Rating: B-
Dir: Fede Álvarez
Star: Cailee Spaeny, David Jonsson, Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced
a.k.a. Dumb Young People in Space. No, really: I think the last time I saw so many stupid teenagers in orbit was probably Jason X. It isn’t necessarily a bad thing, because it is in line with the franchise getting back to its horror roots, something I am inclined to encourage. The last few entries seem to have been increasingly concerned with building some kind of Alien Extended Universe, forgetting that what made the first two movies such cultural touchstones was much simpler: icky monsters. Let’s face it, excluding the Predator crossovers, none of the directors post Aliens have had much love for horror, least of all Ridley Scott. The genre is much more in Álvarez’s wheelhouse, and it shows.
This takes place between Alien and Aliens, beginning on another Weyland-Yutani colony, manned largely be indentured servants. Keen to get out is Rain Carradine (Spaeny), an orphan who has ‘adopted’ a broken android, Andy (Jonsson). Her chance comes when her friends discover an abandoned spacecraft in orbit, and decide to salvage cryonic stasis chambers from it. Naturally, in the process they accidentally thaw out a batch of face-huggers, because it was actually a WY research facility. This was researching the alien creatures for possible use to create ‘better than human’ employees for the corporation, when things went wrong, in exactly the way you would expect. For the Dumb Young People in Space, they’re about to go considerably wronger.
It is very referential to the first two films in the franchise, a mixed blessing. The presence of the late Ian Holm – or, at least, a CGI version thereof – as android science officer Rook, gives the film some much needed gravitas. He’s the only character that feels old enough to vote, in contrast to the original film, where Sigourney Weaver was the “baby” of the bunch. Its characters went all the way up to Harry Dean Stanton in his mid fifties: Ripley would be the space Mom of this bunch, serving up orange slices to the kids. The most direct references are a mixed bunch: Rook saying, “I can’t lie to you about your chances. But you have my sympathies” works. Andy coughing up, “Get away from her, you… bitch”? Not so much.
This is a shame, because Jonsson otherwise delivers the film’s best performance, beginning as almost an android imbecile, before a dubious “upgrade” on the ship adjusts his outlook significantly, shall we say. I suspect the visuals will work better in the cinema than at home, because Álvarez takes the gloom and darkness to almost industrial levels. There’s barely a shot in the entire film involving daylight, which always feels like a bit of a cop-out. Not that you really need to see the aliens, because I doubt many will be watching this without previous experience of the franchise. The brain can fill in the shadows as needed, and there are some “WTF?” moments of Giger-esque invention. You’d still be better off watching #1 and #2: such a conclusion should not come as any surprise.