Since the 1980s, the “Alien” films have represented the combination of disgust, action and philosophical superstructure. The latest film in the series draws heavily on its predecessors – but still has surprises in store. And an important character is missing.
When the first “Alien” film hit the cinemas 45 years ago, it robbed science fiction audiences of the last remaining hope for the future. “Star Trek” had shown the dream of a peaceful, futuristic society that only strives for knowledge and no longer for power and money. “Star Wars” at least still had a charm of magic and morality. The dystopian future of “Alien”, on the other hand, already seemed like a world of despair before the monster of the title even appeared.
Almost 100 years in the future, the industrial conglomerate Weyland Yutani controls interstellar trade, colonizes planets to exploit their resources, and shows interest in a dangerous extraterrestrial life form in order to make it commercially viable as a bioweapon. The company does not care about the lives of the expedition teams sent into the depths of space for this purpose – the majority do not survive the encounter with the aliens.
This also applies to the latest part. In “Alien: Romulus” a group of young people try to escape their dreary life on a space colony. On an abandoned space station they look for a way to reach a distant planet where life is more bearable. But – you guessed it – on site they encounter the alien, which soon decimates the crew in the most brutal way.
Fans of the series are familiar with the aliens’ murderous life cycle, which is full of psychosexual allusions. An octopus-like creature wraps itself around the victim’s head and parasitically “pregnates” the host, from whose chest emerges just a few hours later an alien with an insect-like physique, acidic blood, two mouths and an irrepressible death drive. The victims have little to oppose the “xenomorph”.
Even the first “Alien” films shocked and disgusted the audience. Philosophers speculated about primal male fears that the alien unleashes: the fear of oral penetration and the birth process. While earlier films only hinted at such scenes, director Fede Alvarez now goes all out and uses X-ray optics to show how the alien makes its way through its victim’s chest.
Alvarez finds his own visual language – no easy task in a film universe defined by master directors. Ridley Scott, who directed the first part, focused on suspense and the depressive loneliness of space, while the later “Avatar” director James Cameron focused on hard-hitting action and gallows humor. David Fincher failed in the third part because of the studio’s constant requests for changes.
Scott, who took over again from the fifth part onwards, made mistakes in “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant” with excursions into existential philosophy, which raised many questions – but answered only a few. Alvarez is now trying to bring the various strands together. Horror is back, as is space action of all kinds.
But like its immediate predecessors, “Alien: Romulus” suffers from the absence of Ellen Ripley, played by Sigourney Weaver, the protagonist of the first four parts. The ship’s officer is considered one of the most influential characters in science fiction history and Weaver is considered the first female action star.
Hollywood’s most complex heroine is missing
Long before the Disney corporation flooded its film universes with seemingly invincible heroines who seemed to have been designed on the drawing board of gender studies, Scott, Cameron, Fincher and Weaver made Ellen Ripley one of Hollywood’s most complex heroines.
Ripley is afraid, but overcomes it; she loses her humanity in the fight with the alien and finds it again in the second part when she takes on the role of surrogate mother for a frightened girl who has survived an alien massacre. Her maturity and resilience are bought with endless suffering.
Ripley brings humanity to a world where the cynicism of a ruthless corporate conglomerate is no less than the murderous arbitrariness of the Xenomorph. It was her character development that made the “Alien” series a myth – an iconic monster alone does not make a good film.
In the new “Alien”, however, Ripley is again absent – and David, the android with a god complex played by Michael Fassbender, who made the last two Ridley Scott films somewhat bearable, is also absent.
Instead, the alien once again falls victim to a handful of new space adventurers, whose hastily inserted characterizations do not make them seem any more complex. When the alien brutally massacres them, you feel disgust, but hardly sympathy. You can hardly even remember the names of the protagonists after the credits roll.
And so “Alien: Romulus” threatens to drift into an interchangeable splatter film that is not lacking in shock moments and space bloodbaths, but which does not add any new facet to the series. In the final act, however, Alvarez has a surprising twist in store that probably only die-hard fans will see coming and which also takes up the philosophical questions from the last films.
At least you can see that the filmmakers took the time to deal with the “Alien” universe. This is actually untypical for the Disney corporation, which otherwise focuses on quantity rather than quality, for example with “Star Wars” and “Marvel”, and whose creative minds often lack respect for the film universes in which they tell their stories.
One can only hope that if “Alien: Romulus” is a hit with audiences, Disney won’t come up with the idea of commissioning half a dozen sequels. A TV series is already in the works, however. This is rarely a good sign for Disney. But we shouldn’t let cynical large corporations rob us of our last remaining hope for the future.
