Alien: Romulus review: This 'clever, gripping and sometimes awe ...

Since the first two films in the 1980s, the sci-fi horror series has been a very mixed bag. But this latest gets back to basics, and makes for a superbly scary monster movie.

There have already been eight Alien films, including the two Alien vs Predator spin-offs, but if you add up the Alien films which are genuinely good, that number gets much, much smaller. The series is notorious for sequels and prequels that were compromised by personality clashes and studio interference, and even the last two, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, ended up being derivative and pretentious muddles, despite being made by the director of the peerless 1979 original, Ridley Scott.

Now, though, the total of genuinely good Alien films has gone up by one. Fede Álvarez, the Uruguayan director of Don't Breathe and 2013's remake of The Evil Dead, has triumphed with a clever, gripping and sometimes awe-inspiring sci-fi chiller, which takes the series back to its nerve-racking monster-movie roots while injecting it with some new blood – some new acid blood, you might say.

He has set Alien: Romulus between the events of Scott's Alien and James Cameron's Aliens, and he takes care to recreate the retro-futuristic atmosphere of those films. In particular, he sticks to their weathered industrial aesthetic, with its low lighting, its jets of steam and its scratched and dented machinery, most of which gets jammed so often that it's amazing anyone from Earth ever made it past the Moon. He also brings back the rumblings of anti-corporate sentiment, and uses characters who seem like ordinary people rather than pre-ordained action heroes, while he and his co-writer, Rodo Sayagues, have fashioned a fast-moving, sort-of logical plot that is refreshingly short of the "why are those idiots doing that?" moments that spoilt Prometheus and Covenant. Wisely, he doesn't attempt to shoehorn in Sigourney Weaver, although a surprise guest appearance by someone who appeared in an early Alien film will delight some fans of the series while upsetting others.

The main characters are a group of twentysomething colonists who are stuck in dead-end mining jobs on a grey and grimy planet that never has any sunlight. The actors include Archie Renaux, Isabella Merced, Aileen Wu and Spike Fearn, but the only characters anyone will care about are the orphaned Rain, played with steely grace by Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla), and her awkward adoptive brother Andy, played with exquisite nuance by David Jonsson (Rye Lane). These downtrodden workers have to labour away for years before they are eventually allowed to travel to the verdant planet Rain has been dreaming of, but one of them has a better idea. They have detected an abandoned spaceship in orbit just above them, so if they can fly up to it in their own shuttle craft, they should be able to salvage its cryogenic pods, put themselves into suspended animation and zoom off to their dreamworld before the colony's authorities catch up with them.

After setting off, the first thing these young rebels discover is that the abandoned spaceship is actually a space station. The second thing they discover is that it's abandoned because, you guessed it, its crew was wiped out by spiky-tailed, long-clawed, cucumber-headed xenomorphs. Soon it will be Rain's turn to be chased along metal corridors by these monsters, but that's not her only problem. There are fuel supplies and law-enforcement officials to worry about, and the space station is drifting towards an asteroid belt which will rip it to shreds in a matter of hours. As in all the best ticking-clock thrillers, the characters have a limited amount of time to complete their mission, and then that time suddenly gets a lot more limited.

It feels like a missed opportunity not to have the creatures wreaking havoc in the colony itself, considering how expansive and detailed that dingy setting is. But Alien: Romulus delivers the goods as a creepy haunted-house-in-space film with some crafty twists, hold-your-breath suspense and popcorn-dropping scares. Relying on practical rather than digital effects, Álvarez makes the xenomorphs as nightmarish as they ever have been. He is sensible enough to keep them hidden for most of the running time, skilfully building tension with muffled clangs and glimpsed silhouettes, but whenever the monsters do emerge from the shadows, he makes repulsive use of the icky slime and squelchy, birth-related imagery which have become the series' trademarks.

In fact, my main complaint about Alien: Romulus is that the aliens aren't in it enough. Determined to pay loving homage to several of the franchise's previous films, Álvarez can't resist dropping in concepts and plot strands from all over the series, and, among all those, the iconic xenomorphs are slightly under-used. It's also easy to lose track of which characters are still alive, which spacecraft they're in, and what the rules are concerning room temperature and artificial gravity. The stripped-back simplicity of Scott's first Alien film still hasn't been matched by any of its successors, whether or not they're directed by Scott himself.

Alien: Romulus beats most of the competition, though. Bloated by two or three elements too many, it isn't a "perfect organism", to use the phrase coined by Ian Holm's android character in Alien, but it's as close to perfect as any entry in the series since Aliens in 1986.

★★★★☆

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