I saw Alien: Romulus (2024)
Corporate greed, existential philosophy, and abject horror. (No spoilers).
(Note: spoilers for some previous Alien films).
When vetting prospective housemates in my early 20s, I began leading the process with some simple questions. Though tongue-in-cheek, all of these silly questions, to me, said a lot about a person.
The first and most important of these questions was: Top Gun or Alien?
There is only one right answer.
On my way into Romulus I declined a promotional ‘Alien Ooze Cocktail’ only to be offered a bright green ‘Alien Ooze Mocktail’ which was definitely Mountain Dew. A person in a Xenomorph outfit crawled up and down the aisles and over rows of chairs, which made me very uncomfortable. While my girlfriend, sat to my right, thought my discomfort to be an act, it really wasn’t. I’ve been primed by the entire Alien franchise to understand that those who do not take Xenomorphs seriously are going to die the most gruesome death that science fiction has offered all fans of the genre. Even a small adult in an Amazon-ordered Xenomorph costume is enough to make me feel the heebie-jeebies.
Here’s what you need to know:
The latest instalment of Alien is an incredible addition not only to the franchise, but to the science-fiction genre. The original Alien (1979) introduces us to a perfect predator, who re-appears in 3 sequels that get worse in that order. I’ll be ignoring Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection from hereon out.
Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) are not only terrifying, but they too provide a prescient commentary on what happens when human life is deemed to be of less importance than corporate interests.
In the franchise’s most recent instalments—prequels Prometheus (2012) and Covenant (2017)—the horror and suspense of the original two films are layered atop the introduction of a backstory.
In Prometheus, we are compelled to question the utility of man’s search for meaning, and whether our creators consider us to have demonstrated ourselves worthy of the gift of life. Everything from ancient cave paintings and Greek mythology, to the visitation upon Earth of Jesus Christ, are referenced in an tremendous world-building exercise that places the relationship between human and Xenomorph at the centre of a millennia-spanning creation event steeped in philosophical consequences.
In Covenant, humanity’s destruction of planet earth sees us repeating history as colonists looking for greener pastures on foreign lands. Various incarnations of our own attributes and sins are given greater gravity and terrible consequence as they re-emerge in ‘synthetics’ (human-appearing robots). Covenant forces us to consider our own capacity for creation, and our inability to reckon with our own self-inflicted obsolescence. At the end of Covenant we’re left asking ourselves: if the artificial intelligence that we engineer was to be given the opportunity to create, how would it react towards us, a definitively inferior creation?
Romulus chronologically takes place between Alien and Aliens, and pays homage to the entire franchise, keeping us terrified while also managing to throw back to some of our old favourite characters and cheesy one-liners.
For the more politically interested, you’ll notice that once again all of the film’s characters exist only at the whim of corporate interests. When humans aren’t being used as indentured servants on desolate mining planets with no sunshine, they’re running for their lives through an abandoned space station from Xenomorphs who are on the loose, once again, as the result of a combination of corporate negligence and corporate greed.
With much less philosophising than Prometheus, and much more terrifying than Covenant, Romulus takes the franchise back to its roots in every sense of the word. The film is an unmissable and visually breathtaking rollercoaster for Alien and Top Gun fans alike.
8.75/10
