Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Unlock the Editor’s Digest for freeRoula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.In another life, Ridley Scott might have bred spaniels. As it is, the sometime master director has brought forth sequels. Blade Runner got one; Gladiator soon will. Towering over both is Alien, the science fiction saga hatched from one deathlessly brilliant 1979 B-movie. For the latest spawn, Alien: Romulus, Scott has stepped back into the role of producer; direction comes from Fede Álvarez. But the old hand is clearly still at large, in a film that returns us wholesale to the dank, dripping world of that landmark original.Online, the new film has been called an “interquel,” an ungodly term for a story set between Alien and James Cameron’s wham-bam second episode, Aliens. Tonally too, the film plays like a hybrid between the pair. We open on a bleak mining planet run by mega-corp Weyland-Yutani, whose oppressed workers include one Rain Carradine. She is played by young actor Cailee Spaeny, the fast-riser who has already starred in Priscilla and Civil War.Álvarez got his break making an efficient 2013 “reimagining” of horror classic Evil Dead. That movie’s bloody cabin in the woods will come to ring a bell as Rain, a timid android (Industry’s David Jonsson), and a ragbag of future Gen Zs escape the planet, only to run into a seemingly deserted space station. If you think you can guess what happens next, you would be right. Yes: sacs. The youthful faces freeze. Most of the rest of us have been here before.That same tension ticks under the whole movie. Scott’s own past two Aliens — Prometheus and Alien: Covenant — felt made for fans and, in their close attention to lore-ish detail, the maker himself. For Covenant, at least, box office was muted. The new movie is clearly designed to be faster, nastier and cheaper: a modern horror for teens and twentysomethings to see kids their own age meet a xenomorphic end.Still. It also remains an Alien, with almost half a century of name recognition and a legacy of indelible nightmare imagery. Let the callbacks and homages begin — and then never end. Sometimes, Álvarez riffs on the mythos to reasonable effect. There’s a little fun in the use of new filmmaking technology to revisit old characters. The series’ long fixation with the maternal now certainly goes there. But the sheer weight of retreads gets dull and cynical. Faces are hugged, chests burst, et cetera, ad nauseam. Worse yet, the more Álvarez quotes Scott, the drabber his own ideas seem by comparison. Generic jump scares abound. A ragged plot relies on thin characters doing stupid things.More grating yet: the timing should be a gift. The gloomy future-gazing that was always such a strength in Alien feels more pertinent than ever. Between the march of AI, Elon Musk’s rush to colonise space, and far-out tech moguls like Peter Thiel foreseeing humanity arranged into corporate states, history seems to be catching up to Scott. A shame, then, that his new offspring is so stuck in the past.★★☆☆☆In cinemas from August 16
