James McDonagh on Alien: Romulus and where it needs to take its cue from 1986’s Aliens…
It’s a hostile summer for movies. To succeed, Alien: Romulus must learn from Aliens. The second movie is the best. Why? Because it’s the only film in the franchise that’s not about aliens.
When Ian Holm’s Ash said, in Alien, “I admire its purity,” he could have meant the movie itself. No studio green-lights a production without a solid business case (the spiel for the film, which went into production almost immediately after Star Wars, was “Jaws in Space”), but all the sequels were blatant cash-ins James Cameron’s pitch to studio execs was to write the word ‘Alien‘ on the back of the script, add the ‘s’, and then put two vertical lines through it to create a dollar sign.
It’s hardly surprising that Fede Alvarez, director of Romulus, is focusing so tightly on the first two films. Alien was extraordinary. It terrified young Gen Xers like nothing else—the body horror, the disturbing not-so-subtext (which we’ll return to), and the Ash twist. Most of all, the weirdness of the ‘perfect organism’ made it an apex predator, just like the shark it was trying to emulate.
Two exalted sequels (so far) are based on Ridley Scott films: Aliens and Blade Runner 2049. Both are more character-driven and arguably more human. Scott has created some of the most beautiful moving pictures ever put on screen. Just look at Prometheus. Whatever its faults, it’s a staggeringly beautiful movie. But like many of his films, it’s cold. Aloof.
While there are well-drawn characters in Alien, undoubtedly more so than in the average slasher movie, does Scott care about them as anything more than fodder for the real star of his film?
Famously, Ripley was never written specifically as a female. Dan O’Bannon’s script explicitly states that the roles are unisex. It’s a commendable choice, particularly with 2024 hindsight, but ironic, given that many regard Ripley as the archetypal female movie badass. During the movie’s conclusion, John Hurt might have slipped into that spacesuit in his underwear. Her state of undress was about vulnerability, not titillation. And yet, from the creature’s lifecycle to Ash trying to force a rolled-up porn mag into Ripley’s mouth, the film confronts us with explicit themes of sexual assault. It’s distilling slasher movie sex and violence to their most horrific aspects. When Ripley eventually defeats the monster, she fires a harpoon through it. The film doesn’t care about the gender of the protagonists, but it wants to put them through violent, penetrative acts. The “purity” of that first film was its horror. Everything else was secondary, including character.
Given that, you can understand the approach taken in Alien 3. Aliens was undoubtedly a hard swerve into action, with the third film an attempt to course correct. But it tried too hard. The convicts almost gang-rape Ripley, not to mention the deaths of Newt and Hicks. As much as the film didn’t belong to Fincher, it seems clear why the studio chose him for this story when you look at the nihilism of Seven.
Moreover, where Alien doesn’t care about Ripley’s gender, in Alien 3, it’s her only character trait. The film is a regression. Aliens was an evolution.
The ‘survivor’ from O’Bannon’s script begins Aliens broken. The unspeakable trauma of her experience is – when spoken – roundly disbelieved, except by those who see a way to exploit it. The creature has taken everything from her: 60 years of her life, and most cruelly, as we learn in Cameron’s favoured ’40 miles of hard road’ extended version, her daughter, Amanda. Next, it takes her job. Ripley is uniquely alone in a teeming universe, 60 years out of time, family, friends, and identity all stolen from her by a real-life nightmare that denies her sleep and threatens her sanity.
One of the reasons Burke is so despicable even before he attempts to impregnate both Ripley and a child with his fortune is how he manipulates Ripley with the very identity she’s lost:
Ripley: Yeah, yeah, I saw the commercial. Look, I don’t have time for this. I’ve gotta get to work.
Burke: Oh, yeah. I hear you’re working at the cargo docks.
Ripley: That’s right.
Burke: Running loaders and forklifts.
Ripley: Yeah. So?
Burke: Nothing. I think it’s great that you’re keeping busy. And I know it’s the only thing you could get. There’s nothing wrong with it. [pause] What would you say if I told you I could get you reinstated as a flight officer? The company has already agreed to pick up your contract.
He’s a coward, but he’s a competent psychologist. The acting in that scene clearly shows he’s pushing buttons. The story is structured so Ripley embraces her new identity to reclaim the stolen one. There’s a reason why “Get away from her, you bitch!” has been called the most badass line in SF history. It’s easy to see why when we look at what’s behind it and what’s at stake in that final confrontation between two enraged mothers.
As a literal and storytelling evolution of the first film’s antagonist, the Queen is such a fantastic final boss because, as in all great stories, she mirrors our hero. The criticism that Aliens is more action than the first film’s horror is valid. Still, this theme of motherhood both undercuts and refines that argument. After all, how many times have we heard of wounded or dying soldiers calling for their mothers?
Of that list of exalted sequels, James Cameron directed two. He understood that character development was fundamental to making both work. Compare Ripley’s journey here with Sarah Connor’s horrified realisation that she has become ‘the terminator’ in Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In both cases, the plots are remarkably similar to their predecessors; character is the biggest development.
But it’s not just the writing that sets Aliens apart. The recent 4K Ultra HD version has done what it often does, revealing special effects meant for a lower-resolution era. Still, for this viewer, those alien bastards have never looked better – or scarier – than they did in Aliens. No offence to the first film; it’s a classic by any standard. But come on, the full-grown alien is visibly a guy in a suit, and once you’re over the initial shock of the chest-burster, its squealing departure is laughable. Cameron and his team emphasised the aliens’ insectile nature more than any movie in the franchise, which is creepy and unsettling. Arachnophobia and fears of scuttling things are common, so many of us found elements of the sequel just as frightening as the first film. The textured, slimy redesign of the creature in this film is more, well, alien than the rest of the franchise. The budget limited effects in the first film, and CGI rendered the following too clean. Also, the sequel takes itself less seriously; there are more jokes, and the contrast when the monsters arrive is more visceral.
Moreover, until now, Aliens is the only movie that makes the face-huggers a terrifying antagonist in their own right, something it’s exciting to see that Romulus seems keen to revisit.
Prometheus and Covenant are the only sequels that have attempted to dive into the characters as much as Aliens did, with limited success. It may be too easy an intellectual leap to argue that Prometheus is a thematic answer to Aliens, taking as it does the subtitle of the most famous story on man’s attempted theft of motherhood, Frankenstein, and making it explicit. One of the biggest problems with Prometheus is that its themes are more interesting than the film itself. Still, even then, they’ve been explored in more exciting ways elsewhere, on TV and in both Blade Runner movies.
So, Alien 3 was obsessed with death, draining itself of joy, killing the character and failing to scare in the way the first did. Alien: Resurrection had only a facsimile of the original Ripley character in every sense, and while there might have been an exciting story in the ideal of Call, a synthetic made to believe she was human, it never developed into anything and once again has been done much better elsewhere. Since then, we’ve had only the Aliens vs. Predator movies and Prometheus.
So, Alien: Romulus needs to learn from the franchise’s standout film. It needs to be a film about people, not aliens. It needs to give us characters we care about and still talk about almost 40 years later.
What are your thoughts? Are you looking forward to Alien: Romulus? Let us know on our socials @FlickeringMyth…
James McDonagh
