While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.

It’d be fair to say that recent attempts to revive the ‘Alien’ series haven’t been wholly successful, with ‘Aliens’, which is almost 40 years old now, the last movie in the series to be widely considered as living up to the high expectations set by Ridley Scott’s 1979 ‘Alien’. The most recent two prequels, ‘Prometheus’ and ‘Alien: Covenant’ saw Scott return to the franchise and had their moments in my opinion, but they suffered by getting too caught up in complicated lore that failed to add anything meaningful to the series – to be honest, I can barely recall much of what happened in either of them. For ‘Alien: Romulus’, Scott has moved aside and Fede Alvarez is now in the directors chair, and his focus has clearly been on delivering an entertaining ‘Alien’ movie as opposed to building out the series mythology, and for my money, it mostly succeeds in doing so.

‘Alien: Romulus’ sits somewhere in between prequel and sequel (apparently this is known as an ‘interquel’), taking place between ‘Alien’ and ‘Aliens’ and focusing on a group of young space colonists who are living miserable lives on a mining colony with no sunlight and even less opportunities. The group is led by Tyler (Archie Renaux), but our viewpoint comes through his ex-girlfriend Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her adoptive brother Andy (David Jonsson), who is an android (sorry, synthetic human). Alongside Tyler’s pregnant sister Kay (Isabela Merced) and a couple of others (Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu), they develop a plan to retrieve cryochambers from an abandoned spaceship that may enable them to travel to a different planet with sunlight and more opportunities. Of course, they will soon discover that this spaceship may not be quite as abandoned as expected, and the story takes off from here.

I realised after about an hour of the movie that I hadn’t once checked my watch or considered the time, which is testament to how director Fede Alvarez had hooked me in, and I particularly liked that it wastes very little time on setup before it gets the group to the spaceship. The claustrophobic setting is well realised and I felt there was enough inventiveness in the storytelling to make this enjoyable in its own right, even as it is hewing very closely to the template set by ‘Alien’ many years ago. It is undoubtedly helped by the performances of Cailee Spaeny and especially David Jonsson, who is brilliant as the android Andy, and the dynamic between those two more than makes up for some of the more obvious archetypes we see in the rest of the group.

‘Alien: Romulus’ isn’t going to reinvent the wheel but in setting out to deliver an entertaining ‘Alien’ movie, I felt it succeeded and I enjoyed this a lot more than I was expecting to.

Rating: 4/5

Directed By: Fede Alvarez

Starring: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn and Aileen Wu

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt18412256/