Finally, an Alien film worthy of the original — with a new star

In space no one can hear you scream, but the release of Ridley Scott’s Alien was marked by the clickety-clack of a thousand doctoral theses being typed. Feminists warmed to its heroine and the fact that the white males became dead white males faster than any other ethnic group. Marxists nodded approval of the film’s grimy, Conradian take on late capitalism, and Freudians had a field day, for a film more in need of a trip to the analyst’s couch would be harder to find, with its horrific births, gynaecological designs and a homicidal super-computer called “Mother”.
Even Scott got involved in the Alien analysis cottage industry, making two prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, so swollen with cosmic-mythic musing that they completely forgot to be frightening. For all its subtextual nooks and crannies, Alien was at root a horror film, dark and dripping, set on board the creaking haunted house of the spaceship Nostromo, whose labyrinthine passages echoed the mansions of gothic horrors past.
“Alien is to Star Wars what the Rolling Stones were to the Beatles,” as the producer David Giler put it. “It’s a nasty Star Wars.” Characters smoked — in space! — and complained about their wages. It even rained up there.
Here to deliver another down’n’dirty Keith Richards riffis the Uruguayan director Fede Álvarez, whose horror credentials — Don’t Breathe, Evil Dead — make a change from all the A-listers, like David Fincher, who have lined up to give the franchise a polish in the past. It turns out he has exactly the right level of pulp in his veins, together with a deep, eagle-eyed love of the series, to take it where it needs to go.
For Scott and James Cameron, the horrifying thing was the thought of alien birth, particularly when the person birthing is a man. For Álvarez the emphasis falls on the horror of impregnation. It isn’t just that the alien has sex with us, it rapes us, hence the images in both the trailer and poster of an alien face-hugger clamped to a human head, looking for a warm throat to incubate its eggs.
Alien: Romulus is an Alien movie, then, for our age of consent. Cailee Spaeny heads up a cast of mining colony orphans and deadbeats — Archie Renaux, Aileen Wu, Spike Fearn, Isabela Merced, plus David Johnson as a kindly synthetic — who chance on an abandoned space station whose cryopods may just be their ticket off-world and out of the clutches of the wicked Weyland-Yutani corporation.
They dream of one day seeing the sun, and jet off to a distant, life-supporting moon and establish a colony of happy terraformers growing alfalfa sprouts in peace and tranquillity. Just kidding. Instead, they come across a lab containing row upon row of crablike face-hugging alien parasites who, once awoken, are keen for a rampant round of speed-dating.
• Alien: Romulus — how cinema’s most horrifying monster became scary again
Like the creature at its centre, Alien: Romulus is a remarkable piece of adaptive creative bioengineering. There are nods to Scott’s original film in the resuscitation of Ash, Ian Holm’s synthetic science officer — raised from the dead by the miracle of CGI — and to Cameron’s Aliens in the pulse rifles Renaux teaches Spaeny how to handle. But there are passages in this film — most notably a zero-gravity firefight that ends up with Spaeny trying to dodge spumes of acidic alien blood — that are wholly Álvarez’s own, suggesting that the franchise still has some life in it.
It has definitely found its lead in Spaeny. As Civil War suggested, the 26-year-old has a direct line to all the most visceral elements of screen acting — from prickly excitement to pupil-dilating fear — and here she adds skills with a pulse rifle that would do Lieutenant Ellen Ripley proud. ★★★★☆Fede Álvarez, 15, 119min
What’s your favourite sci-fi film? Let us know in the comments below
A documentary-maker goes behind enemy lines with the militant group as they reoccupy Kabul
Frogmarching in uniforms two sizes too big for them, the Taliban members who appear in Ibrahim Nash’at’s fascinating documentary Hollywoodgateseem less like a terrifying insurgent militia, still less the brokers of a new theocratic emirate, and more like teenage boys who have wandered onto the world stage and cannot quite believe their luck.
The title is taken from an abandoned US base, which we see the Taliban exploring by the light of their iPhones, an Aladdin’s cave containing everything from beer, food cartons and medicine to radar dishes, Black Hawk helicopters and fighter jets — part of the $7 billion worth of equipment abandoned by the Americans when they pulled out in 2021.
“So many strange things,” they marvel, “so much medicine.” With these resources they could “rule the world,” one says. “Do we have pilots for those?” asks another, Mawlawi Mansour, the new commander of the air force, one of two figures Nash’at had permission to film over a year from August 31, 2021 following the Taliban’s reoccupation of Kabul.
• Ken Burns: the five documentaries that made me
Mansour is a jovial man — primitive, disorganised, numerically illiterate — who giggles over Russia’s quagmire in Ukraine, boasts of the people he has had killed in front of his young son, and giggles sheepishly over the hand he sprains beating back protesters. “This was fun,” he says, getting down from an American treadmill found at the base. “We must use it to train our soldiers.”
Fun is not a word usually associated with the Taliban, and the other figure Nash’at has access to, Lieutenant MJ Mukhtar, is less of a charmer: he’s saturnine in visor shades. He fumbles with an American automatic rifle in the desert — “where is the setting for burst-fire mode?” — and is tasked with going door to door at night, tracking down “infiltrators” from the previous President Karzai regime.
“It’s hunting time,” he says. Thankfully, Nash’at is told to stay in the car with his camera, so all we hear are the distant rifle cracks, echoing across the desert, followed by the barking of dogs. Perhaps the most chilling thing of all is that the documentary was done with the full approval of the Taliban: this is how they want to appear. ★★★☆☆Ibrahim Nash’at, 12A, 92min
Make Wednesday your go-to cinema day. Each month Times+ members can bring a friend for free at Everyman on a Wednesday. The perfect cinema experience with plush sofas, a full bar and great food. Visit mytimesplus.co.uk to find out more.
What have you enjoyed at the cinema recently? Let us know in the comments below. Then browse our expert-curated collections of the best movies and follow @timesculture to read the latest reviews