Few cinematic monsters are more iconic than the eponymous Alien of Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic—a dripping, slithering, acid-blooded, tooth-gnashing agent of carnage. The beast is murderous, predatory beyond all rationality, and disconcertingly Freudian. But as brilliantly unsettling as the Xenomorph may be, more than four decades and over a half-dozen films later, you’d be forgiven for thinking the premise is wearing out its welcome. There aren’t that many ways to shoot a slasher movie on a derelict spacecraft, after all.
This probably explains why, upon his return to the franchise, original director Ridley Scott focused on building out the narrative world—populating his cosmos with Weyland-Yutani corporate suits, “Engineer” creator beings akin to Gnostic demiurges, and aesthetics-obsessed androids. The result was ambitious and frequently brilliant (I gave 2012’s Prometheus a 10/10 rating) but a lot of longtime fans balked.
Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is nothing so ambitious. Structurally, it’s mostly content to play the franchise’s greatest hits: empty mechanical rooms, heavy weapons, and lots of gooey claws and mandibles blasting through flesh. In one sense, this is a bit of a comedown from the eerie, quasi-theological musings of Alien: Covenant. But from a different angle, this is pretty much what a summer sci-fi action flick should be.
We start out meeting young miner Rain (Cailee Spaeny, last seen in Alex Garland’s Civil War) and her companion Andy (David Jonsson)—a broken-down android, whose circuitry deterioration manifests as something very like intellectual disability. Rain and Andy, and their friends, are all trapped on the corruptly run mining colony of Jackson’s Star, a 1990s-era sci-fi nightmare—full of smoke, neon lights, CRT screens, and Brutalist architecture. Lacking any realistic way off, they soon hatch an ambitious plan to break into an abandoned space station orbiting the planet. Their goal? Recovering leftover cryo-tubes—necessary to support a nine-year spacefaring journey to the more humane planet Yvaga.
It won’t come as much of a spoiler that, well, that space station isn’t so abandoned after all.
You pretty much know what you’re getting with an Alien film like this one, and the first and second acts don’t break much new ground. Facehuggers, cocoons, chestbursters, spraying acid—they’re all here in spades (though things never get quite as gnarly as Covenant). That said, the third act is an all-out thrill ride that pushes the series’ action in novel directions (a zero-gravity firefight is a particular standout). And true to Alien form, the pedal stays slammed to the metal all the way into the film’s very last moments.
Though this is mostly an action film, it’s worth noting that at least some of the themes from Prometheus and Covenant are meaningfully extended here. This is a series that’s always been absorbed with the question of human nature: what is it, exactly, that distinguishes Engineer from human from android from xenomorph? From one perspective, all four of these “species” exist along a single developmental continuum, each bringing the next into being. It’s a fascinating sort of Neoplatonism-as-horror: each link in this chain is “derived” from the one ontologically prior to it, and each link is progressively more debased than the one before it. Humans lack the sagacity of Engineers; androids lack the social affinity of humans; xenomorphs lack the reflectiveness of androids. Onscreen, the deepest forms of horror (e.g., the half-human/half-alien of 1997’s Alien: Resurrection) come from mixing up this continuum, from confusing one stage in the process with another.
And yet the entire saga hinges on the necessity of revolting against that “emanationist” model. Human beings fight for their survival against their metaphysical “progeny” and forerunners alike. In a fascinating sense, the films are profoundly anti-evolutionary: the idea of progress itself is what must be resisted.
Romulus hints at an explanation of sorts for the fundamental distinction between human and android: human ethics are deontological, android ethics are utilitarian. That is to say: to be distinctively human is to be motivated by moral duties that extend beyond “the greatest good for the greatest number.” (Consider Ellen Ripley risking everything to save Newt in the third act of Aliens.) Romulus’s take is something of a subversion of Covenant: there, the villainous David operates from an altogether different ethic, a sort of aesthetic contemplation turned to necrotic obsession. But perhaps this is simply to underscore David’s own deviance from what—by nature—he ought to be.
Technically speaking, Romulus is a marvel—blending practical and CGI effects with such effectiveness that I honestly thought this movie cost three times as much as it apparently did ($80 million). It’s backed up by a solid score from Benjamin Wallfisch (who’s done a lot of great work in the genre lately). In space, no one might be able to hear you scream—but mayhem certainly sounds better with an epically eerie soundtrack.
Highbrow entertainment, this is not. Part of me misses the grim metaphysical ruminations of Prometheus and Covenant. But for a seventh installment in a nearly half-century-old series, Romulus is a far better time at the movies than it has any right to be.
Literary Analysis 