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Because American pop culture in general and Hollywood in particular like to inflate their properties to epic, endlessly profitable proportions, we forget what a slim and elegant piece of work Ridley Scott’s 1979 “Alien” was. It was suspense stripped down to the genre studs: seven people in a tin can floating in space - well, six people and one closet android - plus an endlessly shape-shifting Freudian nightmare with teeth.
James Cameron stuck to the playbook for 1986′s “Aliens,” delivering one of the finest action movies of all time, before the series spun off into nihilism (“Alien 3″), vain attempts to pump up the back mythology (”Alien: Prometheus” and its sequel) and bald cash grabs (“Alien vs. Predator”).
Directed by the inventive Uruguayan horror specialist Fede Álvarez (“Don’t Breathe”), the new “Alien: Romulus” was billed as a back-to-basics reboot, and to its credit, it’s a no-frills, straight-up genre piece built largely on the bones of the first two movies. All that’s missing are originality and a convincing final act, and, honestly, you could do worse for a Saturday night eek-a-thon.
(Technically, “Alien: Romulus” is being marketed as not a sequel but an “interquel,” a bastard nonword that deserves to be roundly mocked and the studio executive who coined it shunned.)
Where the cast of “Alien” was made up of mature character actors and one tough newcomer in Sigourney Weaver as Ellen Ripley, “Alien: Romulus” is mostly staffed with young actors familiar from various TV series. (We’ll get to the major exception in a bit.) The movie starts on a distant mining planet that makes “Blade Runner” look like Club Med, where a ragtag group of orphans in their early 20s are desperate to escape to a solar system with actual sunlight. Cousins Tyler (Archie Renaux of “Shadow and Bone”) and Bjorn (Spike Fearn of “Tell Me Everything”) lead an illicit foray to an abandoned spaceship floating just beyond the exosphere, hoping to power up its engines and sleep pods for the nine-year journey.
Along for the ride are a nail-spitting pilot (Aileen Wu), a sweet-faced wet blanket (Isabela Merced of “100 Things to Do Before High School”) and - this movie’s Ripley - Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla Presley in Sofia Coppola’s “Priscilla”), who’s been invited along mostly because the others need her adopted brother, an outdated synthetic human, or synth, named Andy. As played by the British actor David Jonsson - of HBO’s “Industry” and last year’s delightfully bonkers romantic comedy “Rye Lane” - Andy is a well-meaning half-wit of an android, a Lennie to Rain’s George, but he can still interface with the ship’s operating system as a sort of mobile key ring.
Do I need to tell you that the abandoned ship - divided into two halves named Romulus and Remus - carries the brand Weyland-Yutani, the name of the Alien series’s nefarious corporation? Or that beasties galore await in various stages of obscene evolution? “Alien: Romulus” doesn’t reinvent the monster or its exoskeleton; it just sets a zillion of them skittering, face-hugging, gut-busting and proudly displaying their dental work as the cast is winnowed down in various icky ways. (This installment makes good use of the creatures’ acid blood, a feature I’ve always felt didn’t get enough respect.)
On a scene-by-scene basis, the movie works - it functions, and that’s good enough given that Spaeny and Jonsson provide the necessary emotional grounding. (Jonsson’s Andy gets an upgrade at one point, allowing the character to leap from a sputtering old desktop to a high-powered workstation, and the actor toggles between the two modes with wit and sensitivity.) Director Álvarez doesn’t go overboard on the gore or the jump scares, and he stages the action in coherent, taut, exciting set pieces, balancing the deep dread of Scott’s original with the muscle-bound action of Cameron’s sequel. If only there were new ideas, too.
Correction: There are two new ideas, one of which is problematic enough to be worth spoiling and the other of which doesn’t work at all. The first - again, spoiler alert! - is the appearance of actor Ian Holm in a variation of his villainous android Ash from the first “Alien.” This time he’s called Rook, and if you’re confused by the fact that Sir Ian died in 2020, don’t be: He has been resurrected through the combined miracles of artificial intelligence, digital jiggery-pokery, voice work and a nod to the late actor’s estate.
Should we be concerned that this is the opening salvo in what may be unintentional horrors to come? Humphrey Bogart and Elizabeth Taylor in “Alien 13: Night of the Zombie Stars”? Sean Connery in “You Only Live Thrice”? You can bet we’ll be seeing more exhumations in the future, but I imagine the Screen Actors Guild would like a word.
More immediately problematic is the finale of “Alien: Romulus,” traditionally the part of the series the more jaded among us call “Ripley goes back for the cat.” I’ll just say it involves one of the movie’s more hapless characters, a vial of experimental Weyland-Yutani DNA, and a creature meant to be terrifying that is instead merely and extremely laughable.
By then it’s too late to complain. In space, no one can hear you ask for your money back.
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Ty Burr is the author of the movie recommendation newsletter Ty Burr’s Watch List at tyburrswatchlist.com.
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Two and one-half stars. Rated R. At theaters. Contains bloody violent content and language. 117 minutes.
Rating guide: Four stars masterpiece, three stars very good, two stars okay, one star poor, no stars waste of time.