Nobody’s more surprised than I am to report that Alien: Romulus is actually pretty good. It takes a while to set up, but then it’s tense throughout, with a genuinely scary nail-biter of a final escape sequence.

It’s a shame I can’t describe the ending, because it’s a doozy, but you have to see the movie to find out for yourself how fresh shudders can be added to the very familiar Alien franchise. I’ll simply note that the Alien movies have always centered on the horrifying implications of sex, birth, motherhood, evolutionary development, and nightmarish corporate interference in all of those areas creating ever worse biological nightmares. One of the crew members in Alien: Romulus is pregnant. You can start speculating from there.

Though if you follow the commentary of certain critics and fans, who seem to have total recall of every plot point in all eight previous Alien films in the forty-five-year-old franchise. there’s nothing new under the sun, and it’s all sadly derivative. Reliable old crank Mick LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle takes this jaded position to its logical end point, grousing,

The real mistake here wasn’t in the execution. The foundational mistake came when someone said, “Hey, let’s make another ‘Alien’ movie.” Newsflash: The alien concept is dead. Leave it alone, and leave poor Ian Holm out of it.

That final gripe about Ian Holm refers to the fact that the late actor, who played the android Ash in the superb first Alien in 1979, is incorporated into this new film. He’s made to give a CGI-zombie performance as a new android character, Rook, who’s clearly the same model as Ash, the coldly single-minded corporate shill. It was producer Ridley Scott’s idea to resurrect Holm, and Holm’s family gave writer-director Fede Álvarez (The Evil Dead) permission to digitally recreate the likeness of the actor, who died in 2020. Actor Daniel Betts impersonated Holm’s voice.

As creepy as this seems to many ordinary humans, showbiz people are differently constituted. Scott and Álvarez regard this as a terrific posthumous favor to Holm. Álvarez explains,

We came up with the idea with Ridley when we realized that the only actor who had never made a second appearance as an android was Ian Holm, who we both believe is the best in the franchise. We thought it’s so unfair that he never came back when Michael Fassbender did it a couple times and Lance Henriksen did it more than a couple of times. So we thought he deserved that.

This sentiment accords nicely with film industry bosses’ desires to own dead actors’ images and keep them working forever. The 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike achieved certain prohibitions against that eventuality, but family permission presumably overrides it.

Anyway, ironically, the film begins with a condemning look at the horrors of capitalism. A young woman named Rain (Cailee Spaeny of Civil War and Priscilla) and her “synthetic” brother Andy (David Jonsson) are hoping to escape the sunless mining colony Jackson’s Star and the terrible working conditions that killed her parents. She thinks she’s fulfilled her contract, toiling enough hours to earn their way to a new planet that features actual sunshine. But she’s told by a downtrodden and indifferent clerk that the Weyland-Yutani Corporation has doubled the required work days necessary to transfer out.

Finding out she’d have to work five more years there before she could apply again for transfer makes her receptive to a half-baked plan her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) has for escaping the colony. He and his pregnant sister, Kay (Isabela Merced), his angry cousin, Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn’s laconic girlfriend, Navarro (Aileen Wu), who’s also a pilot, aim to board a derelict spacecraft that still has partial functions and some working cryonic stasis chambers that will allow them to travel the vast distances to a planet with better living conditions.

The ragtag crew don’t need Rain particularly, but they need Andy, who can communicate with the ship’s existing computer system. Andy’s only directive is “Do what’s best for Rain.” He was programmed by Rain’s late father, who also built into Andy’s system an endless supply of dad jokes. British actor David Jonsson gives an excellent performance as Andy, who’s malfunctioning on old software and wears a perpetual sad-eyed look of worry and puzzlement as he struggles in grim human conditions to help Rain. He moves hesitantly. He’s the target of bullies on the street.

Then as the first of a relentless series of emergencies overtake the young escapees, of the facehugger-chestburster-Zenomorph varieties, Andy is reprogrammed to deal with urgent necessities. But that changes his behavior and overrides his loyalty to Rain. Now his posture is militant, his movements crisp and decisive, and his manner coolly calculating. He’s working for “what’s best for the Company.”

The spacecraft has two modules called Romulus and Remus. Those names evoke the bloody founding myth of Rome’s creation in a way that doesn’t bode well for any sibling relationships in the film. If you recall, it involves a rivalry between the mythical twins that leads to a fratricide and Romulus ascending to rule.

Personally, I still like the “alien concept” and feel right at home among shivering characters with big guns creeping through abandoned space stations full of aliens pulsating and scuttling all around them. Making an “interquel” between Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) — you know, the two great ones — is a smart way of returning to the dystopian basics of the franchise. This includes a built-in recognition of how endlessly exploitable human life is when the profit-seeking power of “the Company” is running things. The variations on corporate manipulation and betrayal in the Alien films don’t lose their fascination as they get ever more sickeningly invasive and unstoppable. The parallels with our own grim reality only get starker over time. And in the end of Alien: Romulus, the monstrosity of the Company takes on a literal form that may make you want to laugh and shriek simultaneously.

It’s a worthy summer movie, all right!