Alien: Romulus review – grungy, back-to-basics instalment goes over same old ground

Fede Álvarez’s new instalment in the Alien franchise presents as a younger, grungier, back-to-basics effort, moving away from the grandiose cosmic reach of Ridley Scott’s films Prometheus (from 2012) and, five years later, Alien: Covenant while attempting a return to the downbeat conspiracy paranoia and anti-corporate satire that made the original so unforgettably good. It also, very startlingly, brings back a major character from the 1979 Alien, the actor involved having perhaps signed away CGI image use rights at the time, or conceivably their descendants have been paid a royalty fee.

The resulting movie is a technically competent piece of work; but no matter how ingenious its references to the first film (let down, however, by borrowings from the A Quiet Place franchise) it has to be said that there’s a fundamental lack of originality here which makes it frustrating. There’s isn’t a single person involved, from director to stars to people on craft services who wouldn’t have been better employed actually working on something new.

The film’s position on the Alien timeline is somewhere between the first two films, though in such a way that the drama exists outside that larger narrative and the assumed destiny of its survivors will be in a secret parallel to the continuing sequence – though perhaps they will be brought back in some Alien Cinematic Universe. On a grim mining planet, Rain, played by Cailee Spaeny, is one of a legion of young serf-workers being exploited on a meagre wage and a (dishonest) promise that the employer will not impede their onward travels once their contractual term is up. Rain lives with Andy (David Jonsson), a sweet-natured cyborg “synthetic”, owned by her late parents and programmed to help her at all times.

Rain hangs out with a bunch of young rebels and pilots who have discovered a derelict space station floating just overhead; they surmise that this craft has all the cryo-freeze equipment and fuel they need to just get away. Furthermore, Andy’s compatible software will allow him to breach the spaceship’s security and hijack it by simply placing his fingertip on the door panels. But once aboard, Rain and her friends make an awful discovery about the creepy-crawly things that have been sealed up in it – although the film has its cake and eats it by having the aliens already in place, but also staging a scene where one jumps on to someone’s face and pumps seed down their throats, as per the iconic jump-scare moment. (The purpose of this, in the first film, was to enable the alien to get on to the spacecraft).

As for Andy, he gets an automatic system-upgrade simply by being on this mysterious craft and it seems he is longer quite so committed to Rain’s wellbeing as before. And when the firearms are being handed out, there are no prizes for guessing which demure character is going to be the ultimate survivor. And so the action grinds on to its conclusion, although with a new twist about why it is these aliens have been secretly bred by sinister forces and what sort of a ghastly new life-form will finally emerge. Yet that, too, feels anticlimactic. It feels too obvious a paradox to say that Alien has become over-familiar. Did we need another Alien film?

• Alien: Romulus is out in Australia, the UK and US on 16 August.