Alien: Romulus (2024)

This checkbox-ticking exercise dutifully opens on a steampunk spaceship with glitchy 80s tech sailing across dark silent space, has the sleeping pods of a ragtag bunch of mercenaries open, features the curious space soundtrack, has some (but not too much) Weyland-Yutani context, and of course, there are synthetics, stomach eruptions, and women fused to walls, but what keeps it fresh is the teen cast - this is the Alien we know and love presented with a Scream/Final Destination teen-horror sensibility and it is a very effective addition to the canon with lots of terrific heart-stopping and inventive action.

★★★★☆

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Blue Beetle (2023)

It took me four or five sittings to get through this looong DC superhero movie that tells, with a glossy magazine look, the origin story of a superhero called Blue Beetle, a human teenager enhanced with a glowing blue parasitic alien technology that effectively disappears the movie's biggest asset, the young and good-looking Xolo Maridueña into a Power Ranger suit.

★★☆☆☆

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Super 8 (2011)

 

A Goonies gang accidentally captures government secrets on their Super 8 camera as they make a zombie film, and while the kids revel in making their zombie movie, you get the sense director J J Abrams himself is revelling in making  the sort of movie Spielberg made in the 80s with kids on an adventure  in a richly detailed small-town America, but J J Abrams is also paying homage to the paranoid scifi invasion B-movies of the 50s and this dual, conflicting purpose strips some Spielberg heart from the kids' adventure.

★★★☆☆

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Alien Vs Predator - Requiem (2007)

In the second of this daft series of movies that pits Predators from Predator movie against Aliens from Alien - though scene after dark, murky scene fails to distinguish which is which - the action shifts from the first movie's subterranean Antarctic pyramid to small-town USA, where way too many human characters blur together while a Predator, again sporting woeful Amstrad CPC-quality predator-vision, hunts Aliens whose number and purpose for marauding the town remain maddeningly unclear - they are just having a bad day, maybe.

★☆☆☆☆

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Alien vs. Predator (2004)

A security guard at work assures me that the bringing together of the Predator from the Predator movies and the Alien from the Alien movies into an Alien Vs Predator (AVP) series of movies isn't silly, that the two series and two monsters complement each other nicely, but this first movie of the series has a research team investigating an underground pyramid in the Antartic, unleashing from a prison the beginnings of a long Predator/Alien mythology that is pretty bloody silly. 

★★☆☆☆

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Alien Covenant (2017)

The series risks becoming the same Alien movie over and over, just cushioned in more and more austere, go-nowhere mythology about mothers, progenies, and all that jazz (and Brahms and Shelley, here, too, with Michael Fassbender's robot steadily morphing into Hannibal Lecter) but in the meantime, this is a solid Alien episode - thankfully not as overcooked as Prometheus - and a hell of a lot better than that Life nonsense rushed to cinemas earlier this year to preempt the same plot...I just wish there wasn't the unfortunate Land of the Lost crossover - is there a rule the shaggy, straw-hatted character of Tennessee has to appear in every sci-fi?

★★★★☆

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Alien: Isolation

For anyone like me who loves the Alien movies, this sci-fi action adventure game is a must because it has you playing Amanda Ripley creeping around the Sevastopol space station searching for clues regarding the fate of her mother and is just like 'playing the movies', but beware: the experience of being stalked by an unpredictable AI alien is terrifying!

★★★★★

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Alien Resurrection (1997)

This time, in an Alien instalment too clever by half, Ripley is resurrected in director Jean-Paul Jeunet's "Delicatessen", a futuristic green-yellow world of zany characters and irreverent detail, but in fact, Ripley isn't Ripley at all but a Ripley-alien clone and empath who once again takes charge of a group of mercenaries when aliens - distinctly Jurassic Park raptor-like ones - break free from their Umbrella Corporation science experiment chambers and start - you guessed it - picking off everyone on board the Earth-bound spaceship Auriga (including elfin robot, Winona Ryder) one-by-especially-bloody-one.

★★★☆☆

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Alien 3 (1992)

The gunmetal-blue quiet of space that marked the first two Alien movies is switched for the brown bluster of a prisoner-run refinery in this third movie directed by David Fincher and that change is the movie's fundamental flaw - rather than an unseen, unfathomable, latent horror suddenly, noisily bursting out of space's deep dark and quiet, here the alien burns around Thunderdome at breakneck speed, noisy, more lit up and visible and more understood than ever before, and it is killing not mercenaries or astronaut scientists but a noisy, repellent bunch of grubby convicts that it is hard to care about.

★★☆☆☆

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Aliens (1986)

For poor Rip-(van Wink)-ley, 57 years of sleep in an escape pod must have seemed like a mere heartbeat when in fact it was plenty of time for the eggs on the LV-426 colony (sighted in the original Alien) to hatch into an alien plague; Ripley skips breakfast and gets straight into alien-busting consultant mode for some macho commandos, but before long, Director James Cameron wipes everyone else out so that the mother-progeny theme that is to become the series' signature can come to the fore as Ripley defends herself and Newt, the colony's lone survivor and first daughter figure of the series, from the aliens and their queen.

★★★★★

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Alien (1979)

Sigourney Weaver's Ellen Ripley became the archetypal kickass heroine after her introduction in this original Alien movie, essentially a pick-them-off-one-at-a-time horror like many American slasher flicks full of teens camping in remote locations with masked evil hunting them down, but Alien transcends its genre with its muted, echoey spaceship campground, its otherworldly Jason always kept at a distance, never seen fully extended, always in shadow and so not just masked but unfathomable, and the movie is rich in other details - robot crew members, extraterrestrial remains, slumber pods - that have been developed into a detailed mythology across four sequels to date (and happily counting!).

★★★★★

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Prometheus (2012)

This sci-fi horror on an epic scale has in its relatively short runtime way too many lofty themes and too many character story arcs - the one about Charlize Theron's family tree is the most clanging and underdeveloped - and so it all feels rushed, and in place of satisfying conclusions, there is an almost completely unnecessary - or, at least, unexplained - tie-in with Ridley Scott's Alien; nonetheless, this succeeds in being thought-provoking and entertaining.

★★★☆☆

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