'ALIEN: ROMULUS' (A MINI REVIEW)

Some while ago now, I said “the Alien films all have to feature Ripley, just like you couldn't make a Dalek film without the Doctor.”

I like to think I’m big enough to admit it when I’m wrong.

She hasn’t shown up in the last two (not counting that one) and ’Alien: Romulus’ even finds ways to turn this deficiency to its advantage. First, where later sequels had become wrapped up in their own continuity this allows for a reset. (In internal chronology, it comes straight after the first film.) Also, this allows a new, young cast to blunder blind into the Alien universe and make their own mistakes. We shout helplessly at the screen “get out of there, it ’s got one of those in it?”. But how are they to know?

Of course in a standard horror film this would just be the teens visiting the haunted house. But here its a course correct, that takes us further back to where we were before then where we were before.

Furthermore, I am won't to complain that contemporary culture insists our protagonists must always be The Special One. (I blame Neoliberalism for this, typically enough, as it means our heroes have to represent not us but me who is not like all the others, not really. I expect you’ve heard me.) Happily, this series has in effect gone the other way. Ripley was not military but she was a capable Warrant Officer. While in ’Covenant’, Daniels was a coloniser. But Rain, our protagonist here, a young wage labourer, the nearest yet to some regular Jo.

And who is our regular Jo set against? I also said “the Alien may be the adversary but the Company are effectively the villain.” And this film is smart enough to get that. Some have complained it starts too slow, but this is info it needs to get over. We’re in a future dystopia, like now only more so. The scenario is ‘the maze and the Minotaur’ in which the Corporation has provided both. The characters become trapped between the Alien’s law-of-fang-and-claw and the demands of rapacious capitalism. (The films tend to exploit Social Darwinism for drama, rather than critique it.)

Plotwise, this is most epitomised by the two Andys. The de rigeur android has two settings; there’s a kind of special needs version who has his skills but also needs looking after himself (not far from the cat in the original), and there’s the other - highly effective but not at all on their side.

But of course, as ever, its most epitomised visually - by the two clashing aesthetics, industrial gothic against the weirdly alien. There’s an effective scene where the corridor they’re about to getaway through is found to be covered in alien… whatever that stuff is. (That industrial gothic look has become almost enhanced by the passage of time. We’re now aware what a mechanical world it is, of chains, metal hatches and grille gates. Monitor screens are analogue and flickery. A retro future.)

’Alien: Romulus’ is rarely lss than involving. You can’t help but get drawn in, feel the tension, jump at the right moments. See it. You won’t be bored.

But the second and third instalments (perhaps even the fourth, to a lesser extent) took all this and took it somewhere new. This is much more more than it is new. It follows the two rules of sequels, ‘bigger’ and ‘faster’. *Aliens’* had already gone for armies of Aliens, so this throws swarms of facehuggers at us, like mobs of spiders. And with this the remorseless inevitability of the first film is, unsurprisingly, gone. Aliens now seem able to not just gestate but grow full size in mere minutes. (I grew hopeless confused as to whether their arrival had let the facehuggers out, or whether the ships had already been overrun.)

The commercial and critical failure of ’Prometheus’ has certainly bounced the series into this more crowd-pleasing direction. (“Less cosmic pontificating, more chest-bursting” read the memo.) So is the result any more than ‘effective franchise instalment’? Not much. Even ’Covenant’, with its Medievalism and bestiaries, had more that was its own.

Added to which, the main place it does innovate doesn’t necessarily work…

(PLOT SPOILERS in next para)

We discover the Corporation have tried to bring capitalism and monster together, thinking to build the strongest creature of all, the best (in their minds) of both worlds. Here the title comes in, they have two spacecraft named after the Rome-founding twins famously raised by wild wolves. That didn’t end well for Remus, and it doesn’t here. But this feels like the film’s own failing, obliged to come up with a new monster variant for the finale, which it then projects onto the Corporation. (I may just object to lanky monsters. Personal reasons.)

But beyond that there are flickers. Trapped in mining jobs on a planet that never sees day is not a bad metaphor for the ceaseless demands of wage labour. Our young team escaping to bathe in sunlight for the first time is a striking moment. (Science Fiction often works best when it shows not the unfamiliar but the familiar from an unexpected angle.) And the zero gravity trick is neat. So… few admittedly, but there. Quite possibly this came out better than might have been expected.