Alien: Romulus review: supercharged spectacular blasts flagging series back to gory, glorious life

Quick questions first. Will the ninth addition to the Alien franchise satisfy sci-fi supergeek fans? Maybe not. Is there anything new in this? Not a whole load. Is it any good? Holy hell, yeah!

New kid in the Alien director’s chair Fede Alvarez (he made decent horror flick Don’t Breathe and rebooted Evil Dead) has crafted a shudderingly chilly knuckle-clencher that blasts the flagging series back to gory, glorious life.

The good news for viewers who weren’t even alive when Ridley Scott’s Alien ripped that genre-definingly gruesome hole in cinema screens back in 1979 is that you don’t have to spend days playing catch-up. While riffing on and paying grisly homage to the previous films, this is a stand-alone outing.

It opens deep in the interstellar void, where an ominous hunk of incinerated rock is captured and lasered open to reveal “something” tantalisingly mysterious. Cut to Rain (Cailee Spaeny) on grim and sun-starved Jackson’s Star Mining Colony, who has just been shafted and had five years service added to a detested job she thought was about to end.

Rightly furious after dreaming of a new life on a sun-kissed planet, Rain leaps at the offer of hopping on a getaway spaceship with a crew of young tearaways to head there anyway.

The non-negotiable is that she must also take her inseparable ‘brother’ Andy, in fact a ‘synthetic’ robot charmingly played by David Jonsson with all the awkward social misfit ticks he displayed so well in last year’s romcom Rye Lane. Apart from being a piece of highly logical, advanced semi-flesh, Andy’s major talent is abysmal grandad jokes.

At this point, you might be wondering if the mission has been hijacked by the cast of a British teen drama, as besides Jonsson we have less well known UK talents Archie Renaux and Spike Fearns alongside Isabela Merced and Aileen Wu. It’s the youngest cast of an Alien film so far.

They are forced to stop over at an abandoned space station on the way to the promised land. Uh oh. And don’t forget that enigmatic rock! The rest is all-out, full-on alien group jeopardy, with some clever double-crossing and personality shifts, plus a gut-churning freakshow finale, thrown in.

Alien groupies will be cock-a-hoop, as the metal-mouthed, acid-dribbling creature is as terrifying as it’s ever been. As will the gore-hounds, particularly those lusting after a spot of vintage chest-bursting. Alvarez does it all with mighty oomph and relentless, cold, hard menace.

Thought: James Cameron and David Fincher both enjoyed glittering stardom after directing Aliens and Alien 3 very early on in their careers. Could Alvarez be heading the same way?

And for those concerned as to whether Spaeny can hold a movie like this after her ever-so-slightly under-powered performances in Priscilla and Civil War: learn to stop worrying and love her. She bosses it big time.

Yes, the mega-nerds might say that everything here has been done in the previous outings, and there may be moans about some minor plot improbabilities. And there isn’t much in the way of new world-building; it’s a simple, bare-bones story.

However, if your idea of fun is a supercharged survival thriller set in spectacularly rendered deep space (and, of course, the return of one of the greatest monsters cinema has ever seen), holy humdinging hell beckons.

Alien: Romulus is in cinemas from August 16