I watched Fede Álvarez’s turn at the Alien franchise’s helm with, i sense, the ideal amount of knowledge. Online reviews are split — and the more Alien films the reviewer’s seen, the less they like it. Me? I’d sat down for the first and second, once, a while ago, and that was it. No slogging through assembly cuts or failed comebacks or stealth prequels or anything of the sort. Where they saw the gasping regurgitations of a dying and overexerted setting, i saw a darn good film.

The opening credits start rolling and we’re immediately in the future. Yesterday’s future. Everything’s clicks and clacks and yellowing walls, just as James Cameron left it when he turned off the lights. What they’ve done is turn what could be an embarrassing anachronism — haha, look at what those quaint twentieth-century fools thought today would look like — into a believable path that, with a nudge and a push, technology might have otherwise taken. Certainly, the bulky CRTs and Vectrex video games aren’t better than the technology of even ten years ago IRL… but they’re cheaper, exactly the sort of thing a fledgling colony would use to save money, and one gets the sense that the predilection for tactile tools and fuzzy screens is the result of æsthetics cycling back to where they were a hundred years ago, not everyone collectively forgetting how to make a liquid-crystal display.

Two sci-fi pet peeves of mine are nicely resolved, too. In the role of the astronomer-aggravating “““asteroid field””” we instead have the ring of an icy planet; the ship’s artificial gravity system is no mere cost-saving cop-out, but a structual Jenga block in the film’s action scenes, which mine the flip between 0 and 1 g for all it’s worth. Objectively speaking, Alien: Romulus just wouldn’t work on a hard sci-fi rotating spaceship, which is a rare thing!

Seven films into a franchise, it would be easy to bog oneself down in continuity and lock out any viewers who haven’t melted into their couch for a twelve-hour marathon. (This is the predicament which Marvel films have found themselves in as of late.) Equally, it would be easy to go too far in the quest to “breathe new life”™ into the world and leave us wondering why they put the Alien name on it at all. Romulus finds a sensible middle path. Its connection with the Alien brand is chiefly a matter of economy. We know, for example, that xenomorphs are bad, that they have acid blood, and that they get you boypreggers. We know Weyland-Yutani is an unscrupulous corporation in the business of space colonisation that wants to use xenomorph DNA for its own gain. We know that androids are made of milk for some reason. And so Mr Álvarez needn’t waste any time explaining that to us. Equally, nobody ever says the name “Ellen Ripley”. There’s no mention of the ancient progenitors of mankind or whatever those prequel films were about. Our story is set in the world of Alien, not the wiki.* (Please ignore that Asterisk of Doom. I’m sure it’s fine.)

*The Asterisk of Doom, or, the dead CG elephant in the room

This was an exceedingly minor thing to my overall enjoyment and i didn’t want to give it more space than it deserved, so i’m shunting it down here where noöne will see it. So. That, uh… that Ian Holm deepfake, huh?

There has always been spirited debate over the ethical quandaries of reviving old actors with effects, even before the current wave of machine learning — Crispin Glover sued Universal for flipping his character upside down in Back to the Future: Part II, remember! I actually don’t mind it, particularly when the character themself, like Ian Holm’s Ash/Rook, is meant to be artificial. (And as before, the same way we already know xenomorphs are bad news, we already know Mr Holm’s face won’t belong to someone with our crew’s best interests at heart.)

My annoyance is strictly technical. To understand the problem, let’s flash back fourteen years to Tron: Legacy, the first blockbuster to bring back an old face with the power of the computer:

Here Joseph Kosinski’s legasequel flashes back to the original film’s time period, so faces the task of bringing back Jeff Bridges as he looked in 1982. It starts with just his voice. Perfect: faces and bodies change drastically in one’s life, but at worst, a voice will get a little huskier.

Then, as we pan into his son’s room, we see him first from the back, then a side profile, in the dark. Again, perfect. Hiding shoddy CGI in the dark has been a go-to in the filmmaker’s bag of tricks since Spielberg did it in Jurassic Park. This is going great. We have a believable fake Jeff Bridges. We’re hitting our audience right in the nostalgia zone, which, as we all know, is the most profitable zone of the body. And then… oh. Ohhh no. Ohhh no no no.

Mr Bridges’s doppelganger turns around directly into the bright light and opens his mouth. Every weakness in early-tens computer graphics comes out at once. The plastic skin. The dead eyes. The mouth that never moves the same way as the rest of the face. This is not Jeff Bridges. This is a changeling who has stolen his name and skydived into the uncanny valley. The illusion is shattered, because the filmmakers couldn’t help themselves from giving the game away.

I bring this example up because Alien: Romulus has the exact opposite problem. The crew, exploring a dank, dark ship, finds Rook face down on the messy ground, having barely survived a close encounter of the third kind. They plug him in, and… a heretofore unknown bright light turns to shine directly onto his face, on which not a jot of blood or waste is to be found. (It’s harder to deepfake someone if there’s muck in the facial area, you understand.) This is everything you’re not meant to do, and though technology has advanced tremendously in the fourteen years since Rubbery Bridges Syndrome, a cluster of neurons in the back of your head knows that something is deeply wrong. There is no light in his eyes. I kept looking at his eyebrows, wondering if the problem was there, but no. Every bit of his face looks perfect — but all put together in motion… one shudders at the sight.

But the further the film goes on, the smarter it gets. After our scavengers leave the lab where they found him, they interact with him chiefly through fuzzy CRT screens, smoothing out the imperfections. Unable to move, assorted gunk and alien goo piles up on his increasingly ravaged face, and when we do properly cut back to him, he’s shot in a side profile with chiaroscuro alarm lights. I kept thinking: why the fuck are you only doing this now‽ You don’t put the bad effects first, for Gods’ sakes!

Anyway, the rubbery robot face didn’t actually bother me that much — we’ve come to the point where we’re closer to the top of the uncanny valley than the bottom. I just needed some time to explain.

Particularly i’d like to single out the cast, none of whom i had heard of before barring a passing recollection of the name Cailee Spaeny, but all of whom do great jobs. Mr Álvarez has aged down the cast from the series’ usual monster fodder, not burnt-out truckers but wide-eyed twentysomething pirates looking to steal some cryo pods to blast off after a better life. (Outside the lead two they’re pretty thin, but hey, it’s a monster movie.) Our lead is the orphaned Rain Carradine, a serviceable Sigourneyalike played by Ms Spaeny, who reluctantly goes with the scavengers after she finds out she’s been assigned another six years on a black-skied mining colony… and because they require the services of her android guardian Andy (heh), the only one who can interface with the systems on the derelict space station they have their eyes on. David Jonsson, who plays Andy, would deserve an “and introducing” had he not been in Rye Lane just last year, but this alone already proves he’s going on to do even greater things. He’s given the task, without spoilers, of playing what amounts to two different (but similar!) characters in the same body, and shows off his naturalistic chops in every little micro-movement.

A certain scene with his character early on will be etched in my brain forever. It’s the big reveal of the Alien™, facehuggers jumping out from every corner in a room flooded by molten ice and red lights… and he stands there, rebooting, the same pose he was two minutes ago, his arms wide, as if nothing happens. Two seconds later, he takes total command of the situation, going from timid to Terminator in five seconds flat. If anything from this film is passed into the annals of pop culture (other than the Asterisk) it’ll either be that scene or the insane body-horror third act that i daren’t even mention for fear of ruining the experience. (Annihilation would be proud.)

I’ll be straight with you: it’s not as good as Alien. It’s not as good as Aliens. But nothing ever will be. Don’t go in with sky-high expectations — go in for a rollicking sci-fi-action-horror, xenomorph or no xenomorph, and you’ll have a great time.