While there have been eight movies within the Alien franchise, only two—the original dread-filled Alien and its action-packed sequel Aliens—have been genuinely good. Now it looks like we might finally be getting another film worthy of those stone-cold classics with the forthcoming Alien: Romulus, set to land in cinemas on August 16. And if the new trailer (above) is anything to go by, 20th Century Studios’ claims that the franchise would be ditching the philosophical leanings of recent outings and returning to its horror roots appear to have been right on the money.
Helmed by director Fede Alvarez, whose impressive horror credentials include directing 2013’s outstanding Evil Dead reboot, the film appears to be revisiting the original film’s simple premise of a small crew aboard a spaceship who come to the awful realisation they’re sharing the craft with something very nasty indeed.
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The footage within the trailer doesn’t give much away, but we see the dreaded facehuggers return (faster, more aggressive, and hunting in a pack, making them more terrifying than ever), lots of dimly lit spaceship corridors, and hints at the squirm-inducing body horror that the franchise has always had at its core.
At the trailer’s conclusion, we get a shot of Cailee Spaeny—possibly this film’s substitute for Sigourney Weaver’s iconic Ripley—with a weapon in hand as she stalks the xenomorph, who craftily catches her off guard. Although we suspect her implied grisly fate is just an edit for the trailer. We’ll see.
Joining Spaeny to fill out the cast are Isabela Merced, Archie Renaux, David Jonsson, Spike Fearn, and Aileen Wu. The relatively low profile of all the actors should make it even trickier (and therefore more fun) to pick out who’ll make it to the end of the film in one piece and who won’t.
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Finally, Ridley Scott returns here in a producer role. Having directed the original Alien, as well as recent franchise instalments Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, Scott passed directing duties to Alvarez, presumably so he’d be free to helm the upcoming and long-awaited Gladiator 2.
Whether Alien: Romulus lives up to the considerable promise contained within its trailer remains to be seen, but after six efforts that haven’t quite lived up the first two instalments, we think we’re overdue another horror-in-space classic. Check out the trailer above.
