Since the first two films in the 1980s, the sci-fi horror series has been a very mixed bag. But this latest gets back to basics, and makes for a superbly scary monster movie.
There have already been eight Alien films, including the two Alien vs Predator spin-offs, but if you add up the Alien films which are genuinely good, that number gets much, much smaller. The series is notorious for sequels and prequels that were compromised by personality clashes and studio interference, and even the last two, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, ended up being derivative and pretentious muddles, despite being made by the director of the peerless 1979 original, Ridley Scott.
The main characters are a group of twentysomething colonists who are stuck in dead-end mining jobs on a grey and grimy planet that never has any sunlight. The actors include Archie Renaux, Isabella Merced, Aileen Wu and Spike Fearn, but the only characters anyone will care about are the orphaned Rain, played with steely grace by Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla), and her awkward adoptive brother Andy, played with exquisite nuance by David Jonsson (Rye Lane). These downtrodden workers have to labour away for years before they are eventually allowed to travel to the verdant planet Rain has been dreaming of, but one of them has a better idea. They have detected an abandoned spaceship in orbit just above them, so if they can fly up to it in their own shuttle craft, they should be able to salvage its cryogenic pods, put themselves into suspended animation and zoom off to their dreamworld before the colony's authorities catch up with them.
