Starring Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson   

Directed by Fede Álvarez

Disney, in cinemas now

‘Available from 20 Century Studios – ‘Now That’s What I Call Alien’ – a ‘best of’ mixtape of all your favourite bits from the previous Alien movies… even the bad ones. Relive your favourite moments recreated with a new cast, using the same lines of old dialogue, or even recycled faces!’

OK, I’m being deliberately a bit mean here about Fede Alvarez’ new Alien movie, because it is actually very well put together with some nice set-pieces and scares, but the overwhelming feeling is one of a lack of ambition. I guess we’ve only got ourselves to blame after our criticism of the pseudo-science and baffling mythology of previous movies Prometheus and Alien Covenant. The message was clear – just make the sort of Alien film that people want rather than the one they need. And here’s the result.

There are a couple of moments where the mechanics of the Alien lifecycle is extended or aspects of the mythos are played with, but otherwise it’s two hours of creeping round the USS Deja-Vu, waiting to be pounced upon by Xenomorphs or Parasitoids (the creatures formerly known as Facehuggers) with the usual predictable results.

Benjamin Wallfisch’s score fuses its own action cues with audio nods to Goldsmith, Horner, Goldenthal et al, and there’s visual Easter eggs in the background to leave us in no doubt what universe we’re in. David Jonsson is excellent as ‘artificial human’ Andy and Cailee Spaeny brings a vulnerability to the Alien movie female lead – she’s a survivor rather than an action hero.

Playing more like an Alien-themed theme park ride (remember Alien War at the Trocadero?) than an original movie in its own right, Alien Romulus is a thoroughly entertaining though highly derivative experience that gives us all the Alien movies all at once. It’s The Force Awakens equivalent of the Alien movies, for good or bad.

Verdict: The box office over the last weekend has shown that there is still an appetite for Alien movies, and I for one would love to see what happens next, but hopefully any sequels would get the chance to create their own identities. 7/10

Nick Joy

A group of young workers attempting to escape indentured labour on a corporation planet, attempt to raid a derelict space station for its cryochambers; however the labyrinthine modules aren’t as deserted as they might appear.

I was still in my teens when I first saw Ridley Scott’s Alien in the opening week of its UK release. It involved a trip up to London, as it wouldn’t hit Harlow Odeon – which only had one screen – for a good few weeks. Yes, kids, we really did have it tough in the old days!

I’d never been particularly keen on Star Wars, so this felt, at last, like the science fiction movie I’d been waiting for all my life (all nineteen years of it). Mucky, scary, and with characters who were vaguely like people I knew (I’d spent a good deal of my gap year working in factories and packing lorries). So, for anyone (like me) for whom Scott’s original movie is the benchmark in science fiction horror, the first hour of Alien: Romulus is a bona fide return to its grungy, industrial ‘truckers-in-space’ vibe, albeit the truckers now replaced by sort of hard core teenaged indentured Amazon grunts.

Gone are the tedious philosophical ramblings of the Prometheus and Covenant  prequels, and blissfully forgotten are all the Predator spinoffs and other galumphing sequels (yes, yes, I know, Aliens was brilliant too).

Rain (Cailee Spaeny – who we last saw being a nuisance in Alex Garland’s annoying Civil War), determined to escape corporate slavery on an oily, lightless mining planet, along with her digitally unstable synthetic human, Andy (a wonderfully doe-eyed David Jonsson) joins a posse of embittered orphans on their quest to gather the kit necessary for an interplanetary flit.

As soon as they catch sight of the haunted house – sorry, deserted space station – we know pretty much what’s going to happen, but that’s all to the good, because this is pacy, back-to-basics stuff, with zinging dialogue and messy, angry characters.

For that first sixty minutes, I was nineteen again, helped a good deal by Benjamin Wallfisch’s excellent score which quotes liberally from Jerry Goldsmith’s iconic original.

However, round about the halfway point the movie starts to go up its own xenomorphic bum, and there’s just too much plot and exposition about stuff that’ll do stuff, if you do other stuff, and press that button or pull that lever, or inject that thing… into, well, more stuff. I lost track, but to be honest, I didn’t really care as I was still having a good time.

Alien: Romulus just about works as a self-contained story, slotting neatly between the first two in the franchise, but there are a lot of nods to its predecessors – perhaps too many, and too heavy-handed for some people. One particularly humongous nod might be the movie’s marmite test. I went with it, as the meta discomfort it inspired me felt appropriate to the film’s overall tone, but I suspect it will be the subject of many an argument between Alien nerds for decades to come.

Verdict: Alien: Romulus is not perfect by any means, but it’s by far the best of the franchise since James Cameron’s Aliens sequel, hugely entertaining, never boring, lovingly made by a director who clearly adores and respects the heritage with which he has been trusted. 7/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com