"There's still power in this relic," says one of the protagonists in Alien: Romulus as he bids to reboot an abandoned piece of tech in the early stages of this new sci-fi horror thriller, and he is no doubt talking too for director Fede Alvarez, who is here rebidding to reboot the Alien franchise, seemingly dormant following the disappointment of the series’ second cinematic prequel, 2017's Alien Covenant.
Alvarez, director of 2013's gory Evil Dead remake and 2016's suffocatingly tense home-invasion thriller Don't Breathe, has set his new movie (co-written with frequent collaborator Rodo Sayagues) in 2142, twenty years after the events of Ridley Scott's Alien and thirty-seven before those of James Cameron's Aliens. In genre terms, his film also slots between those two films, occupying a niche somewhere between the creepy haunted house in space feel of Alien and Aliens’ gung-ho combat movie vibe. Alien: Romulus also, somewhat more unfortunately, trots out a good few of the tics and tropes of the young-people-in-peril thrillers that became the horror genre’s dominant strand somewhere between Scott’s 1979 and Cameron's 1986 films.
