It is refreshing that Romulus has a retrospective aspect to it of the first Alien film, where a crew of unknown players who add an unpredictable atmosphere as youthful enthusiasm overrides all logical thinking and the consequences of what these actions will have throughout their adventure.
There is a huge infrastructure that has developed where thousands of workers who mine the planet LV-410, which is in constant darkness and are under contract from Weyland Yutani to fulfil their duties to keep the whole galactic sector powered up.
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Unfortunately, for these young groups of miners they have been ordered to extend their contract, which prevents them from returning home.
This unforeseen setback initialises a few of this handful of young miners in an escape plot, but first they have to go aboard an abandoned space station Renaissance so that is destined to be consumed by a neighbouring planet, to get some much-needed fuel to power their space pod to reach their chosen new home planet Yvaga III some distance away.
Going back down the timeline of the Alien space saga, we've had the crews on the first space station discover that they were not alone and that the Aliens breed inside human bodies.
We've has the escape from infected space station Renaissance inhabited by Aliens, and then a resurgent of the story, then some years later going back to the start of how the Aliens came into existence in Prometheus, and then the Covenant pushed the story into modern times, and now a crew wanting to get fuel supplies and not knowing anything about Aliens and not realising their self-inflicted mission is about to accidentally ensure the continuation of the Alien species
Like in Prometheus and the Covenant, Romulus may have a more advanced humanoid robot Andy (David Jonsson), but has some kind of virus that makes him imperfect and though is the target of bad tasting jokes from Bjorn (Spike Fearn) who may have had good reason to view androids with suspicion as his mother was killed by one, but his demeanour actually becomes an unlikely hero.
The setting is eerie as this space station Renaissance is not only abandoned but has an infinite amount of time before grinding to its final end against the planetary ring of space rocks and planetary debris.
It takes a short amount of time before the slimy creatures start to scurry across the screen and under the shallow water dripping from broken air conditioning pipes and fridges housing those lovely distasteful experimental disasters of alien foetuses.
This film is more than science fiction, the dynamics and relationship between each of these young miners is rather messy, which leads to conflict and disagreement which distracts them from the main mission of getting cryostasis, which suspends life for the nine-year journey to their chosen destination planet Yvaga III.
The self-appointed leader of the crew Tyler Harrison (Archie Renaux) tries to focus them all to getting what they need and departing, but as Kay's (Isabela Merced) cousin who happens to be pregnant, as well as Bjorn's cousin too you see he will be torn from showing unconditional love and wanting to stop the arguments and conflicts, though it is stressful for him in this confined and ever hostile environment.
Tyler has another problem of being the ex-boyfriend of orphaned miner Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), who's late-father made Andy as surrogate brother and programmed to protect her at all costs, furthering the tension as the plot mores along to who's going to survive - well the fittest of course!
Then we have Bjorn who has an adopted sister Narravo (Alieen Wu), which then pulls the loyalty strings even further.
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While searching for this cryostasis they stumble across the flight deck of the space station Renaissance and are rather startled when the space stations when the chopped in half android powers called Rook (based on the late Ian Holm who starred in the first Aliens (1979) film, and voiced by Daniel Betts), wants to take over and save himself by putting this young crew of escaped miners in peril.
The confusion of who to follow plays well and this ratchets up the tension, conflict, disagreements and arguments throughout the film.
Romulus is a catch and well worth watching, and thankfully - more of this story of the Aliens will be coming sometime in the future, hopefully not too long.
Available
Alien - Romulus on DVD
Alien - Romulus on Blu-ray DVD
Alien - Romulus on 4K Ultra Blu-ray DVD
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