Alien: Romulus

When a young woman is fighting an alien xenomorph on a crippled spaceship, she must be in her underwear. Them’s the rules. Lot of other rules and tropes, callbacks to previous Aliens, in this scary and well-made chapter. There’s a legit pattern now, and a lot of it is predictable. An innocent will be face-hugged. A synthetic will betray the hero. Acid blood will cripple the ship. It goes on. But it’s a skillfully made bundle of lore. Director Fede Alvarez knows how to “fan-service” and uses his excellent sense of timing to scare – beyond the typical jump scares. When something new DOES come along, a biological abomination, you don’t get the sense that it’s going to be sticking around for very long. Spoiler alert. Thematically, all of the “Alien” movies depict a worse-case-scenario of people caught in between a battle between biology and technology, and the exploitation of one for the other for profit, of course. One of the lessons is: don’t let a corporation decide what’s human.