Review: ALIEN ROMULUS

Ok, so young Rain gets told that the company has upped the minimum contract hours by five more years so she's officially headed back to the mines which have a lethal effect on miners (um .... union!) She hears out the plan of a group of friends who want to ditch their contracts and flee to the distant planet Yvaga. Why doesn't she bring her synthetic person/brother along who can help with security when they raid the derelict hulk they've found for its cryopods. Long way to Yvaga. She says ok and off they go. When they find the hulk it's heading for the rocky rings of the planet which will mince it. They have a few hours. When they dock and get in, they meet a colony of xenomorphs. That's the plot.

But that's all it has to be. What is the 1979 Alien, when you think about it? It takes some decent swipes at future capitalism, for certain, but when it gets going, it's a slashy monster movie. People exult the first sequel Aliens over it but that really only ups the scale, adding little more than running time and more xenomorphs. Two further sequels filtered in religion and prisons and the prequels attempted the clumsy injection of meta religion to offer an origin story which only added cringe. Well, now new horror director Fede Alvarez has taken it back to its roots as a capitalism-driven monster movie with a lot of white knuckle suspense and high octane action.

And, you know what? It's really entertaining. The momentum, once the threat is discovered is maintained and this does drag towards the end when we realise that there is a vat of further action to be doused with before the credits but it does what it says it will. There are callbacks to the earlier instalments and they bother me as cutesy winks rather than fan service. The suggestion of a method to deal with the acid blood is an addition that is worthy of mention as it affects the action and allows this episode a place high in the lore of the franchise.

All this is helped by seeing it in a full cinema of people who were with it all the way. In these times o' loungeroom cinema that is easily made a distant memory but the spectacle of an efficient action movie finds a real home in the dark, surrounded by cronies and strangers. I normally would have shooshed the dickheads two rows back who have lost all perception of the difference between voice levels in living rooms and cinemas but the movie was so loud with a banging Dolby Atmos mix, that I didn't care much.