Welcome to How Gay Is It? Out's review series where, using our state-of-the-art Eggplant Rating System, we determine just how queer some of pop culture's buzziest films and TV shows are! (Editor's note: this post contains spoilers for 20th Century Studios' Alien: Romulus.)
Alien fans, we are so back!
I'm a defender of more recent films in the Alien franchise like Prometheus and Alien Covenant, but when I heard that one of my favorite directors, Fede Álvarez, was going to put his own stamp on the franchise, I couldn't have been more excited.
And now that I've seen Alien: Romulus, I know that my excitement wasn't wasted!
Romulus picks up between Ridley Scott's original 1979 haunted house in space thriller Alien and James Cameron's 1986 action sequel Aliens and focuses on a small band of scrappers who make a plan to salvage some cryogenic pods from a decommissioned Weyland-Yutani space station orbiting their mining planet, only to come face to face with a horde of xenomorphs and, in a stunning third act, a new and terrifying evolution of our favorite alien.
Cailee Spaeny stars as Rain, a young miner working on a planet that has zero days of sunshine a year who teams up with her friends Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), Navarro (Aileen Wu) and her android brother Andy (David Jonsson) to try to get the cryo chambers they need to take a nine year trip to a habitable planet.
Spaeny, Jonsson, and Renaux are especially terrific among the great young cast, who all deliver in their intimate and demanding roles.
Alien: Romulus is an instantly rewatchable gory fright fest that raises the stakes and shows what makes this sci-fi franchise great.
Álvarez is a brilliant horror director and makes Romulus the most terrifying entry in the franchise since 1986's Aliens. He uses his horror bonafides to up the ante when it comes to the spider-like facehuggers and the xenomorph's acid blood, creating some of the most stunning scenes in the franchise to this date.
One thing fans of the Alien franchise will also notice is lots of callbacks to previous films, specifically Alien (the film involves the xenomorph that Ripley ejected from the Nostromo at the end of that film) and Prometheus. Here we see the black goop present in Prometheus and Covenant used in a new horrific way, including creating an all-new xenomorph-human hybrid that is a body horror version of the Engineers.
There's also something to be said about his use of birth and vaginal imagery for horror. Álvarez leans heavily into the yonic appearance of the xenomorph cocoons and even challenges The First Omen for 2024's most disturbing birth scene in a movie.
I really love what Álvarez has done with this film and hope he gets to flesh out his ideas in new gory ways with at least one sequel!
Now, for the question we always ask here at Out: How gay is it?!?
While there's a ton of horror based around penises, vaginas, and birth in this movie, it doesn't really get any gayer than that. This film views sex as something that is sometimes monstrous and unrecognizable, which is definitely queer, so I give it four out of five stars, but just one out of five on the hand-dandy Eggplant Rating System.
Alien: Romulus is now playing in theaters.
