Following the cosmic space junk of Ridley Scott's films Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, Don’t Breathe director Fede Álvarez makes a noble effort to bring the Alien franchise back to basics and perhaps scare up some of the oppressive dread of the still riveting first salvo of movies.
He’s assembled a ragbag young cast including - naturally - a cyborg who provides much of the moral backbone and the most interesting character arc of the story and an ingenious CGI rendered character from the past - but nine Alien movies in, it’s hard not to conclude that this latest face-sucking fest is just another greatest hits package.
Cailee Spaeny, so great in Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, plays Rain Carradine, an indentured grunt working out her time on a godforsaken, rain-lashed mining colony. Just when she thinks she’s finally free to make the onward journey to (literally) sunnier climes, the Kafkaesque corporation adds another six years to her contract and she is forced to turn to other means of escape.
Rain lives with Andy (David Jonsson), a sweet and caring cyborg "synthetic" with a taste for puns and dad jokes who has been programmed by her late parents to help her at all times.
Andy becomes the key to a plan hatched by a group of young rebels to hijack a suspiciously familiar looking abandoned space station drifting in orbit above and make their dash for freedom.
However, once on board, something very wicked this way scuttles and the gang are stalked, inseminated and otherwise ripped to shreds by countless young xenomorphs.
What follows is yet another retread of all too familiar Alien territory with some mumbo jumbo about natural selection and eugenics.
With it’s Alien universe timeline intersections and young female protagonist, it has something of the feel of Rogue One and it isn’t ashamed to borrow whole scenes and dialogue from Alien and Aliens.
Spaeny, who very quickly becomes the Ripley of the piece, and Jonsson are good value, it’s sturdily made - all hulking hardware and massive sound design - and while the first act captures some of the paranoia of the first movies, it’s short on shocks and squanders any goodwill with a spectacularly naff ending.
Alan Corr @CorrAlan2
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