Alien: Romulus ★★★

BEING handed the keys to the Alien franchise is a big deal.

You will be working in the shadows of Ridley Scott, James Cameron and David Fincher so you better bring your A Game.

Young Uraguayan writer/director Fede Alvarez knew his limitations when he started creating Alien: Romulus.

He had shown with his previous two features, the 2013 remake of Evil Dead and Don’t Breathe (2016), that he could make a damned good horror film.

So Alvarez brought that knowledge and confidence to this seventh instalment and made one of the best horror/sci-fi films of the past 10 years.

Alien: Romulus is also clever in that it functions as a stand-alone horror film while making some small connections to the other films and overall lore of the franchise.

Apart from one misstep, which we will get to, the film gets the level of pandering to the Alien franchise fans pretty right.

In this story we are taken back to the period between the events of Scott’s 1979 original film and the first sequel, Aliens (1986), directed by Cameron.

It’s 2142 (yes purists, I know the dates across the entire franchise don’t match up) and we are in the remote mining colony Jackson’s Star, run by Weyland-Yutani, the same corporation that sent the original crew of the USCSS Nostromo on its ill-fated salvage mission.

Mining contractor Rain Carradine and her adoptive brother and android Andy, want out of the colony. Rain has reached the end of her original work contract period and is looking forward to them being able to pursue an easier job on a more hospitable planet.

But Weyland-Yutani suddenly extends her contract by several years with no possibility of leaving the colony. In desperation, Rain and Andy join her ex-boyfriend and three others in using a derelict spacecraft to reach a larger, currently abandoned one. They plan to retrieve its cryostasis chambers in order to make the longer journey to another planet.

Got all that? It’s explained better and more interestingly in the film and there are a couple of nice twists to the story that add further tension to the proceedings when they are stuck on the other vessel and find it inhabited by the original alien life in a couple of its deadly forms.

The film does have computer-generated effects but also uses built sets and creature prosthetics to give it more of a look and feel akin to Scott’s original film and one of the more recent entries, Prometheus.

There are plenty of good jump scares and a clever sequence playing with gravity that allows the  to stamp its own mark on the franchise.

That misstep I spoke about is where they take things a little too far in harking back to one particular story thread and character from the original film. The thread would have been enough rather than needing to show us the actual character. You’ll know what I mean when you see the film.

This is essentially a traditional haunted house/monster horror film set in space, but with just enough Alien nods to fit within the lore. It doesn’t advance the over-arching Alien story in any way, but it’s great fun all the same.

Watched at the cinema.