Alien: Romulus” (2025) – When the Xenomorph Comes Home Again
By Luna Tran, Galactic Gazette – 18 February 2025
After years of speculation and a COVID-delayed production schedule, director Fede Álvarez finally unleashes Alien: Romulus on global screens—and the result is a lean, vicious return to everything that made Ridley Scott’s 1979 original a pop-culture nightmare. Shot for a reported $80 million but already clawing past $350 million worldwide in its first ten days, the film proves there is still plasma in the franchise’s veins. 
Set between the events of Alien and Aliens, the story follows six young scrap-hunters working for Weyland-Yutani who raid the derelict orbital foundry code-named “Romulus.” Lead heroine Rain Carradine (a crackling performance from Priscilla breakout Cailee Spaeny) boards the station hoping to steal cryogenic drives and disappear into the frontier, but instead awakens a 20-year-old xenomorph colony engineered as living bioweapons.
Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues cleverly thread the needle between haunted-house tension and body-horror spectacle: an early first-person helmet-cam sequence where a facehugger skitters across a visor may be 2025’s most panic-inducing minute of cinema.
Visually, Romulus is a love letter to the franchise’s grimy retro-futurism—slab keyboards, CRT flicker, and corridors dripping with condensation. Yet new toys abound: magnetized droideka-style sentry spheres, and a zero-G chest-burster that pirouettes through floating globules of blood, captured by cinematographer Galo Olivares with disorienting beauty. Benjamin Wallfisch’s score mixes bone-rattling percussion with a mournful synth motif that echoes Jerry Goldsmith’s original theme.
n.wikipedia.orgNarratively, Álvarez adds surprising myth-building. A sealed lab labeled “Project Narcissus” nods to Ripley’s escape pod and seeds the rumor—confirmed by Álvarez in press junkets—that Ellen Ripley herself may have crossed this station in deep freeze, unseen by our protagonists. The implication that Weyland-Yutani has lied about her whereabouts reframes the corporate villainy running through every Alien film.
Spaeny is backed by David Jonsson as her partially disassembled android brother Andy, whose malfunctioning empathy routines deliver the franchise’s bleakest punch line since Bishop’s demise. The supporting cast—Isabela Merced, Archie Renaux, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu—serve mostly as exquisitely perforated fodder, but the brisk 119-minute runtime never lets their arcs feel disposable.
Alien: Romulus is not just nostalgic fan service. With its indictment of debt-bonded labor and bio-weapons profiteering, it feels eerily current. Álvarez ends on a ruthless cliff-hanger—Rain’s escape shuttle drifts toward a radio-silent terra-forming rig labeled “LV-679.” A sequel, tentatively titled “Alien: Leviathan,” is already gestating.
Forty-six years after the first chest-burst, the xenomorph is still evolving—and so, blessedly, is the saga that spawned it.
