JM: In terrible news for hapless space colonists everywhere, a new Alien film has erupted with a fancy Latin name from the chest of its unwilling host. What’s a little surprising is that this is the first real entry in the mainline series since 1997’s Alien: Resurrection. The prequels Prometheus and Covenant, the last entries directed by Ridley Scott, are deliberately peripheral, focusing much more on the mysterious Engineers and the psychotic Android, David. I personally think the prequels are pretty good, especially Covenant, but they’re not really Alien films in the same sense.

As for the proper Alien films, multiple auteurs have had a go. Scott’s original Alien from 1979 is genuinely peerless as a science fiction-horror. James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) is a perfect action movie with unbelievably good special effects, even if it does introduce some unpleasantly mawkish sentimental elements. David Fincher’s Alien 3 (1992) is a masterpiece of atmosphere which has only gotten better with time, and its prison setting is inspired. French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Resurrection has some good scenes, but Joss Whedon’s slime is all over it.

All in all, the Alien films have been pretty consistently interesting since day dot. What about Alien: Romulus? Did this latest entry plant an egg of fear behind your ribcage, which subsequently hatched into a slavering terror-beast?

SK: Well, I was relieved that the scope of Romulus is much truer to the mainline films; it’s a mostly hapless crew (featuring mandatory suss android), trapped and hunted down by a constantly evolving apex predator. Director Fede Alvarez, who cut his teeth (and everything else) in the gross-out Evil Dead remake in 2013, loses the Promethian lore and wisely re-centres the focus on what we’re here to see; aliens exploding out of people and then absolutely getting after it in a derelict spaceship.

Here, our crew are blue-collar miners indentured for years to work on a grim planet that doesn’t see sunlight. The good news: the crew have spotted an old junk ship orbiting the planet, which contains cryopods that could keep the crew in stasis while they make the nine lightyear journey to the more appealing planet of Yvaga.

The bad news: the ship is definitely, definitely crawling in xenomorphic material. Fans know what this means; we’re talking face-huggers, alien cocoons shaped like the female anatomy, dripping acid. Sagely, Alvarez doesn’t show us too much too early. Horror – so formalistically aligned with the erotic – is all about delayed gratification and what we don’t see. But also like the erotic, we need real characters to invest in and stories we can get behind. Did Romulus get you there, John?

JM: Not quite. I really liked the opening of this film. Taking the perspective of these poor millennial shmucks serving out their lifetime contracts with the unfathomably evil and stupid Weyland-Yutani corporation is a great choice. Unfortunately, the scenario doesn’t get much time to breathe at all. The best Alien films all have a lot of build-up and give us time to get to know the ensemble cast. Who could forget poor Kane (John Hurt) or Harry Dean Stanton’s character in the original film, or Lance Henriksen as Bishop in Aliens. In Romulus, by contrast, the action gets underway a little too quickly. And obviously you need a female protagonist for an alien movie, but like the protagonists of Prometheus and Covenant, Cailee Spaeny‘s Rain is fine as an action heroine but a little thinly drawn. We get no sense of her as a person. Her relationship with her adopted android brother, Andy (David Jonsson) is, again, satisfactory for the purposes of the limited plot, but not really that compelling as an emotional hook.

The xenomorphs, I will say, are very well-done, for the most part. The facehuggers in particular are truly skin-crawling. As in his Evil Dead remake, Alvarez proves himself a deft hand at gore and he really knows how to keep the momentum going. But at times I felt like I was watching a very well-made Alien video game rather than a great Alien movie. The pulse rifle in this film even has an auto-aim functionality straight out of a first-person shooter. Do you think the action sequences in this film hit the mark? Or was there perhaps too much action altogether?

SK: The structure of Romulus very much reflects the modern, experiential horror aesthetic, which is to say, it’s all kinetic set-pieces. Chained together, yes, the film has a video game rhythm and I wasn’t super invested. Andy, the defective android, is the most interesting character, treated deplorably by his human counterparts who expect total loyalty in return. Androids have always provided Alien with its philosophical Turing test angle; just what is it to be human? Does the soul compel moral action? And what are the consequences of dehumanising a conscious entity? Romulus dances with a few of these themes, but far less than the other Alien titles, and it suffers as a result.

For me, Romulus suffers most from the lack of a protagonist with the same strength, complexity and clear motivations that enlivened Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), arguably the greatest space hero in cinematic history (sorry, Han). Thematically, Ripley can’t be labelled; she’s a badass who fires blasters and stands up to the patriarchy, but she’s also a mother (both in the metaphorical, and xenomorphic sense). She understands that the alien — despite being a salivating, hive-minded, biologically-unstoppable, teeth-gnashing, killing machine — has the same ruthless instinct for survival and propagation as us. Her empathy was an important counterpoint of the film series that Romulus — a technical achievement to be sure — doesn’t have. Without it, the film loses a core part of its horror element: that the aliens have a biological imperative. They’re different and disgusting, but not evil. I mean, who doesn’t find the little baby xenomorphs that explode out of the host chests as a bit cute. Aww. John, can we keep him?

JM: Actually, that reminds me of another issue that will rankle the Alien pedants out there — they really mess with the alien’s life cycle in this movie. The chestbursters only take a few minutes to grow and hatch and, towards the end of the movie, some truly fantastical evolutions occur. It does ruin the internal logic somewhat, and I guess it reflects the frenetic tone of the film. In the previous entries in the franchise, the time it took for the alien to pass through its various biological stages was part of the tension. I also don’t think the film benefits at all from reintroducing the Engineer mythology from the prequels. When it’s shoehorned into a more traditional Alien film, you see how incongruous it really is.

And I agree that the franchise is going to need to find a way to function without the inimitable Sigourney Weaver. Romulus sometimes feels a bit afraid to step out of her shadow. But are we focusing on the negative because our hopes for an Alien movie are so high? I have to say, I found Romulus very entertaining from start to finish. I’m not sure I’ll come back to it in the future, however, the way I have the other movies (even Covenant!). What about you?

SK: Yes, look, Romulus is fine. I’ll give it points for looking good, having practical special effects and generally having the right tone of an Alien instalment. But like The Force Awakens, it suffers for being the Same. Old. Jam.

So let’s just get this out of the way; the Alien films ranked from best to worst are: Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, Prometheus, Resurrection, Romulus, Covenant.  I love all these films. And I love the alien. I love it. The little mouth, the big mouth, the chest bursting. There should be one in every home. 7/10.

JM: Yep, it never gets old. It can also survive in the vacuum of space. I wavered a bit on Romulus, but I think Alvarez basically knows what he’s doing. If he turns out a few more sequels of this calibre, it’s not the worst thing that could happen to the franchise. As a side note, for an example of somebody coming back to a (rather less august) franchise with a genuinely interesting take, I’d recommend Dan Trachtenberg’s Prey, the recent Predator movie set in colonial North America.

As for my personal ranking of the aliens – Alien, Alien 3, Aliens, Covenant, Prometheus, Romulus, Resurrection. 7/10

Alien: Romulus is currently playing in cinemas.