Alien: Romulus

Here's the seventh installment in the Alien franchise, if we can disregard the two Alien vs Predator efforts, and it fits in the timeline about 20 years after the original film (see graphic below). It kicks off with a hat tip to Ripley and co with a mission to recover some unmentionable. The film then jumps to a grimy mining colony called Jackson's Star, where we're introduced to Cailee Spaeny's Rain and David Jonsson's Andy. She's rebuffed by the authorities in her attempts to get off-planet, and so agrees to a hare-brained scheme to escape the working drudgery and likely death in the mines. Her accomplices, a similarly aged group of chancers, need Andy to get into an abandoned (hmmm) Weyland-Yutani spaceship that they've located floating above them. They need Andy because he's actually a company synthetic and should be compatible with the mystery ship's systems. Set-up over, time for the viscosity.

This is director Fede Alvarez's fourth feature following an Evil Dead remake, Don't Breathe and The Girl in the Spider's Web. Sunshine and lollipops aren't really his bag. He does a pretty good job with the constraints of the material - there are boxes that must be ticked in an Alien film. Little scurrying crab finds a face, said human has a chest problem, slimy result grows in stages, crew members get picked off until one (or two) remain, and so on. 

It must be tough to find something different to do, and the biggest change here is probably the lack of any mature players in the crew. No grizzled Tom Skerrits or John Hurts, not even a slightly younger Idris Elba or Michael Biehn. This lot are closer in age to Newt than any of those mentioned above. Plot-wise, it kind of makes sense, as the older folk on Jackson's Star seem to have a short shelf life. As I was saying, trying to find a new angle, or even just a stand-out shock (see the DIY caesarean section in Prometheus) can be difficult, but here it becomes downright fucking ridiculous. Hey, it's something different, I guess.

Spaeny does most of the good work here, she's a really solid actor and the camera loves her. The rest of the cast are ok, though their lack of star wattage clearly marks them out as Alien fodder. There are some really tense moments, one floating acid scene in particular, and Alvarez knows his way around a fright fest. 

Unfortunately, a lot of the good work is undone by the disappointing trend for fan service callbacks, even though most fans of the original would surely blanche at some of this tripe. I don't have a problem with a (poorly done) CGI version of Ian Holm's Ash reappearing, but I do when he knocks out a famous line from the past. Even worse is the return of one of Ripley's iconic lines - I can't tell you how much this deflated me. Give it a rest writers, not clever.

See also:

The first is, hands down, the best - Ridley Scott's Alien (1979), but it's worth going through the following three films to see how the wildly varied directors turned them out - James Cameron, then David Fincher, then Jean-Pierre Jeunet.