Locked into a seemingly inescapable Weyland-Yutani contract on a bleak mining colony in deep space, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her lovable "brother" Andy/ND-255 the android (David Jonsson), a font of dad jokes, team up with some friendly rapscallions to loot a derelict space ship that has just drifted into orbit.
However, upon docking with the craft, they discover it's not a ship, but a hastily abandoned space station. The group hopes to scavenge the cryo-pods so they can put themselves into suspended animation for the nine year flight to another colony.
However, the pods aren't fully fuelled up, so they have to venture further into the station... where they accidentally awaken a legion of facehuggers that were napping there.
Unsurprisingly, chaos ensues.
Matters aren't improved when the young pickers find the only surviving member of the station's crew is the remnants of a droid called Rook.
Rook is the same model synthetic as Ian Holm's Ash from the original Alien... and just as trustworthy.
Slightly wonky CGI has been used to replicate the late Ian Holm's face which makes Rook look more like a Gerry Anderson Thunderbird than anything else.
I get that this was supposed to be a shorthand and an Easter Egg, but ultimately it comes over as a rather uncomfortable design choice.
Written and directed by Fede Álvarez (who gave us the superb Evil Dead remake in 2013), Alien: Romulus makes no attempt to conceal what it is and this is one of its major strengths, for instance there is no need to explain xenomorphs to its audience or hide the fact that Andy is an android.
Rook is the same model synthetic as Ian Holm's Ash from the original Alien... and just as trustworthy.
Slightly wonky CGI has been used to replicate the late Ian Holm's face which makes Rook look more like a Gerry Anderson Thunderbird than anything else.
I get that this was supposed to be a shorthand and an Easter Egg, but ultimately it comes over as a rather uncomfortable design choice.
Written and directed by Fede Álvarez (who gave us the superb Evil Dead remake in 2013), Alien: Romulus makes no attempt to conceal what it is and this is one of its major strengths, for instance there is no need to explain xenomorphs to its audience or hide the fact that Andy is an android.
The film's biggest flaw, however, is its continual blurring of the line between respecting the franchise's lore and replaying its greatest hits (Andy's quoting of one of Ripley's best-known lines was particularly egregious).
While it builds nicely on what has gone before (managing to tie its story, surprisingly, into key elements from Prometheus), the constant need for the script (co-written by Álvarez with Rodo Sayagues) chokes on a surfeit of heavy-handed homages to earlier Alien movies.
And the thing is, it doesn't need them: there's clearly a cracking slasher in space horror film here, with its cast of teenage chum ready to feed the unstoppable, acid-blooded, monsters haunting the floating house.
It is potentially, as Joe Bob Briggs would call it, a perfect "spam in a cabin" movie.
Important elements are nicely foreshadowed and the central performances from the young cast are wholly believable (and appropriate for a sci-fi spin on the slasher genre), this could have been another classic in the well-loved franchise.
And it is a fun movie, but it's let down purely by film's teeth-grindingly awkward urge to scream: "you know that bit you liked in that other Alien film, well here it is in our film!"