FEde Álvarez’s new installment in the Alien series presents itself as a younger, grimmer, back-to-basics film, moving away from the grandiose cosmic scope of Ridley Scott’s Prometheus (from 2012) and, five years later, Alien: Covenant, and instead attempting to return to the gritty conspiracy paranoia and anti-corporate satire that made the original so unforgettably good. It also surprisingly brings back a major character from 1979’s Alien, although the actor involved may have signed over the rights to use CGI imagery at the time, or perhaps royalties were paid to his descendants.
The resulting film is technically a competent piece of work; but no matter how ingenious its references to the first film (which are let down by borrowings from the A Quiet Place series), it has to be said that there is a fundamental lack of originality here, which makes the film frustrating. There is not a single person involved, from the director to the stars to the production company staff, who would not be better off actually working on something new.
The film’s position on the Alien timeline is somewhere between the first two films, but in such a way that the drama exists outside of that larger narrative, and the assumed fate of the survivors stands in a secret parallel to the further sequence – though perhaps they will be brought back in an Alien Cinematic Universe. On a grim mining planet, Rain, played by Cailee Spaeny, is one of a legion of young serfs exploited for a meager wage and the (dishonest) promise that the employer will not hinder their onward journey after their contract term expires. Rain lives with Andy (David Jonsson), a good-natured cyborg “synthetic” owned by her deceased parents and programmed to help her at any time.
Rain is hanging out with a group of young rebels and pilots who have discovered an abandoned space station floating right above them. They suspect that this ship has all the cryo-freezing equipment and fuel they need to simply escape. Furthermore, Andy’s compatible software allows him to breach the spaceship’s security and hijack it by simply placing his fingertip on the door panels. But once they’re on board, Rain and her friends make a horrifying discovery about the creepy crawlies trapped inside — though the film gets the best of both worlds by having the aliens already in place, but also staging a scene where one jumps in someone’s face and pumps semen down their throat, like in the iconic jump scare moment. (The purpose of this in the first film was to allow the alien to get on the spaceship).
Andy, on the other hand, automatically receives a system upgrade just for being on this mysterious spaceship, and it seems he’s not quite as committed to Rain’s well-being as he was before. And when the guns are handed out, it’s a gamble to guess which reticent character will end up alive. And so the plot drags to its conclusion, albeit with a new twist about why these aliens were secretly bred by sinister forces and what kind of hideous new life form will eventually emerge. But that too feels disappointing. It’s too obvious a paradox to say that Alien has become too familiar. Did we need another Alien movie?
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