ian Holm in the first place.

I had heard about the deepfake prior to seeing the movie and had assumed that it would at least be bringing Holm back as some variation on his character Ash from the first film. Instead, however, the deepfaked Holm is playing Rook, a fellow synthetic science officer who is mangled in ways similar to how Ash and Bishop end up in their respective films.

It has been established that the androids or “artificial persons” in the Alien universe are manufactured in models, and presumably Rook is supposed to be the same model that Ash was, hence the Ian Holm deepfake. But because he isn’t Ash, there’s no reason for him to be the same model as Ash, except as an excuse for audiences to point to the screen in recognition.

In fact, almost none of the callbacks happen in any way that feels organic at all, and they come from all over the place. Even the black goo from Ridley Scott’s much-maligned prequels shows up for no real reason except as an excuse the recreate the (also much-maligned) hybrid alien from the end of Resurrection, only as much more of a goober this time.

(Seriously, if you can see this dipstick for the first time and not at least snort in derision, you are made of sterner stuff than I.)

Weirdly, amid all these many, many nods to the previous films, the script seems to play fast and loose with some of the most iconic elements of the franchise. A character goes from facehugger to chestburster in a matter of minutes, while at another point a full-grown alien hatches inexplicably from a pointless, yonic cocoon on the wall for some reason.

As bad as all the Easter eggs in Romulus are, they are par for the course in most movies today. Even movies that aren’t the ninth film in a franchise tend to be more about showing you a commercial for something you already own but that will give you a certain thrill of recognition than they are about actually telling a story or making a movie – see, for example, the many pointless Kubrick nods in The Substance. And while Alien: Romulus may be heinously guilty in this regard, it is by no means the worst offender we’ve gotten recently.

The main problem is that everything going on around these callbacks is only “pretty good.” With the exception of our two leads, the characters are so thinly sketched as to be nonexistent – one could be summarized almost completely with the single word: “pregnant.” Some set pieces are nice but few stand out. Even the much-ballyhooed and heavily foreshadowed sequence with acid blood in zero gravity is more interesting in concept than execution.

The one place where Romulus really distinguishes itself is in David Jonsson’s Andy. Andy is one of those aforementioned androids, a malfunctioning synthetic who was salvaged and repaired by Rain’s father before the latter died, making him functionally Rain’s brother.

Though Cailee Spaeny’s Rain is ostensibly our lead (and the actress does her best), Andy gets by far the meatier role, switching ably between his glitchy early behavior and his “upgraded” personality after the crew has been forced to swap in a new chip to give him security access to the derelict space station where the film’s action takes place.

Like several other elements of the film, Andy has been given what we can easily think of as the Disney treatment, which in this case means him being programmed to tell a seemingly endless series of dad jokes, but even so he is easily the most interesting character in the ensemble. That would only carry things so far without Jonsson’s expressive performance, however, which deserves a better movie to exist in.

All that said, it isn’t exactly that Alien: Romulus is bad. Alvarez is a capable visual stylist and the film mostly looks good and, to its credit, isn’t intentionally underlit. If you cut back on some of the nods to the source material, this could have been a middling but enjoyable installment of the long-running Aliens comic series from Dark Horse.

Unfortunately, Romulus isn’t a comic book, and a movie like this has to be more than “not bad” to justify itself, especially if it’s going to perform the kind of digital grave robbing that it perpetrates against Ian Holm. At its best, this is a hollow confection, tasty enough at first but ultimately just empty calories that turn more and more to ashes in your mouth the longer you chew on them.

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Orrin Grey is a writer, editor, game designer, and amateur film scholar who loves to write about monsters, movies, and monster movies. He’s the author of several spooky books, including How to See Ghosts & Other Figments. You can find him online at orringrey.com.