119 min | R | August 16, 2024 | 20th Century Studios
Fede Alvarez takes the Alien franchise back to basics. Young colonists trapped on a derelict space station with xenomorphs. The scares work. The fan service is excessive. The third act goes somewhere new.
A group of young colonists living under corporate oppression on a mining planet decide to escape. They board an abandoned space station to scavenge cryogenic pods for the journey. The station is not empty. The xenomorphs are here. The facehuggers are here. The acid blood is here. Fede Alvarez strips the franchise back to its survival-horror roots and stages a haunted-house movie in space. The setup is efficient. The characters are young and expendable and likable enough that their deaths register.
Cailee Spaeny plays Rain with the same wide-eyed determination she has brought to every role. She is the Ripley of this entry and she earns it through physicality and emotional commitment. David Jonsson plays Andy, a damaged android who is Rain’s surrogate brother. Jonsson gives the film’s best performance. His character undergoes a transformation that creates genuine moral complexity in a franchise that usually operates in black and white. Isabela Merced, Archie Renaux, and Spike Fearn round out the crew with enough personality to matter.
Alvarez directed the Evil Dead remake and Don’t Breathe. He understands confined-space horror. The space station is designed with the industrial grime of the original Alien. The lighting is dark and wet. The facehugger sequences are the most effective since the first film. The xenomorph is terrifying again. The zero-gravity acid blood sequence is a set piece that justifies the entire film. Where the film stumbles is its reverence for the original. Lines are quoted. Images are recreated. A digital resurrection of a character is unsettling for the wrong reasons.
The third act takes a turn into body horror territory that connects to Prometheus’s mythology in ways that are both grotesque and thematically rich. The franchise has never been shy about reproductive horror and this entry pushes it further than any previous film. Alvarez delivers a lean, effective horror film that respects the franchise without transcending it. The fan service holds it back from greatness. The scares push it past good.