OK, bone dread fear from the original, shadows and echoes of which are still with me. Some visceral excitement from Cameron’s sequel and I just loved the Queen. I actually really liked Fincher’s No. 3, especially the director’s cut. I found things to be entertained by in Resurrection except for the ridiculous human-alien hybrid. I am ignoring the Predator crossovers. Hope you don’t mind. Prometheus promised big and its flaws bugged me to LV-426 and back and Covenant just came and went. So, here we are. New director, new ideas, 45 year-old old ground. Álvarez imagined what if the children from a deleted Aliens scene were grown up? What would they be doing? How could they escape from having to do it and what would happen if the Weyland-Yutani company was as dumb, relentlessly ambitious and anxious (to quote Ripley) to secure “the alien for the weapons division.”

A salvage mission in deep space arrives at the debris of the Nostromo, the ship Ripley blew up in the first Alien. They are looking for any remains of the xenomorph. I’d have to really pay attention on a second viewing to see what they did find. I mean that Nostromo explosion was extreme. What was left on the ship from the alien? All I can think of is discarded chest burster skin, and an alien nest with a dead, torched captain entombed in it. But did I mention that it was an enormous explosion? I’m pretty sure they found something… A young off-world miner for the Weyland-Yutani company working at the Jackson Star colony, Rain, has completed her work days and is owed time off. She is flatly refused and her work days are doubled. These people are no better off than slaves but then ‘the company’ has always been the main ‘bad guy’ in the series. Rain’s adopted brother, Andy, is a synthetic human and as such is treated badly by many. Rain’s father programmed him to look after his daughter after he died. So Andy has a lot of ‘dad jokes’, some of which are actually funny. But he’s also meek and acts very young, almost needy. It seems in their relationship, it’s Rain who’s doing the looking after. Not happy with her current predicament, Rain is summoned to her ex-boyfriend, Tyler and his little group of friends and relations who’ve hatched a plan to travel to a significantly nicer planet (with added sunshine) but as it’s so far away, they will need fully fuelled cryo-tubes to stay in stasis for the journey. Using their own space-ready ship, they plan to steal them from an abandoned research station with Andy’s help (he’s a synthetic company man with company interface programmed in) In other words, he’s a door opener. The research station is divided in two with the names ‘Romulus’ and ‘Remus’. Guess what kind of research was going on… What could possibly go wrong?

The curse of an ongoing franchise is to deliver more of the same, but different.
As I sat down, my thoughts arrived at a potential marker for my own personal satisfaction. It’s an Alien movie which has a paradox at its heart. It’s an Alien movie so it will almost certainly have a face hugger, a chest burster and a grown xenomorph. But we are overly well acquainted with Alien movies so as an audience we are always ahead of the characters. This is never a good place to be. It’s almost like ticking boxes. So I made up my mind. I accepted that the standard alien ultra-violence would be in place but my judgement would be based on whether the film gave me a good, new idea around the tropes of the series. It gave me two which is why I’m writing this review. But as they are massive spoilers, I’ll keep them to myself.

An undoubtedly new facet of Alien Romulus was the cast, a team of fresh-faced twenty-somethings but this wasn’t one of the two ‘new’ things I mentioned earlier. And this is an Alien movie so no bets necessary as to who’s going to survive. It’s a no brainer that someone has to survive. Rain, played by Cailee Spaeny (she was the enthusiastic young photographer in Civil War), goes through so much in the course of the film that the idea of the group’s plan for all to sleep for nine years after everything that happened would seem to me to be the very last thing on my list, well down from several years of psychoanalysis and trauma counselling. I mean, imagine the dreams. The real meaty role of Andy is played by David Jonsson. Like Brent Spiner’s Data in Star Trek The Next Generation, Jonsson is afforded a few chances of changing his character via a chip in his synthetic brain that Rain swaps around to get more information about the alien threat they are facing. Jonsson is very good playing both characters. On hand, in a sort of Basil Exposition role, is Rook, half an android (the upper half) and what a familiar face to have back in an Alien movie. Daniel Betts does a marvellous vocal impression of Science Officer Ash aided with a CG face replacement which is certainly getting there (but not quite yet). It’s all about knowing the actor Ian Holm is dead that makes you seek out the imperfections. Compare this work with the CG Peter Cushing in Rogue One.

The rest of the cast acquit themselves well. Archie Renaux as Tyler, Rain's ex-boyfriend, is the leader of the pack. His sister Kay is played by Isabela Merced and is pregnant. Pregnant. In an Alien movie? This is what’s called foreshadowing. Shudder… The android-hating Bjorn (who’s also a bit of a dick most of the time), Tyler and Kay's cousin, is a role Spike Fearn has some fun with. He does something very unwise with a futuristic cattle prod. Aileen Wu plays Navarro, a pilot and Bjorn's girlfriend. It’s no secret what happens to this poor soul. She’s the face huggee on the poster…

Benjamin Wallfisch’s dense score is dizzying with so much referential nodding, not unlike the movie itself but we’ll get to that. There’s Jerry Goldsmith’s stone cold original score alluded to as well as the 2001 Ligeti cues. I thought I could make out bars of Goldsmith’s Total Recall too. The score is rich and is definitely written to a direction of returning to the franchise’s roots. Like Goldsmith’s original, there are moments of romance as in the definition: a quality or feeling of mystery, excitement, and remoteness from everyday life. But if you play the score on a loop for a day, get ready for some atonal sound effect cues which are not exactly easy listening. For mood’s sake, I crawled back to Goldsmith’s score. The more I listen to it (oh you don’t know how many times), the more I’m convinced it’s a masterpiece.

If I had any issues… As we start at the mining colony the intelligibility of the dialogue was a little hard to catch. It could be the result of my high end hearing loss but the dialogue was fifty per cent garbled in the first few scenes. That’s always frustrating. There is a relentless and continual stream of overt franchise references to earlier films based around the conceit that the film is set in the same era as Alien so all the tech works just like it did on the Nostromo. Even the set dressing alludes to Scott’s original with the dunking bird in one scene. This constant referencing only really irked me once with the climax of an action scene and an odd line delivery by Jonsson… “Get away from her, (pause) you bitch.” Not sure why the most famous line in the sequel to the original still decades into the future - as far as the Alien timeline goes - was required there. The sequel Aliens happens 61 years after Romulus… It was such an odd reference to make. Unless it was a fourth wall break, there was no reason for it to exist and then even if it was, there was still no reason for it. In online critiques, this line – and its irrelevance - comes up quite a bit.

* https://www.cbc.ca/arts/q/alien-romulus-director-explains-how-a-deleted-scene-in-aliens-inspired-the-new-film-1.7295256