A previous Alien: Romulus teaser trailer set up the atmosphere that we expect from Fede Álvarez, who has already scared the pants off audiences with maddeningly quiet moments in Don’t Breathe, and now, he’s in space, where (as the iconic tagline goes) “no one can hear you scream.” With that said, Álvarez is also the guy you want when you need skilled hands on an existing movie franchise, as with 2013’s Evil Dead, and he’s here to do justice to what the original Alien movie (from Ridley Scott) did best: use the spaceship’s confines to help craft merciless terror.
This film goes back to the franchise’s late 1970s/early 1980s roots (and blue-collar beginnings) with an official interquel that takes place in between Scott’s Alien (which occurred in 2090-ish) and James Cameron’s Aliens (which happened in 2179). As this trailer shows, group of young-adult scavengers find themselves being hunted on a ship, and there are plentiful callbacks on display like the water scene (you can still hear Newt’s piercing scream from Aliens, right?), and oh god, Álvarez really wants us to see the penetration action from the facehuggers as they move in to plant the eggs.
The simple synopsis of this movie reads, “Young people on a distant world find themselves confronting the most terrifying life-form in the universe.” The story stands separate (although obviously in the same universe) from FX’s upcoming Alien series from Noah Hawley, and if you were wondering whether Álvarez prefers Alien or Aliens, he wisely will not go there. There is, however, a taste of Alien 3 mixed into the end of this trailer when Cailee Spaeny’s Ripley-esque character finds herself corned by a xenomorph. Eek.
Spaeny will be accompanied by Isabela Merced, Archie Renaux, David Johnson, Aileen Wu, and Spike Feam. Please enjoy this poster because it goes seriously hard. Lots of Evil Dead flavor here, too:
Alien: Romulus arrives in theaters on August 16.
