WOW! Alien: Romulus was what Alien fans have been waiting for over three decades.  Gone are the crushed visions of Fincher’s Alien 3. Gone are the cringe CGI moments in Ressurection. Gone are the pretentious, protracted backstories of Ridley Scott’s returns to the franchise. Director and Co-Writer Fede Alvarez and Co-Writer Rodo Sayagues take us back to what made Alien scary. The film amps up the tension, the suspense, the claustrophobia, and the body horror. We know these fools are in for. It’s the reason we buy the ticket. We want to go on an unrelenting terror-filled thrill ride. Boy, do we get it.

Set between the events of the first Alien film and James Cameron’s Aliens, we meet Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her brother/synthetic human Andy (David Jonsson). They are on a distant mining colony planet living in what is essentially forced labor. After learning that her work contract has been extended without her consent, it appears there is no way off the sunless, rainy, miserable planet. That’s when fellow forced laborer Tyler (Archie Renaux) approaches Rain with a possible plan to escape their prison. It seems that a huge abandoned space station will be drifting above them just 200 miles above the surface of their planet. On this station are dormant escape pods that could sustain them on a journey to a planet with better living conditions and freedom. They need Rain’s brother Andy to communicate with the space station to gain access. After considering the options, Rain, Andy, Tyler, Tyler’s sister Kay (Isabela Merced), friends Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Navarro (Aileen Wu) launch upward to the floating mass of metal in the sky.

We, the audience, have our eyes peeled. We can see the signs of danger a mile away. However, this group of escapees is blinded by hope. Getting into the space station was easy. Getting off of it is another matter. Once the escape pods are located complications arise, one after the other, until this hapless band of dreamers comes face to face with what took an entire space station down. Payday-Schmayday. After encountering our beloved face huggers, the team is perfectly happy to just leave and go back to work. Not so fast.

The sense of discovery is all but gone with a franchise that started 45 years ago. In its place are what made both Alien and Aliens work so well. The production design by Naaman Marshall lands nicely in the visual style between 1979’s future-look by Michael Seymour Peter Lamont’s 1986 vision of the future. This has both a nostalgic and confined result that lends to the tension. Composer Benjamin Wallfisch crafts a score that nods to both Jerry Goldsmith’s work in the first film and James Horner’s work in the 1986 sequel. Alvarez and Sayagues have a keen understanding of what made Alien and Aliens classics and attempt to blend the two approaches as a transition if watched chronologically. We get the tense moments in darkened corridors and the occasional riot of action and chaos. That’s not to mention the dotting of references to the other films throughout including a fiendishly disturbing final act that made my skin crawl. Sheer bliss.

In the end, we get a great story with another badass final girl and a seemingly unstoppable monster. It was impossible to go back and try to reinvent the wheel. Instead, Alverez and his team created an homage to what made the first two films work.