‘Alien: Romulus’ Is Exhausting, Gross As Hell, And Incredibly Fun

The human characters in Alien: Romulus are young adults born into indentured servitude on a hellish mining-colony planet shrouded in permanent night. The closest thing to hope in their lives is the possibility they can stay alive long enough to fulfill infinitely receding service-time quotas, after which they’ll be allowed the freedom to go someplace else. In an early scene, the main character, Rain, walks into a grimy company office to claim a long-awaited departure for herself and her synthetic surrogate brother Andy, only for a haggard, dead-eyed clerk to inform her that her quota has doubled and she owes the company at least another five years. The office isn’t literally labeled “Sallie Mae,” but it might as well be.

Just as the original Alien wore Vietnam War–era working-class paranoia as its skin breached by the titular acid-blooded beast, Romulus—evidently set in between the events of Alien and Aliens, but somewhat off to the side from both—grounds its gore and horror in the plight of Zoomers, born pre-chewed by the gears of a society that has lost the ability to do anything but coerce and extract. Sinister or coldly indifferent corporate machinations have tended to steer prior series protagonists into danger, but the civilization in Romulus is too broken to sustain the chains of authority that make such conspiracies possible. The husk of one such enterprise, already ended in disaster by the time the opening credits have finished rolling, sits in a decaying orbit above the mining-colony planet. To the extent Alien: Romulus has non-alien villains, they too are improvising under duress.