At The Movies: Alien: Romulus proves the sci-fi horror franchise still has bite

Alien: Romulus (NC16)

119 minutes, opens on Aug 15 4 stars

The story: Set in the period between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) on a bleak mining planet run by the ruthless Weyland-Yutani Corporation, a group of young people, sick of being treated like slaves, plot their escape to a better world. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her lifelong android companion Andy (David Jonsson) – along with friends Tyler (Archie Renaux), Kay (Isabela Merced), Bjorn (Spike Fearn) and Navarro (Aileen Wu) – hatch an exit plan that involves breaking into a derelict space station.

It has come full circle. This movie – the ninth in the franchise, if one includes the two spin-offs – is a homage to Ridley Scott’s 1979 original, while also being one of 2024’s best films in any genre.

Uruguayan director and co-writer Fede Alvarez has shown the way forward for the horror franchise, which till now has found itself mired in philosophising (Alien 3, 1992; Prometheus, 2012; Alien: Covenant, 2017) or the same old running and screaming (Alien Resurrection, 1997).

Like the scientists in Alien Resurrection, Alvarez has performed DNA splicing, combining familiar franchise set-ups, weapons and characters to create a hybrid greater than the sum of its parts. Viewers will be pointing at Alvarez’s acts of homage and saying, “That rings a bell”, while never feeling the fourth wall break.

At its heart, the first film was a B-movie, a “ghost ship” slasher-horror flick complete with a final girl survivor, except it was set in space, with a budget to match.

Studios tend to give sequels even bigger budgets, so the films strayed from the single-location ghost ship format to become war epics, as in James Cameron’s Aliens or bargain-basement versions of Stanley Kubrick’s classic work of science fiction, 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), if Kubrick had given the ruthless computer HAL a face, limbs and Pinocchio-like yearning to be human.

Alvarez proves that when the horror label is worn with pride, a gory B-movie can have a place in the summer blockbuster line-up.

The budget has been well spent – the abandoned spaceship bearing all the action is capacious and ingeniously structured for a mix of chase scenarios. The xenomorphs, chest-bursters and face-huggers, all created with real materials, look properly creepy.

Yes, running, screaming and jump scares take up the majority of Alien: Romulus, but that is balanced by the ingenuity of the getaway mechanics. Ladders, doors, lifts and other bits of spaceship furniture do double duty as escape routes and, when death is imminent, as Chekhov’s guns in the hands of survivors like Rain.

The relationship between Rain and Andy is the poignant heart of a story that would otherwise be a cacophony of killing. Spaeny (Civil War, 2024; Priscilla, 2023) holds the role of victim and avenger in one consistent package. Jonsson (Industry, 2020 to present), playing her synthetic sibling, imbues Andy with more humanity than most human characters.

Hot take: Do moviegoers need another Alien movie? Yes, when it is this inventive and unafraid of returning to its B-movie horror roots.