Gritty, Working-Class, Romulus is one of the franchise’s best

Alien: Romulus - Fede Alvarez - 2024

★★★★--Loved it, but it wasn’t perfect. Alien is my Star Wars. Love all the movies, even the ones that aren’t good, likeAlien: Resurrection. As such, I watch all of these through the rosiest colored glasses imaginable and will watch every version of every bit of IP that gets put out there. Because the movie is pretty working-class, the stakes might seem kind of low, but not for the characters, of course. Best to think of it as the Rogue One of the Alien franchise in basically every way. Stand alone flick. Set between two of the original movies. Doesn’t have a huge impact on the other movies. Brings back an old dead guy with horrible CGI. So forth. 

Gist is a group of people and their android butler (jk) board a derelict space station to get cryo-pods/fuel to escape their mining colony on a Saturn moon. This leads to them fighting for survival against face-huggers, Xenomorphs, and shitty “synthetics” as happens in these flicks.
 
The cast is mostly unknowns. Rain Carradine is played by Cailee Spaeny—only thing I’ve seen her in is Mare of Easttown.She is the dead girl. David Jonsson plays Andy, the robit. Others include Archie Renaux as Tyler, Isabela Merced as Tyler’s preggers sister Kay, Spike Fearn as Bjorn, Aileen Wu as Navarro, and Ian Holm who is back from the dead as Rook, another robit. 
 
Director is Fede Alvarez. He previously did the 2013 Evil Dead movie, eh, Don’t Breathe, and The Girl in the Spider’s Web, one of the worst movies I’ve ever seen. 
 
Some of the stuff I like: the acid blood in zero gravity, the thing at the end (no spoilers), robot maintenance, and getting back to the working-class aspects of Weyland Yutani. Actually, this is the most working-class movie of all the movies, which adds to the mythology. We get a lot glimpses of that over the course of the movies, but this one, these guys are the bottom of the barrel grunts. This also really focuses on the whole immortality goal that becomes so important in the prequels. 
 
Also of note, none of the movies are as unsettling as this one, including the original. This is straight up white-knuckle horror shit. 
 
The guy who plays Andy is great and does a lot heavy lifting. Starts out benevolent, becomes a company man, then goes back to being cool and seemingly feeling guilty. 
 
Soo, I’m really looking forward to Alien: Earth, which takes place about the same time as Prometheus. Bummed we probably aren’t getting a sequel to Covenant. But you never know. Hopefully that a lot of the quests get answered then. 
 
I’d put this at No. 4 on my list of Alien movies. My order from favorite to least goes thus: Aliens, Alien, Prometheus, Romulus, Covenant, Alien3, and Resurrection.