Romulus makes a franchise first achievement in humanising a synthetic character, an idea that was inevitable for the franchise and one I was surprised didn’t happen sooner, as I had expected some of the earlier movies to take this step. I’m glad this movie didn’t repeat the same “secret synthetic” storyline done in 3/4 of the Ripley movies, instead making a synth one of the supporting cast, though David Jonsson’s screen time and development easily qualifies his character Andy for a co-lead label.

The opening act introduces each character perfectly – their first scenes immediately tell us who they are as people and how they tend to behave, but the film spends far too much time building up the alien reveal which we all know is coming and is the reason we bought tickets, but when it gets going it really gets going. The amount of time we spend waiting for the meat of the plot to commence means we don’t get to see the very human panic caused by being hunted by terror-inducing aliens, with the few that do, such as Aileen Wu’s Navarro and Spike Fearn’s Bjorn, having the most intense performances that serve to drive the plot forward.

Romulus employs both Sydney Shircliff and Mary Vernieu as casting directors, who opt to invest in new talent by hiring some of Hollywood’s biggest rising stars. With a cast of only six core characters, Alien Romulus had ample opportunity to develop each character and give each performer the limelight to demonstrate their talent. While lead actress Cailee Spaeny (Rain Carradine) sells the fear aspect well, I do feel she could have been given more material to bestow a range of emotions on the audience – in contrast, Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley had several iconic scenes in the original movie where 

she displayed intense fear, anger, and misery; I’m sure Cailee had the capabilities to do this, but she never got the chance to blow us away. In contrast, David Jonsson had, by far, the strongest and most human performance of the cast, which is ironic as he is the only non-human character among them, yet he clearly had the best material to work with. 

I feel the writers had the idea of humanising a synthetic and entirely focused on fleshing his character out, forgetting to award the other characters the same focus. Isabela Merced is a solid actress and her younger fanbase will certainly help boost ticket sales; her performance was strong but hardly utilised, as she was instead stuck playing the damsel in distress numerous times in the movie, waiting for other characters to save her. Better use of her could have driven the tension of the film as she had the best emotional range in the entire cast, and I feel her fans may be left disappointed by how sparingly she’s used.

The star of this film is not the main actress, nor is it any of the cast. That prize goes to the writing team of the film. There are a number of ingenious concepts and sequences throughout the movie which surprised me as I never would have thought of them. These creative talents behind the film come up with a number of threats beyond simply the aliens alone, with characters having to come to terms with the potential repercussions of simply shooting their way out like many audience members would be screaming at them to do, with the characters instead learning lessons from the beginning of the film which do pay off later, in a satisfying manner.

Upon seeing the film, I was pleasantly surprised to see that the entire feature had been filmed in an expanded 1:90 aspect ratio, exclusive to IMAX, which means seeing this film in IMAX not only promises a bigger screen and surround sound, but more picture that will be cropped in other formats. With this film taking place on a space station outside a beautiful planet with jupiter-like rings and mesmerising outer space setpieces, I strongly encourage you to make the effort to see this feature in IMAX where possible.

Alien: Romulus releases in cinemas nationwide on August 16th.