Alien: Romulus (2024)

After Ridley Scott’s attempt to destroy this franchise and legacy with the one-two punch of Prometheus and Covenant, the reins were handed over to Fede Alvarez and while far from perfect, a welcome return to horror roots.The setup is much like Alvarez’s other films, Don’t Breathe and Evil Dead, focusing on a younger cast of mostly unsympathetic characters, with an element of malicious glee in watching horrific things happen to them. And there are some genuinely horrific moments strewn throughout, not afraid to focus on some of the more gut-churning possibilities the franchise offers. There are also a number of highly inventive sequences, remixing the elements from previous films yet delivering something harrowing, especially the zero-g sequence. Most of the cast is decent, but David Jonsson delivers a genuinely amazing performance in his portrayal of the android Andy, alternating between personas with a chilling efficiency. Alvarez focuses much of his attention on the facehugger part of the life-cycle, so arachnophobes are certainly going to be cringing, but there is copious gore and effectively built tension throughout. The film does tend to revisit and amalgamate elements from other entries in the series, providing a kind of a ‘greatest hits’ package for the franchise, and for the most part this is not a bad thing, unifying many of the disparate entries. Where the film falters is in an unnecessary need to make callbacks and shoutouts, recycling iconic lines to simply key-jangle nostalgia bait. The last act goes a bit off the deep end, and revisits one of the more shameful moments in the franchise history, but delivered far more effectively and with more nastiness. On the whole, while not necessarily offering much new, it reinvigorates and refreshes the alien franchise where I would welcome additional entries despite once having written it off.

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