Alien Romulus is the The Force Awakens of the Alien franchise. It feels like a return to form after the pretentious clunkers the prior two installments, Prometheus and Covenant. We're back to the horror movie structure of Alien, and the villain is back to being the corporate entity of Weyland-Yutani and their bottom-line focus at the expense of random individuals who get in their way and happen to be the protagonists.

On the other hand, the stuff that makes you feel like getting back to the good films, is pretty superficial. It's less of getting the essence right so much as directly copying it, down to repeating lines of dialogue from the first two Alien movies. And then the ending sequence is an entirely modern over-the-top spectacle of senseless motion and elaborate stunts, with no real stakes, utterly ruining the more grounded, if not necessarily scientifically-plausible, sensibilities they are trying to draw on from the first two films.

A big problem is the cast. Where the original Alien crew felt like a real crew of blue collar workers, and Aliens felt like a group of real soldiers, in both cases with the sort of petty personal priorities and grumbling about the job they are facing that anyone in a similar situation can relate to. The cast of Romulus are nominally in the same boat, as blue collar works on a company mining planet, but the film's approach to their jobs has a more activist feel about unfair policies shafting the workers and never "letting" them get ahead or away. Also, for what it's worth, the average age of the Alien cast was 40 years (45 for the male actors, with 30 year olds Weaver and Cartwright dragging it down) in the year the film was released. Even in Aliens, featuring a lot of characters whose first name is private, corporal or lieutenant (i.e. low-ranking and thus young; average age of US Marine personnel is mid to late 20s), had an average age of 33.8 years in 1986 for the major adult actors (9 first billed). For the main characters of Alien Romulus, it's 26. The oldest character is a robot in his 30s, leaving the four featured human characters played by actors with an average age of 25. Only one of them has been in anything I've seen, or at least played a character with enough lines to be remembered, Isabela Merced, who has played juveniles up until now, with such leading roles as Transformers: the Last Knight, and Dora the Explorer. Now, IDK what kind of reputation or recognition Sigourney Weaver et al had before Alien, but even if it was the first big break for Tom Skerritt, Ian Holm, John Hurt and Harry Dean Stanton, they had enough mileage to give their grizzled trucker/industrial worker personas some gravitas. The new kids feel like they could, at most, be students slumming in summer jobs in a factory town.

And there are no real characters in the film. The closest thing to a dynamic arc is the robot Andy, largely due to programming issues and upgrades. The only character traits of the humans are related to robots or "synths", who of course, prefer the term, artificial person. One is all about taking care of, and protecting Andy (because she thinks of him as a brother, since her father salvaged and reprogrammed him), and the other projects his distrust of synths onto Andy. The movie seems to think we are supposed to see him as some sort of asshole or bigot, except he's got a point, robots aren't people, and Andy does not have free will or personality. Even more than Ash or Bishop or Michael Fassbender's David, it is made abundantly clear that Andy has no personality or life and that he is merely acting according to programming, however much his relationship with the lead character, Rain, is set up like a neuro-typical/divergent sibling dynamic. But this film also leans harder on a supposed or intended emotional investment in Andy, that we never even really had for Bishop. And there are definite steps taken, vis a vis the aforementioned callbacks to the original films, to remind you of Ash. As the villains of their films, Ash and David represented human ambitions or corruption taken to their logical extreme, with the robots being the literal face of the flaws in humanity, the handiwork of man destroying men, because that's what we programmed them to do. There is no such point or thematic resonance in the case of Andy. Even the off-putting Call from Resurrection represented a sort of idealism or pushback trait.

In any event, our gang of plucky kids, who owe their souls to the company store, hatch a plot to sneak onto an abandoned space station orbiting their sunless mining world, steal its cryosleep equipment and use it to travel to a new colony for a better life. The small group is centered around a brother & sister their cousin and his pilot girlfriend, and they invite the main character, the brother's ex, Rain into the plot because they need her "brother" synth Andy to access the systems of the station, named Romulus. As we see in the opening scenes, Weyland Yutani has salvaged a xenomorph corpse from the wreckage of the original film's ship, the Nostromo. Romulus is, of course, where they had been carrying out their experiments, and the kids' tampering has the predictable effect and we get an Alien movie.

Overall, most of the movie is okay as an Alien film, but the lack of interesting characters means it doesn't inspire much interest, and the easter eggs for the good movies are so blatant that you can't help but notice how they are not just throwing in references to the good movies, but mixing in plot elements from the BAD ones. And while the idiot plot stuff is not as bad as say, Covenant, where the characters had to do actively dumb things or ignore obvious issues in many situations to make the plot happen, in this one, it seems a lot of instances of characters surviving or escaping through sheer luck, such as the pattern of acid blood spattering, or off-screen face-huggers not attacking when they'd be vulnerable. There are also a few moments of sheer bad luck, such as a character falling down or dropping something or randomly hitting the wrong controls at the worst possible time. Also, the alien life cycle stuff seems like it happens really fast, so it can happen within the film's timeframe. But, too, you don't really feel the stakes, because you never really believe that various collisions in space are going to doom the characters, so there is never any tension about mechanical or piloting problems, which nonetheless, make up a significant part of the danger. It's like they want to go for the imminent threat of the reactor explosion that forces a ticking clock on the survivors in Aliens, but you're never really worried, because you're pretty sure that whomever escapes the xenomorphs (and if you've watched a decent sample of sci-fi creature features, you have a pretty good idea who that will be) will retain the necessary equipment functionality to make a complete escape.

As a viewing experience, it's maybe the third or fourth best film in the series. But beating out Alien 3 or Prometheus is not exactly a high bar to clear, and I think if you're going to sit down and really look at it under a microscope, and depending on YMMV issues, it might be one of the worst entries.