Last Saturday, Rain and Andy were cornered by a group of xenomorphs. It looks like all is lost, but then Rain has a clever idea, one I particularly liked. Earlier in the film, we learn that the station goes through periodic gravity purges. This prompts Rain to shut off the gravity to the station, which will give her the ability to shoot the xenomorphs without their acid immediately eating a hole in it. She turns the gravity off and begins shooting the aliens. Once they’re all dead, the pair make their way through the floating puddles of acidic blood and reach an elevator shaft.

Why we root for Rain

I liked this scene a lot because it made Rain seem clever — as she should be if she deserves to be the protagonist of the film. Ripley aside, the other protagonists in this franchise have been infuriating, always reacting to situations and never anticipating obvious problems. This moment was a real highlight for me.

Once inside the elevator shaft, Rain and Andy run into another problem. The gravity purges begin to pick up again, and Rain can’t make it to the top of the shaft before the first one kicks in. She begins to fall, but an alien catches her and pins her to the wall. Now, at this point, the viewer might be asking why the alien saved her but the next plot twist is very clever: A facehugger appears and begins creeping toward Rain. Without a single character saying a word, it’s communicated that the alien is holding her in place so that the facehugger will be able to implant an embryo inside her.

Aliens with goals

It’s worth noting that here the monster has a goal. I haven’t seen this in any of the earlier films. There, the aliens are just creatures of chaos, appearing here and there and doing this or that because the script needs them to. In this film, the xenomorph is a predator with a specific objective, a nice plot development.

However, before the facehugger can do its work, Andy jumps from the top of the shaft and kills both aliens. Then Rain and Andy return to the ship. Rain puts Kay in a cryopod, and it looks like all is well. But just before Rain is about to enter a cryopod herself, a red light goes off on Kay’s pod.

Rain opens the pod, only to find her friend giving birth to a horrible creature, which is inside some kind of shell. Rain takes the shell to a large storage container at the bottom of their ship, presumably used for transporting mined materials, but the shell opens. While the creature that crawls out of it is bad enough, the shell is full of acid. Rain rushes off to grab a weapon that will freeze the acid, but the newborn alien returns to its mother before she can return. Andy shows up too, and the newborn kills Kay and seriously damages Andy.

The rings of doom

Rain rushes back with a freeze gun and finds her friends. Then she confronts the newborn. She eventually leads it into the storage hold and throws the acid inside the shell onto the floor so the creature can be sucked into space. After barely managing to avoid getting pulled into the void herself, she releases the storage hold, which is destroyed by the mining planet’s rings. The Weyland station is also destroyed by the rings, taking care of Ash.

The movie ends with Rain promising herself that she will repair Andy before she goes into cryosleep, escaping the mining planet where she’d spent her whole life.

The franchise’s hits and misses

Alien: Romulus isn’t perfect; it has plot holes here and there that vary in depth. On the whole, I enjoyed the film. In fact, it’s one of the better additions to the series. I would—surprisingly—recommend it.

Before concluding this review, I want to give my final thoughts on the franchise as a whole. It’s mostly terrible. The first two movies are good, but after that, the bottom falls out. However, I do see a ray of light. Granted, that could be due to my dramatically dropped standards for evaluating this franchise. But if the audience sees a few more Romulus quality films and no more Alien Covenant quality, the series can make a comeback.

What about those alien embryos?

The main issue is with the aliens themselves. For example, there’s zero thought given to the gestation period of the embryos, and it varies wildly in each movie. It seems as though the alien embryo births became a sloppy plot device to make things happen as needed. The reason I see this as such a big flaw is that, handled properly, the gestation period is a giant missed opportunity! A set amount of time would be a perfect ticking clock trope—an excellent way to build tension throughout a film. But the writers never do this. They settle for making the process a mere contrivance so the audience can watch people die horribly at opportune times.

Unfortunately, the Romulus screenplay does not correct this error, but it does attempt to correct others. It tries to explain why the aliens grow so quickly. It attempts to establish a set of hunting patterns for the xenomorph that have been mentioned earlier but never really explored. The fact that the xenomorphs are primarily hunting for their facehuggers is only brought up in Aliens when Newt is captured at the end. But beyond this once instance, the why behind what the xenomorphs do is just ignored.

Characters that don’t make sense

Another problem has been with the cartoonish casts in the later films. The first and second movies don’t have this issue. But Alien 3’s and Alien Resurrection’s characters are clowns. Prometheus’s and Covenant’s characters do things that make absolutely no sense.

In Romulus, by contrast, the miners have a goal. They are young. They don’t want to die in the mines like some of their parents. This makes the audience empathize with them, so that when a character is killed, it is a disappointment, which is how it should be. Rooting for a cast is what raises the stakes in a movie.

By contrast, if everyone is an unmotivated moron, then it doesn’t matter when they die because it’s abundantly clear that they aren’t really people. This makes a film boring. But Rain taking risks to save her robot made sense because Andy was a gift from her dad. Details like this compel an audience to care, which creates a better story despite the plot holes.

And now my Reviewer’s Rankings

To wrap things up. I’m going to list the alien movies first chronologically, then in terms of their quality.

Chronologically, the movies go as follows: Prometheus, Covenant, Alien, Romulus, Aliens, Alien 3, and Resurrection.

In terms of quality, I would rank them like this: Aliens, Alien, Romulus, Resurrection, Prometheus, Covenant, ice melting, grass growing, and Alien 3.

Prometheus, Covenant, and Alien 3, I feel, can be outright ignored. They are so stupid that to watch them is to threaten your intellect. Alien Resurrection is somewhere in the middle. It’s better than the other three, but only good if the viewer likes mindless B-movies. However, Aliens, Alien, and Romulus are worth your time.

I’m sad to say that I don’t think Romulus is going to do well at the box office because of the previous two films, but I hope its improved quality is an omen of things to come. The Alien franchise can still be saved if future writers will at least maintain this latest addition’s quality.

Here are the first three parts of my extended review:

Alien: Romulus (2024) — Wait! This movie is actually good? A new character, Rain, tries to escape the Weyland Corporation mine in which her parents were killed but the xenomorphs have infiltrated the space station the escapees must board… Romulus is likely harmed at the box office by the fact that the previous two films in the series were terrible. It meets the minimum standard for a quality film.

Alien: Romulus (2024): Andy turns bad — Thanks to an old friend. Ash reappears in the story, a nice touch which reconnects the film to the original. When measuring the significance of a plot hole, we should ask, how does it ultimately affect the story? Some of the ones in Romulus are not deep.

and

Alien: Romulus (2024) News flash: Ripley didn’t kill her first alien. This film makes a serious effort to tie the alien anthology together. Continuity is too often seriously neglected in this modern age of “cinema.”
We learn that the aliens usually don’t intend to eat their prey but to use them to incubate facehugger embryos.