Get all your news in one place.
100's of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Ben Child

Can Alien: Romulus return the space saga to its chestbursting glory years?

Looks encouragingly familiar … Cailee Spaeny in Alien: Romulus.
Looks encouragingly familiar … Cailee Spaeny in Alien: Romulus. Photograph: 20th Century Studios

Back in the day, if you accidentally created a giant plot hole in your science fiction saga, you were done, your goose droid cooked, with nothing to look forward to but the prospect of future generations looking back scornfully at your ever-sullied work of cinema.

But then along came Star Wars: Rogue One, a movie that somehow made sense of all the really silly bits in 1977’s Star Wars, such as the climactic sequence in which Luke Skywalker managed to blow up the Death Star in his tiny little star fighter. It turned out (albeit nearly 40 years later) that this wasn’t a plot hole but an ingenious deliberate flaw in the giant planet-killing monstrosity’s system planted there by Imperial scientist Galen Erso (Mads Mikkelsen), because he was miffed that the Empire had forced him to build it in the first place.

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100's of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.