Ever the optimist, I’m actually looking forward to a new Alien film, despite numerous disappointments over the years.

Look, I’m not just an optimist, but I also actually enjoyed Alien 3, ok? Despite the fact that, having been too young to see it on the big screen initially, I read the novelisation and was baffled that the character of Golic, whose genuinely interesting story arc was a highlight of the book, ended up being unfairly, almost entirely edited out of the final cut. Something that I actually discussed with Paul McGann, who played Golic, this year at Portsmouth Comic Con!

But I digress. The point being that Alien films haven’t been particularly good for decades now. Not even Ridley Scott, with his ‘oh it’s definitely not an Alien prequel, but oops it is really’ Prometheus and its own sequel, Alien Covenant, both of which were underwhelming at best, could rectify. And certainly not Jean-Pierre Jeunet, with Alien Resurrection back in 1997; as the first Alien film I was legally old enough to see at the cinema, what a crushing disappointment that was, especially from the usually reliable Jeunet.

Yet the director of the Evil Dead remake and Don’t Breathe, Fede Alvarez, seems to be taking the series back to its terrifying roots, and is doing so in a way that makes it genuinely feel like it fits into the lo-fi, retro futuristic aesthetic of the first films, something that Scott himself got incredibly wrong with his prequels. With video game Alien Isolation showing how it should be done and even giving in-universe justification for the use of dated looking tech, there was no excuse to go for an overly advanced or cleaner looking vibe than we saw in the original Alien.

Anyway, the final trailer for Alien Romulus is here. It looks fantastic, and perhaps most importantly, it looks bloody terrifying. Oh, and it’s especially heavy on the good old facehuggers.

Just what the Doctor ordered. Enjoy, but maybe don’t watch while you’re eating.