Look, I won’t go so far to say I’m a fan of the last couple of Alien movies—who could forgive the undodgeable space wheel or Michael Fassbender’s “I’ll do the fingering” line—but I am enough of an apologist to be excited about the next one. All of which is to say, hey, here’s the first teaser trailer for Alien: Romulus, the next one, which arrives in theatres on August 16.
Billed as a standalone entry, Romulus is directed by Fede Álvarez, who previously handled the 2013 Evil Dead reboot, which was so-so, but also did Don’t Breathe, the excellent low budget home invasion shocker. Little is known about the plot beyond this synopsis: “While scavenging the deep ends of a derelict space station, a group of young space colonizers come face to face with the most terrifying life form in the universe.”
So far, so Xenomorph, and sure enough the teaser does feature younger protagonists than we’re used to. The cast is led by Cailee Spaeny, best known as the star of Priscilla, supported by David Jonsson (who based on one second of footage I’m willing to bet is an android… sorry, artificial person), Archie Renaux, Isabela Merced, Spike Fearn, Aileen Wu—most of whom I promise you’d recognise if you Google image searched them, as I have. Ridley Scott is also on board as producer, though I’m not sure his involvement is quite the benchmark of quality it once was (*shudders in Napoleon*) .
As for the trailer itself, I like the vibe quite a bit. It definitely nods to the 1979 trailer for Scott’s original movie, which terrified me witless when I glimpsed it through the bannisters at my grandparents house a few years later. That building atonal score and sense of rising panic is a particularly unpleasant but cool throwback. Honestly, I’m sure most of us would have been happy if the Alien franchise had ended after those first two magisterial entries, but I am into the idea of this as a clean reboot.
The exception to the rule would be Andy Kelly, former PC Gamer editor, who would routinely make the case for why Alien 3 was brilliant, actually. Kelly is such a fan of the Alien oeuvre—and let’s face it, few things are more influential on videogames—that he has a whole-ass book coming out this year about Alien: Isolation, the 2014 stealth game from Creative Assembly, called Perfect Organism. I like to imagine he’d be a fan of the shot in the Romulus trailer where a bucket full of facehuggers tumbles into a spaceship corridor and then runs toward the camera like truculent corgis at the Westminster Dog Show. Time to head to the airlock, folks.
