Alien: Romulus

Essential, and the easiest recommendation here for anyone who has seen the first two films and bounced off everything after them. Fede Álvarez sets it twenty years after the Nostromo and treats the original as a style guide rather than a backstory: practical creature effects, cramped corridors, and working-class characters who are aboard a decommissioned station because they are trying to buy their way off a company mining colony.

The opening is the strongest argument for it. The indenture plot is the most direct this series has been about what Weyland-Yutani is for. These are young people whose contracts have been extended without their consent, and the theft that starts the film is an attempt to take cryo-pods and leave. The horror arrives into an economic situation, which is exactly how the 1979 film did it.

Two honest caveats. The film leans hard on recognition: lines, shots and props from the first two films recur often enough that stretches of it play as a greatest-hits reel rather than a story. And it recreates a dead actor's performance digitally for a significant supporting role, a decision that drew sustained criticism on its own terms and that many viewers find difficult to watch past.

It also connects to the prequels more than the marketing let on, so the Prometheus thread is not optional background by the time you reach the third act. If you have skipped those two films you will follow this one fine, but one late sequence will mean considerably less.