Metacritic reviews

It’s fun, tense, and slimy. It’s also nowhere near as ambitious as some of the films in this series deemed failures. We can’t have everything.

Romulus ends up as the franchise’s strongest entry in three decades for its devotion to deploying lean genre mechanics.

The filmmaker embraces unpredictability and plenty of gore for his graphic spectacle, yet Alvarez first makes us care for his main characters before unleashing sheer terror.

Somewhere between Alien & Aliens — fitting given its place in the timeline — Romulus serves up blockbuster-level action & visceral horror all in one.

The slime and the shadows and the silences are back. Horror DNA is honored rather than pointlessly duplicated. This time, at least, IP familiarity breeds contentment.

Romulus feel torn between Alvarez’s desire to tell a new story in the Alien universe and 20th Century Studios’ desire for a fan-servicey thrill ride.The frustrating thing about it is that, moment to moment, it very much works.

Álvarez eventually gets there, with the third act of Romulus impressively nauseating. But otherwise, the filmmaker isn’t developing this cinematic universe so much as he is stunting its growth.

Lacking thematic subtlety or dimensionality outside of Rain and Andy, Alien: Romulus compensates with a killer instinct deployed with squirming glee.

It’s certainly hard to imagine a cruder way of connecting the dots between the series’ fractured mythology.

The resulting movie is a technically competent piece of work; but no matter how ingenious its references to the first film (let down, however, by borrowings from the A Quiet Place franchise) it has to be said that there’s a fundamental lack of originality here which makes it frustrating.