Alien: Romulus

I’m going to do something I rarely do. I’m going to review a movie I hated. It pains me to do this, but do it I must, because this film is terrible in ways that are, on their own terms, super interesting and important for the history of film, horror, and feminism. Oh, Alien franchise. How I love you, and how bad you treat me sometimes. But never, ever so bad as Alien: Romulus.

I’ve waited a few months to post this, because I wanted to give anyone who wanted to see the film a chance before hurling my bile all over everything.

Let me very quickly list of the not-super-important things that don’t work about this film.

1.           The title. Romulus is one of the two mythical twins from the Aeneid who are said to have suckled at the teat of a wolf as infants. Romulus eventually committed fratricide, killing Remus, before then founding Rome. The film does nothing interesting with this potentially electric literary historical touchstone. Nothing. I kept expecting the main character to kill her “brother” Andy in the film, but no: she saves him. If that’s the lesson—that we have to turn away from Romanitas-driven corporate imperialism, in order to “save our brothers” rather than killing them—the lesson should have been made, like, a lot clearer and earned with a lot more narrative scaffolding. FFS.

2.          The suspension of disbelief bar is set way too high. Oh, be nice, Eleanor. It’s an interstellar horror film; what do you expect? Well, I expect basic scientific principles to be maintained, like conservation of momentum. There is no possible way that Rain (main character) could have snaked her way through a zero-G room full of floating particles of alien acid-blood without getting burned. All those particles would have been moving at different rates and in different directions based on the blast angle they were hit at, and they would have been moving fast. No way. I also expect that, if there’s going to be a discussion of Non-Newtonian fluids (which there is), that the discussion will do something with the idea of Non-Newtonian fluids (which it does not.)

3.          The film is a teen film. Yes, that’s right: the entire main cast appear to be between about 14 and 20 years old. The slightly care-worn, slightly over-it, slightly middle-aged and hard-nosed energy of Ellen Ripley, which is so much of what made the original franchise so compelling, is replaced by wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, tearful innocence. It does not work. Like, at all.

4.          I didn’t like the racial politics of the film at all. They went out of their way to cast a very diverse set of main actors: Black, Latino/a, East Asian, South Asian, and white. I’m all for that. I was like, “Ooh, yay!” But then all of them die or are horribly damaged except the white girl. And moreover they die because the Black character—who is markedly not human—is at first a malfunctioning synthetic, and then taken over by an English-accented colonial microchip. To sum up: white girls are the ones who get to survive; Black boys are synthetics who are subject to hostile takeover. How this thing got green-lit, I shall never know.

5.          There is a very annoying missed opportunity in the film to take the Black synthetic human character—Andy—and reinvent the Alien franchise’s fixation on aliens as a fixation on AI. That could have been interesting, but it doesn’t happen.

6.          The film is not scary. It is boring.

Oh, no! I’ve taken up too much time just being pissed off. Let me cut to the chase.

The most important thing about the original Alien film, both from the standpoint of film history and from the standpoint of the history of American feminism, is that it told a story about violent, predatory rape and forceful impregnation as something that could—and did—happen to men every bit as readily as it could happen to women. Remember Kane? Yeah, me too. And so does literally everyone who’s ever seen the original film, because he was a man who got raped and then died “giving birth” to his alien offspring as it tore its way through his abdomenal wall.

The Alien franchise is about rape and forcible reproduction. James Cameron totally clocked and amplified that in Aliens. All good there. Romulus clocks it too, but does things with the rape and forced reproduction dynamics that don’t make any goddamn sense at all, and totally dilute the political rigor of the original two films.

In Romulus, one of the teen heroes is a woman named Kay (Isabela Merced), who is pregnant. With a human baby. When I heard that, I leaned forward: this could be interesting, I thought. When the group of kids dock on the derelict spaceship that they’re planning to hijack, in order to get away from their wage-enslaving and eco-ravaged homeworld, they pretty soon discover a whole bunch of alien larvae—the “face-huggers” from prior films. Navarro (Aileen Wu) is the first to get impregnated—because, remember, the film is killing off the kids of color, one by one. Ok, so she gets impregnated. But when the alien hatches out of her, it comes out through her upper chest, not her abdomen. Yes, of course, people call these scenes “chest-burster” scenes, but if you go back and look at Kane’s death, the alien emerges from his belly—it doesn’t crack through his rib cage. And that matters, because it keeps the iconographic meaning of Kane’s death in the realm of pregnancy and parturition. When Navarro dies, we see broken ribs and cardiac tissue. It’s no longer a pregnancy, but a parasitic infection of the cardiac region. Boo.

A couple scenes later, the mean-spirited boy character, Bjorn (Spike Fearn) attempts to kill the growing alien baby while it’s in a pupal state. He finds it inside what appears to be a massive, wet vulva, attached to the wall. This visual is a full-on rip-off of the scene from Species (1995) when we see the alien larva stuck to the wall of a passenger train. So anyway, in Romulus, we’re looking at a big, steaming vulva. And then mean little Bjorn takes a long electric prod—a phallus—and he rapes his way into the vulva, to electrocute the little alien inside. Now I get it, he wants to kill the alien. But I’m going to say this: I don’t want to see a male character violently shoving a phallic probe directly into a giant vulva. Like, under any circumstances. Nope, I don’t. Nor do I want to see that gigantic vulva then leak acidic vaginal secretions all over the place. The scene is so nasty, and it’s very, very hard not to read it as a misogynist scene. I mean, I get that the baby alien has to die. But do we really have to watch an acidic, wet, probe rape to make that happen? I should think not.

So now, at this point, I’m getting pretty desperate for something redeeming to emerge from this film. Because, despite my ire, I am at my core an optimist, and I believed they could turn this film around. Sure, they botched the alien birth from Navarro’s body. They introduced an interspecies rape scene in which the humans are the assailants. But maybe, just maybe, they’d do something interesting with Kay’s pregnancy. So I’m waiting, hoping for something to start clicking into focus, while the kids are picked off. Eventually, the alien captures Kay, and we think she’s dead. But her brother Taylor (Archie Renaux) hears her, and they go pry her out of an alien cocoon. Andy (the synthetic) can tell she hasn’t yet been impregnated; perhaps it’s because she’s lost too much blood, they say. Another missed opportunity! Because it could have been because she was already goddamn pregnant! It could have been because the alien species recognized that, since she was carrying a fetus already, they should not impregnate her. But no, because this film doesn’t encode the alien rape-and-impregnation as rape-and-impregnation. It just, like, abandons that altogether.

Regardless of not having been parasitically infected by the alien, Kay is nevertheless dying, so she injects herself with this non-Newtonian alien blood DNA extract serum goop (it’s really not explained well in the film) to try to save herself and her baby. It backfires, accelerating fetal development violently, and causing the fetus to be born as—you guessed it!!—a half-human, half-alien hybrid. We’ve seen this stupidity before, in Alien: Resurrection. And it doesn’t work any better here. Kay quickly discovers that her breasts are leaking a mucus-like black and clear fluid; this is what non-Newtonian nursing looks like, I guess. (The black fluid breast milk thing is a pretty clear shout-out to Julia Ducournau’s infinitely more excellent film Titane, also about a hybrid pregnancy that results in the leakage of black fluid from its mother’s body.) So anyway the alien suckles her, and she dies from it. Oh, her brother Taylor had also died. So now we’ve got three dead young people of color (Navarro, Kay, Taylor), one dead mean white boy (Bjorn), a severely compromised Black synthetic (Andy), and an entirely unscathed white girl (Rain). Blergh.

Rain and Andy make it to the end, though it’s pretty clear Andy will die when they exit Weyland-Yutani space, because he will become decommissioned automatically. “I will fix you,” says Rain to him at the end. But I did not believe her at all, despite her having apparently reprogrammed Andy so that his prime directive is no longer “do what’s best for Rain,” but instead, “do what’s best for both of us.” And from the look on Andy’s face, I don’t think he believed her, either. I mean, why not reprogram him to, “Do what’s best for Andy?” The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t get to choose on his own behalf. He doesn’t get to have full agency. This is where the film could have done something really interesting with AI ethics, and just choked. Why not reprogram Andy to do his own will? Since he has to follow his prime directive, that would have forced him to become an independently willing being, not attached to his “sister” at the hip. But no, the film wants Rain to be safe, and Andy just to be, like, upgraded a tiny bit from servant to caregiver. Yuck.

So off they rocket, Rain and Andy, for a 9-year hypersleep until they get to a vacation planet, far, far away. Not kidding, that’s the goal.

Now, before I go be cranky somewhere else. I do want to give credit to the two things about this film that are good. First, the acting. All of the actors do a great job with very, very little to work with. They’re credible, they’re compelling, they’re empathogenic. Second, the outer space visual effects. Whoever the film team got to design the scenes where we’re looking at planetary rings utterly destroy—through collision and friction—a massive space station, sending probably trillions of glittering metal particles into the light of the sun, did an amazing, amazing job. The film is beautiful, astrophysically speaking. Beautiful and devastating, because, of course, the glorious glittering sky is glittering because of an enormous about of destruction and detritus. And yet, it’s still really beautiful. Watching twinkling little islands of blue-white glaciers zoom by the windows of the spacecraft, while knowing that those islands are traveling past you at thousands of miles and hour and could obliterate you faster than an a-bomb? That’s philosophically powerful, right there. I’d love to see a film about the beautiful horror of the total indifference of space. The way that extreme scale and extreme speed create both cataclysm and unimaginable beauty. I’d watch that film for sure. 2001: A Space Odyssey had some of that energy. Some. Tree of Life had some. And the original Alien had some: that scene where we watch Kane’s tiny, vulnerable body jettisoned out into the cold dark of space, flickering and white like a snowflake until it disappears into fucking nothingness, yeah. That’s good. Good and brutal. And this film does have some of that energy. But it’s not because of the story, or the direction, or the script. It’s because of the visual effects, period point blank.

So, if you’re itching for something to be angry about, go watch this film. Otherise, for your homework, go watch A Quiet Place: Day 1, which we’ll be talking about next week.

Meanwhile, if you find yourself Jonesing for some horror analysis, check out this podcast I did with Omaha NPR about Rosemary’s Baby and reproductive violence! Episode 27: https://www.kios.org/the-entertainment