Alien: Romulus focuses on a group of young workers trying to escape their dreadful daily lives. We explore how the film combines our own fears with a futuristic setting.
This article contains no story spoilers, but discusses the film’s premise and first act. It also references previous Alien films.
Going into Alien: Romulus, I expected to be scared and entertained as a group of broadly written characters met their grisly ends at the hands (mouths?) of a xenomorph or two. And for the most part, I got just that. You can read Ryan Lambie’s excellent review for more details on how the film is.
What I didn’t expect was to relate to those characters so much.
It’s a well-known fact of horror films that characters usually come paper thin, because we’re not buying a ticket to see a thoughtful arc for someone whose only function is to be monster/killer/ghost fodder. We pay good money to see chaos and bloody mayhem. Any character development that happens is a plus.
Alien: Romulus, Uruguyan director Fede Alvarez’s entry into the franchise, introduces us to our protagonist Rain (Cailee Spaeny) as she’s dreaming about a beautiful sunset. She abruptly awakens to find herself at Jackson’s Star, a space colony that never sees the sun. She’s working hard to earn a travel pass to leave Jackson’s Star behind but just as she thinks she’s earned enough hours to grant her the pass, the company (Weyland-Yutani of course) ups her hours by another 12,000 hours, amounting to roughly five years’ more work.
Rain and her friends – Tyler, Bjorn, Kay and Navarro – realise that they’ll never be permitted to leave their colony and will likely spend the rest of their life doing gruelling, unforgiving work for the corporation.
Which brings us to why Alien: Romulus is so surprisingly relatable. Alien has always been a franchise that focuses on the working class. Alien’s vision of the future wasn’t smooth and ultramodern, but grimy and manual. Spaceships still required engineers to manually fix faults and steer the thing rather than everything being automated or things happening via a push of a button.
From the beginning of Alien: Romulus, it’s easy to believe why these youngsters would leave the relative safety of Jackson’s Star. There’s no hope left there, no future; just hours and hours of manual labour to profit a company who’ll probably eventually kill you. Amusingly, an announcement is heard where a computerised, generic voice tells the labourers that “health and wellbeing is Weyland-Yutani’s top priority”.
Our own present isn’t looking much sunnier either. The cost-of-living crisis has been rattling the UK and the rest of the world for a good while now. The news tells us every day how dire things are; the rental market is in shambles and the NHS waiting times are catastrophic. Young people are facing an uncertain job market with or without a university degree and even if you manage to get a job, your wages are unlikely to be enough to rent more than a cupboard, especially in London.
It’s easy to relate to Rain and her crew’s desire to go to extreme lengths for the chance of a better future. Rain is initially a little hesitant to hijack company property and illegally leave their colony, but realising it’s that or a lifetime of toil, she relents. As this is an Alien film, things go terribly wrong for our group of characters, but the risk our group takes might still be worth the reward. Even if the risk involves getting gnawed on by “the perfect organism”.
Alien: Romulus also reflects our somewhat complex relationship with technology. There’s always been a healthy amount of distrust towards “artificial humans” or synthetics in the franchise, and the theme continues with Romulus.
David Jonsson – who is superb in the film and his performance alone is well worth the price of admission – plays Andy, Rain’s sort-of synthetic brother who has a tendency to malfunction and glitch. He’s been programmed to do whatever is best for Rain by her late father, creating a close, mutually protective bond between the two. The group needs Andy to come with them as he’s able to communicate with Mother and help them unlock the station’s numerous doors.
Once aboard the Renaissance, there’s the constant question: can we entirely trust Andy? We’re keenly aware that he’s the group’s only hope in navigating the abandoned Renaissance as the facehuggers and xenomorphs lurk around, ready to pounce.
As AI becomes more and more common, we’re recognising that it’s useful in some ways, but also poses a huge threat for a lot of jobs. We’re intrigued, but wary of it and there’s seemingly little we can do to stop its progression. Andy is a pretty spot-on representation of our collective fears of – and fascination with – AI. You can view the new Andy as hugely efficient and improved, or he can make you deeply uncomfortable.
The Alien franchise has also had a strong psycho-sexual side to it, and if anything, Alvarez emphasises it even more in Romulus. One of the film’s trailers included a shot of a facehugger being ripped off a victim’s face, pulling its long, rather phallic proboscis out of their throat.
Alien: Romulus also shows what happens in between the chestburster and adult xenomorph stages of the alien’s lifecycle. As hinted at in the trailers, the chestburster, once it’s done bursting, somehow creates a cocoon for itself, in which it quickly matures into the full-grown xenomorph. There’s no subtle way to say this, and Alvarez sure isn’t subtle about it, either: the cocoon looks an awful lot like a vagina. Coupled with the xenomorph’s rather phallic looking head emerging from it… well, you get what we’re saying here.
We’ve written before about how 2024 has really dug into our fears of forced pregnancy. Both Immaculate and The First Omen are particularly effective in a post-Roe vs Wade world where women’s bodily autonomy is constantly in danger. Alien: Romulus, with all its sexual imagery, joins this bizarre trio of horror films that mine the idea of pregnancy and birth for their full horror potential. We’d love to see what an Alien film directed by a woman would look like.
All of the Alien films have played around with themes of forced birth and motherhood as well as the threat of AI, but Alien: Romulus feels particularly timely with all of its themes. As we find ourselves somewhat enslaved by our jobs, the rapid progression of technology looming over us and women’s bodies being constantly regulated, Alien: Romulus hits pretty close to home, even with its space setting and xenomorphs running around.
Alien: Romulus is in cinemas now.
