Fede Alvarez's 'Alien: Romulus' bursts into cinemas on Friday (August 16) Alien: Romulus bursts its way into cinemas on Friday (August 16), the ninth film in the sci-fi/horror franchise – but how should newcomers tackle the xenomorph world in order? Read on for the comprehensive guide. Fede Alvarez’s ( Evil Dead , Don’t Breathe ) new film stars Cailee Spaeny ( Priscilla ) and David Jonsson ( Industry , Rye Lane ) and follows a group of young space colonists who are confronted with a mysterious extraterrestrial threat while scavenging around an abandoned space station. In a five-star review of Alien: Romulus , NME wrote: “With spot-on production design that really captures the worn-out feel of space travel that the Alien films so perfectly showed, the practical and visual effects, bringing that acid-dripping bitch back to life, are also superbly realised.
With a gets-right-under-the-skin score from Benjamin Wallfisch, this is an Alien film for the ages. Finally, someone has made a movie that comes close to the brilliance of Ridley Scott and James Cameron .” Alvarez recently spoke to NME about working on the new film , sharing the advice that Scott, who directed the 1979 original, gave him.
“He said the director should not be editorial all the time because you lose objectivity with your film,” he revealed. “If you can stop looking at it for a while and come back to it, you will make it so much better. So I did that during the [Christmas] holidays.
I took a month off from the movie and went away and came back...
That was great advice he gave me.” The Alien franchise covers multiple centuries of encounters between human and alien life and first materialised in the late 1970s when sci-fi/horror writers Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett collaborated on a script originally titled Star Beast . Inspired by the success of Star Wars , Walter Hill’s Brandywine Productions bought the script and made the decision to hire the relatively unknown duo of Sigourney Weaver and Ridley Scott to star in and direct the film.
Thanks to the palpable tension that pervaded the film, the experimental creature designs of H.R. Giger and the word-of-mouth shock of the John Hurt chest-burster sequence, the film was a box office success, launching over four decades of sequels and spinoffs.
Every entry in the franchise so far is available to stream via Disney+ , and for those wishing to watch the entire Alien saga in canonical chronological order, here is the complete guide:.
