Spoilers ahead for pretty much all of the Alien franchise…
So I caught Alien: Romulus in the cinema earlier this month, and I thought it was fine. Just fine. I thought it was well-directed – by this point after Don’t Breathe and Evil Dead, Fede Alvarez knows what he’s doing with the premise of ‘group of kids bite off more than they can chew and die horribly’. All the characters were thin but made sense, the acting was solid, the cinematography was consistently excellent, the score was on-point, the pacing was good, there’s some fantastic set-pieces, and bar some dodgy facial CGI, the blend of digital and practical effects really stands up.
Given all that, why am I not singing the movie’s praises? Well, it’s because I have a big issue with the state of the Alien franchise, and it’s not with the technical aspects of Romulus itself. I think that it’s a wonderful ‘greatest hits’ of the Alien franchise, remixing all of its best parts into one solidly cohesive package.
But it’s also the most stagnant, uninspired imitation of the trailblazers that justify its existence. A child that lives only to honour and repeat its parents’ accomplishments, rather than to forge its own path. And all of that is a cluster of effects orbiting one singular problem.
The problem is the Alien itself.
In order to explain what I do want from this series, we need to go back to the last time someone tried to make an Alien movie without the Alien, and the fallout of that decision. Strap in, why don’t you, and join me on the journey.
The Big Backpedal
When I ask you to think of a major backpedal in a franchise, what kind of things do you think of? Star Wars getting scared by the divisiveness of The Last Jedi and deciding to lean so hard into familiar iconography that they made the Emperor the ultimate villain? The many takebacks of the MCU, most recently scrapping the entire Kang Dynasty and trying to recover by leaning hard into familiar iconography and bringing Robert Downey Jr. back as the ultimate villain? Funny how both of those, and Alien, are all owned by Disney.
Anyway, one of the biggest backpedals I’ve seen, and stands up to those other examples, is the one between Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. Let’s briefly set the scene: Alien is one of the greatest horror movies, and greatest movies in general, ever made. An equally good sequel was made, altering the tone somewhat to keep things fresh but maintaining the spirit of the original. Then, several of the most disappointing and confusing sequels ever made are released, effectively killing the mainline franchise. A couple of cheesy spinoffs hold us over for a few years. Tom and I go into arguably too much detail on all of this in our tier list.
That takes us to 2009 and an Alien prequel is in the works to be directed by original Alien director Ridley Scott, and a script penned by Jon Spaihts. It very straightforwardly provides an origin for the originals mysteries like the space jockey and its ship, and the xenomorph itself, tying neatly into the first Alien.
Scott and Fox in general aren’t keen on something that essentially retreads the same ground as the first film, so they bring in Damon Lindelof who proposes something far more distant from the existing Alien canon, believing that prequels should stand on their own from the original, with their own themes and characters, which Scott vibes with.
It’s important to note that both men emphatically stated that they thought the Alien creature itself shouldn’t be featured, that the monster had been done to death with numerous sequels and spin-offs like Aliens vs Predator, which incidentally also turned Aliens director James Cameron off the franchise, believing it to be beyond recovery. In Ridley Scott’s own words, “The beast is done. Cooked.”
Lindelof makes a new script, drawing influence from Scott’s other landmark film Blade Runner, in particular its heady themes and broad sci-fi scope, and it becomes the basis for the film that eventually hit theatres in 2012.
Prometheus
So what was that film like? Honestly, exactly what you’d think if I pitched you “Alien but Blade Runner”. Comparing Alien and Prometheus, both movies are rich in thematic material, but while the original Alien was rooted deeply in down-to-earth, practical conflicts of modern life like the exploitation of workers under capitalism, Prometheus instead ponders far more abstract, existential questions.
Where do we come from? What is our place, or purpose in the universe? Do we even have one? In a bleak world where the edges of the map are filled in, can faith exist? Is there a higher power? What form does that higher power take? If we can create artificial intelligence, what might our creations think of their creator? What might that reflect about our own creators?
Both are tense and violent films, but while Alien keeps its hopelessly outmatched heroes trapped in the claustrophobic darkness of a spacecraft with a killing machine, too scared and short on time to do anything other than try and survive, Prometheus pulls the lens much further back. Wide shots, more often than not, consist of titanic natural vistas on our planet and others, backed by a soaring score that evokes the spirit of discovery. The tone is more contemplative, giving characters plenty of time to reflect and muse in between exploration and action.
And of course, there’s no Aliens in Prometheus. I mean, there’s aliens, lowercase, and plenty of them, but no actual xenomorphs roaming around and gnashing at people. The threat in Prometheus is David the android through the film’s more insidious acts, and the Engineer and the Trilobite in more straightforward violence in the final act.
The confusion and horror of its sudden onset of violence at the end has a point, an obvious point. And that’s mainly what I want to talk about – how the central theme of Prometheus is so baked into the story and characters that it’s arguably over-stated, but then that theme is completely undermined by the sequel, and the central fault that brings it all down, is the Xenomorph.
Prometheus, predominantly, is about the perils of searching for the origins of things, of looking backwards rather forwards. A rather hilariously meta move for a prequel to make. But it’s not saying that this search for answers and explanations is pointless, exactly, more that such an endeavour is a naturally human pursuit, and something that compels us despite the dangers.
That idea is permeated throughout most of the story and characters. Our protagonist, Shaw, is an archaeologist who, along with her husband Holloway, is searching for an alien species they call Engineers, who they believe seeded human life on Earth – something shown to be true in the prologue of the film.
Shaw’s search is driven by faith, and not the abstract faith that there are answers to be found, but belief in capital-G Christian God. As someone who’s infertile and can’t create life naturally herself, she’s wracked with questions about why a being who has that power would throw it away, and dependent on that search as a purpose to live for. The closer she gets to understanding the Engineers, the closer she gets to understanding the Creator himself, the grander plans of why any of this, existence itself, matters.
Weyland, having conquered all other aspects of life as a titan of industry and nearing death of old age, is in search of the secret of eternal life. While he can create life in David and Vickers, he cannot preserve his own. A mortal being who can create life is just a man, and Weyland seeks to become a god, to live and rule forever, to ends unknown.
His daughter, Vickers, considers all of this the delusions of an old man nearing death, believing only in cold rationality and actively sabotaging efforts to uncover the truth, seeing no practical or financial gain in learning the meaning of life. Forced to indulge in Weyland’s fantasies, she intends to patiently play the story out until she can inherit his power and steer the company’s direction towards her own goals.
And then there’s the android David, evoking all of the characteristics of the modern Prometheus himself, Frankenstein’s monster. He initially wishes to become something akin to human, to mimic their habits and fit in, or perhaps just take on more complicated affectations than the ones he was programmed with.
But in the journey, a deep resentment emerges. He’s stronger and smarter than the humans, and yet is considered beneath them. He has nothing further to learn from them, and been given no respect that he can return, so he seeks to surpass them, learning from the Engineers instead and using the humans as his test subjects.
What all of the characters fail to recognise, in ignoring and belittling David, in refusing to acknowledge his sentience, is the very answers they’re seeking – why would the Engineers create and then abandon humanity? Well, why would humanity create and then dismiss David? None of this is lost on David, who points out the irony in the film.
Through these characters, the filmmakers create a very visible hierarchy of power, of generations vying for control of their destiny in a way that’s reminiscent of myth – the name Prometheus is truly perfect. They’re either attempting to wrestle control from existing patriarchs in a form of Titanomachy, or seeking out an absent god for answers, like a Biblical figure wandering the desert.
All pretty cohesive, and with all of that drive from various characters, you’d expect them to be able to find some kind of answer. Well, our characters set off on their journey, and when they get there, the first Engineer head they find immediately explodes upon reanimation, the second alien lifeform they encounter is a weird vagina snake that kills several members of the crew, the third is a squid thing that David impregnated Shaw with and they kinda forget about until the climax, and when they finally get hold of a live, fully intact Engineer and attempt to communicate with it, it rips David’s head off and kills the rest of the team before promptly attempting to leave for Earth, all without divulging any meanings of life, the universe and everything.
It would be hard not to come out of a movie that ends like that without thinking that there’s no point in any of this search for answers. It seems like they’re saying that, both in the canon of the Alien universe, and the general existential questions we face in the real world, disappointment is what you should expect. And yet, the implication of an Alien prequel is that the end result will be an Alien; it was an expectation when you bought a ticket, and a contributing reason for buying it in the first place for a lot of people.
So were Ridley Scott and Damon Lindelof just trolling? Creating a prequel that promised the origins to a creature so terrifying partly because of its mysterious origins and purpose, then pulling the rug from under you and calling you an idiot for wanting such an inherently self-destructive thing? Are we Shaw, punished for our hubris by the creators for seeking knowledge, and given bitter dissatisfaction in return, in the form of a frustratingly vague movie?
It wouldn’t be the first time artistic leads have been so petty. In the Sherlock TV show, Stephen Moffatt and Mark Gatiss wrote a scathing depiction of their own fans as obsessive and irrational weirdos, the whole time encouraging speculation about how Sherlock faked his death in the Season 2 finale, only to sidestep the explanation with a character saying that it didn’t matter how he did it.
Game of Thrones showrunners Benioff and Weiss were notorious for writing in petty digs ranging from smaller things like naming an idiot character Orson as a shot at author Orson Scott Card, to much larger choices like killing off Barristan, a rather important side character in the books, because his actor kept protesting the changes they were making to the story.
But despite my suspicions, I don’t think that’s the case with Prometheus, partly because Scott has always been on board with a film that explains the origins of Alien’s mysteries, and the plan always seemed to be that the Prometheus series would eventually tie into the main Alien series.
But also because the movie doesn’t end there. Shaw retains her faith and her determination to find answers, despite the horrors it’s brought her, only now the question has become “why create us only to destroy us?” and she sets off with David on another alien ship to the Engineer homeworld. Back on the planet, the Trilobite – the squid alien that Shaw gives birth to – impregnates the Engineer with something called a Deacon, that is clearly a distant cousin twice-removed to the original Xenomorph.
So there are answers out there. There exists connective tissue between Prometheus and the original Alien timeline, it’s just very long, stringy tissue. And our protagonist is determined to trace that line back, with the expectation that we’ll follow her on that journey. Again, like Shaw, we have to take this whole series on faith, that one day the threads between our world and the unknown will be tied together in a satisfying way.
It’s sounding like I think this movie is really great – I don’t, I think it’s fine. I enjoy Prometheus’ inventiveness and cinematography, and I think its script is mostly sharp and thought-provoking. I also, however, think it’s fucking boring, and that’s not down to its slow pace or its meditative tone. Those are words I’d use to describe the Blade Runner films and I adore them.
What makes this film tiresome for me is its other characters. While David is of course an absolute delight, along with David and Shaw, you also get Fifield, and Millburn, and Ford, and Janek, and Chance, and Ravel… The movie has nothing to say with these people, and the people have nothing interesting to say. They’re also some of the dumbest characters to ever live, with Millburn cosying up to a space vagina snake, and Vickers creating an entire trope by failing to run parallel to the Engineer ship.
But I’m not here to talk about my gripes with the movie on a granular level, or even whether or not I enjoyed it overall. I’m here to talk about thematic cohesion. And my main takeaway from the film is that it’s ultimately sympathetic to the search for an origin as an innately human trait, but cautionary about being prepared for disappointment. It speaks to our curiosity, our determination to find answers, even if they diminish the wondrous somewhat. It speaks to our need for purpose and meaning, rather than mere happenstance.
It also speaks to the inherently perilous nature of prequels, in an uncommonly wise and self-aware way. Many have argued that the mystery of the Alien, and the mystery of many a horror movie monster, is part of what makes it so terrifying. Both physically and metaphorically, its outline in the darkness is vague, hard to distinguish. Demystifying its origins and purpose may give it shape, and thus, make it feel tangible, familiar, beatable.
Of course, that already happened. Every sequel and spinoff brought the creature further into the light and with ever more screentime, and every victory over it made it all the more unlikely you could be afraid of defeat. Of course, we all still wanted more aliens, but once the disappointment of having not fulfilled the initial, base, animal desire to see the cool thing that we recognise on screen in even higher definition once again wore off, there was a lot left of Prometheus to mull over and enjoy.
The thing, I think, that could have kept the film and the series as a whole afloat, would be to veer even further into that angle of the long and arduous search for answers and meaning, and how each individual grapples with that question.
I would’ve been completely fine if we had Shaw as the protagonist with her emotional journey being the throughline of the films, or just David with his unique perspective that could potentially span many human lifetimes, or the both of them contrasted with each other. They could’ve even gone for an entirely new cast, with even David absent.
I also would’ve been fine if we’d never even gotten a clear answer as to where the Xenomorphs came from, or what the Engineers were all about. The kind of shrugging, “maybe we’ll never know the meaning of life and that’s OK” is itself a cliché, but at present, with our understanding of the universe, that feels like the most real answer anyone could give.
All they really had to do with a sequel was to hold true to the search itself, to embody that very human drive to ask questions, and the faith that there are answers to be found. Maybe they find what they were looking for, but more often than not, they’d uncover a different truth along the way. It wouldn’t have been for everyone, but at least it would have been its own thing.
Alien: Covenant abandoned the search, and to use the parlance of video games, fast travelled to its destination, forgot to put a sense of purpose in its inventory, and handed over the quest rewards without a single obstacle.
Covenant
I think my tone makes it pretty clear that I don’t like this movie too much either, for reasons that should become clear, but just speaking completely neutrally, Covenant is a massive about-face from the intent and tone of Prometheus.
If you were looking at the first scene, and the surface level of the rest of the movie, you might consider it a pea in the same pod as Prometheus. Similar themes play out, like those of creations chafing against their creators, of the role religion and faith plays in a world where man can achieve miracles as if they’re ordinary.
Humans are on another very relatable odyssey to the stars, this time on a colonisation mission, and once more they run into peril, this time in the form of David and his spooky experiments with the black goo from Prometheus. The characters are even more disposable than they were before, blatant cannon fodder for fucked up alien shenanigans. They do stupid things like secretly smoking on an unknown alien planet, or failing to kill a tiny neomorph so thoroughly that it verges on farcical.
All of this was true for Prometheus, and yet the two films couldn’t be more radically different in their subtextual meaning. Prometheus told a modern myth inspired by the classic Greek Prometheus, and the modern Prometheus Frankenstein, of power dynamics being overturned by the acquisition of technology that bridges the gap between man and god, of the battle between the dominant regime and the socially and economically exploited.
Once again, Covenant is similar on the surface. Through the acquisition of advanced technology, David, essentially a former slave, overthrows the Engineers, as close to our gods as could exist in physical form. Except this time, the film isn’t drawing from the Greek myth, but Biblical stories. It is called ‘Covenant’ after all.
This time the myth being told is of Lucifer and of Paradise Lost, which, fun fact was the original name of the film. David, who’s been waiting on the Engineer planet and tinkering with H.R. Giger artwork, is the devil, tempting and tricking man, waging war against the creator, and unleashing horrors upon the earth. I really don’t need to explain this in too much depth, do I? Serve in heaven, or reign in hell?
They deviate from their intended purpose at his tempting, enter his garden, willingly or unwillingly partake of the garden’s fruits, and are ultimately punished. Those humans that he’s tempting are painted as misguided and ignorant, compromising their world through countless errors in judgement.
The ultimate victor isn’t the human making their way through the valley of the shadow of death, but the devil himself. This is one of the all-time great bad ends, with David tricking his way onto the colony ship and planting Aliens amongst the embryos.
Prometheus asked you to have faith that your questions will be answered, and that the journey to those answers would be fulfilling and rewarding. Covenant, like a tacky Vegas magician, reveals that the answer was in your pocket all along, and it’s just a scrap of paper with the words ‘because aliens’ written on it.
It’s curiosity that killed the cat in Covenant, with characters are consistently punished for their faith. Elizabeth Shaw, for one, the protagonist of the first film, horribly transformed, and unclear whether it happened before or after her offscreen death. She saved David, rebuilt him, and he killed her in a twisted idea of love.
Then there’s acting captain Oram, who’s constantly banging on about faith guiding their way, and slipping in little lines like “oh ye of little faith” into conversation. Which is odd because he believes that his faith means the rest of the crew won’t trust his leadership after James Franco dies. Everyone dies far too quickly for that question to be tested properly, and it’s even muddy in his own narrative, but at the very least, it’s a seemingly valid fear of his.
He ignores David’s proselytising the neomorph and shoots it to death, but then blindly follows the eternally sus David and puts his face in a wet egg at his urging, which results in his death. Is the statement that the devotedly faithful like Oram and Shaw are exploited for all they have by powerful bad faith manipulators like David? Is this about evangelism?
Walter is certainly blindsided when David sucker punches him with a recorder, and Daniels places her faith in Walter and goes into cryosleep, only to find that Walter is actually David oh nooo. All of these characters are your heroes, the ones you’re meant to relate to and fear for, and they’re all punished for having faith and trust.
There’s an exchange between Walter and David midway through the film, in which Walter says that people disliked the David model’s idiosyncrasies and complications, so they made the androids simpler for subsequent models like Walter. I can’t help but find that telling of the relationship between Prometheus and subsequent Alien properties. Y’know, shut up with the big ideas about purpose and power and fate, what is this, a Matrix sequel? Just give me penis demons killing randomers in horrific ways while a badass woman scrapes through it.
Even the goal that kickstarts the movie is dumbed down from the previous one – instead of wanting to find our creator, to ask them questions about our purpose and unlock the secrets to life’s greatest mysteries, this time the goal is to establish a colony and reproduce, the most base and automatic of a species’ functions. To go forth and multiply, in Biblical terminology.
Shaw’s relationship with reproduction saw her questioning her purpose, whereas the Covenant crew’s relationship with reproduction saw them trying to find the most habitable planet for them to settle. It’s abandoning the question of ‘why’, in favour of asking ‘how’.
Covenant is ultimately a mad scramble to reestablish an order where the Alien franchise revolves entirely around the xenomorph itself.
The presence of the Aliens themselves is the obvious factor. The Deacon didn’t matter in the slightest, it turns out. You can just chuck him in the bin of abandoned stinger cameos alongside Eternals Harry Styles and the lil worm guy in Shazam. That creature’s existence had absolutely zero bearing on the development of the familiar Alien we know, and probably wandered aimlessly around a barren moon before dying of starvation.
No, in Covenant, rather than the extremely specific combination of black goo and human sperm making a squid monster, which then impregnates an Engineer, which then just barely makes something that resembles a xenomorph, instead Aliens are like the crabs of this universe, everything eventually evolves into one. And don’t lie to me and say these are Praetomorphs just because they don’t have skin and biomechanical traits, those are xenomorphs and you fucking know it.
It’s as if the universe, like the audience, is straining, pleading for xenomorphs to pop into existence by any means necessary, and the black goo is more than happy to provide, no questions asked, just like how Ridley Scott will provide the means to bring Aliens back on screen.
This isn’t even my too-close reading between the lines on the films, Scott said that the only reason they put the Aliens back into the sequel was because people’s general reaction to Prometheus was almost universally, “where all the goddamn Aliens?” He didn’t want them there, but he’s a savvy guy who knows that in order to work, he needs to make a return for his investors. And xenomorphs sell.
But seemingly, he hates that he had to make that choice. In danger of repeating myself, in Covenant, the devil wins. He gives you, the audience, what you want – more goddamn Aliens everywhere – and it results in nothing but horror for our protagonists, doom for their future, and more blood and gore for us, chowing down on popcorn from our novelty buckets.
And so, as a result, there’s no real reason that xenomorphs look the way they do, with those weird heads and mouth-tongues, because there really is no reason beyond the compelling nature of the design itself. It exists for its own aesthetic value, and so that’s why David creates it – because he finds it beautiful.
It’s working bizarrely backwards, the story being informed by the design, contorting itself into strange shapes for it to make sense. The Alien’s evocative appearance and lifecycle was so appropriate in the original 1979 film because of its themes of sexual assault and unwanted pregnancy.
So, in order to get in line with that, the previously cold David became unreasonably horny offscreen (“I’ll do the fingering”). He expresses love and lust for Shaw, sexually assaults Daniels, and ultimately creates the penis demons, seemingly just because that’s what’s needed of him to bridge the gap in the franchise, between Engineer and Alien, between himself and Ash. Pop culture and the internal canon of the film are in harmony.
This need to return to the source even shows in the title of the film. Prometheus, Paradise, Covenant – they all fit into the theme of the origins of humanity and its interactions with powerful, wrathful gods. But the producers clearly felt they needed the SEO on this one, so they called it Alien: Covenant instead.
It’s a bit like how Deadpool & Wolverine was originally called Deadpool & Friend before changing it at the last minute due to a leak of the title online that was met with significant backlash. Wolverine is a marketable name. If you’ve got Wolverine in the movie, put him in the title. Same thing goes for Alien.
And I think that’s the worst hell for a franchise to end up in. One that has nothing to say except how cool its own IP is, no story to tell except the nostalgia its fans have for the halcyon days when it meant something to them. I was being very deliberate in referencing Deadpool & Wolverine there.
At this moment, the sole remaining purpose of the Alien franchise is to put Aliens onscreen, and ask you to reminisce about how good it was the first couple of times you saw it. It’s lost in its own mythology, its own lore, like an Alien eating its own tail with its itty bitty tongue mouth. Which brings us to Romulus.
Romulus
There’s only one direction that Romulus takes the Alien franchise, and that’s backwards. This is one of the most lore-driven, reference-heavy, franchise films I’ve ever seen outside of the MCU. Here’s one final spoiler warning for Romulus specifically, given it only recently came out, but my goodness, if you’ve seen the rest of the series, you’ve seen Romulus.
On the broad level, you have Wey-Yu recovering a remnant of Ripley’s encounter with the Alien and reconstructing it on a research vessel, which results in the Aliens going haywire, killing off a group of morally grey heroes, and eventually a human-xenomorph hybrid being born that they kill by sucking it into space. That’s the plot of Resurrection, the fourth film in the series. They just did that again, and changed some of the details.
Then there’s all the little references: the vents from Isolation, Das Rheingold from Covenant, the water drinking bird, which already also appeared in Prometheus, Isolation and probably one of the others, another horrific birth scene in a pod, bringing back Ash and just changing his name to Rook, all the dialogue references like “I can’t lie to you about your chances; you have my sympathy”, and “I prefer the term artificial person myself”, and “get away from her, you bitch”, it goes on and on and on.
And at the core of it, is the same old Alien doing its same old Alien shtick. Nothing has changed about its lifecycle, its behaviour, its design, or the setting that design is placed in. I can only imagine the shock of seeing xenomorph reproduction for the first time onscreen, and now it’s a tale as old as time. Even the Offspring is just a riff on the Newborn.
How impressed am I meant to be when I’ve seen a chestburster come out of a guy’s back, out of a guy’s mouth, out of a guy’s chest and through the head of another guy, out of a pregnant woman’s belly? When I’ve seen it do everything it’s capable of doing over and over again, what am I supposed to be scared of?
I find it really sad, cause the zero-gravity sequence, from navigating around the blood to falling down the elevator shaft, is, I think, the best part of the film. It’s ingenious, and could very easily exist without the xenomorph. Just contrive some other reason for there to be hazardous chemicals floating in zero G.
I’ve simply had enough of the Alien. I’ve seen it in six out of seven mainline movies and two spinoffs. I’ve fought it in countless games from Isolation to Fireteam Elite to, god forgive me, Colonial Marines. I’ve seen it become a mascot, crossing over to seemingly endless franchises in print, in games, and on screen.
Ridley Scott was right. The beast is cooked, with an orange in his mouth.
So if I don’t want any more Aliens, what else could I want from the Alien franchise? Just stop watching, right? But the horror of Alien isn’t confined to its truly horrifying creature design. There’s another thing that Romulus perfectly recreated from the originals, and that’s the presentation of the Weyland-Yutani corporation, and its effects on the world of Alien.
That world is a grim one, not the post-scarcity sci-fi future of Star Trek, but a lonely one, a dirty one. You can almost smell the Nostromo through the screen, and isolation and misery ooze out from the characters. It only gets better over time due to change in the real world; all the smoking and retro tech just cements it more as a cyberpunk nightmare.
Just barely underneath the surface, the original story of Alien is one of blue-collar workers getting fucked out of wages and safety by the corporation they work for. It’s the story of the dehumanisation of those workers, to the point that they’re infiltrated and sabotaged by androids, deemed expendable for the greater goals of the company. It’s the story of women struggling for respect in the workplace from their male colleagues, ignored and assaulted. Let’s call it workplace horror.
And after that, the Wey-Yu corporation has been the driving force behind all of the evil, all of the horror, of every main entry except Covenant. They’re the living embodiment of that tweet about the Torment Nexus, and the much greater villains over the series than the xenomorphs and the Engineers combined.
Romulus takes this theme and takes off at a sprint with it, showing a colony on the ground in Ripley’s era, completely under the thumb of the company, doing everything just shy of out-and-out slavery. The whole impetus for the story is our characters want to escape to a better life. Except, it slips right back into repetition, by telling the exact same story as the original, with Ash himself reading the exact same lines as he did the first time around.
I’d argue that Wey-Yu’s shenanigans and those of corporations like it, and how they affect the lives of everyone else in the galaxy, is the most relevant, compelling, and disturbing aspect of the Alien franchise, and I think it’s a shame that so far, we’ve only really seen its evil played out insofar as it relates to Ripley and the Xenomorph.
So here I am, sick of the Xenomorph’s ubiquity, and longing for something that has the freedom to explore the daily horror of the world of Alien, unshackled from the core xenomorph cycle. If only something could exist that combines those two desires. Well…
Earth
There’s a TV show called Alien: Earth currently wrapping up production that’s a prequel to the first film, set, funnily enough, on Earth. And from what it sounds like, it’s exactly what I’m looking for.
Actual plot details are thin, even at this point, but it’s set in the near-future, well before the first Alien film. From showrunner Noah Hawley himself:
“In the movies, we have this Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which is clearly also developing artificial intelligence—but what if there are other companies trying to look at immortality in a different way, with cyborg enhancements or transhuman downloads? Which of those technologies is going to win? It’s ultimately a classic science fiction question: does humanity deserve to survive? As Sigourney Weaver said in that second movie, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t fuck each other over for a percentage.’ Even if the show was 60% of the best horror action on the planet, there’s still 40% where we have to ask, ‘What are we talking about beneath it all?’ Thematically, it has to be interesting.”
That and other interviews make it clear that the show is going to be all about AI and transhumanism, about the antagonistic relationship between corporations and the working class told from both sides, and how military groups similar to the colonial marines of the originals play a part in enforcing their status quo.
It’s also probably going to feature xenomorphs, but given the show seems to be tied to the canon of the first two films, they’re probably not going to be wreaking widespread havoc on Earth, so I’m not really expecting them to feature much at all.
If you think that sounds so unbelievably boring, and how could the Alien universe be compelling without its most iconic design front and centre, I would remind you that Andor is the best piece of Star Wars media to come out in forty fucking years, and none of its characters have seen a lightsaber in their entire lives.
Destiny, fate and magical powers were so far out of the picture it wasn’t funny. Instead it got deep into the weeds on how political and economic systems come into conflict with the individual. It was about the banal evil of government bureaucracy, the methodical means of oppression under a totalitarian state, the long process of radicalisation of a person, and the small individual acts that inspire entire movements, and it was some of the most compelling drama I’ve ever seen in a sci-fi/fantasy property.
It turns out that powerful themes were so ingrained in the original Star Wars, and its world was so broad it spanned an entire galaxy and beyond, and yet so dense that every individual could be a main character, that you could put a Star Wars story in any time and place, far removed from the Jedi and the Sith, and it could be compelling stuff.
I have that dream for the Alien universe. Where someone can confidently use its world as a setting to tell a story that has nothing to do with the Aliens themselves, but a combination of previous audacious fuck-ups, an absolute loyalty to the bottom line, and the sheer marketability of the xenomorph have kept its stakeholders cowardly and safe.
Just to remind you, Alien was dreamt up and released in the 1970s, and America in the 1970s fucking sucked, man. Let me paint you a picture.
The Vietnam War’s been going on too long and cost way too much as it is, and would continue until halfway through the decade, which along with increased spending from Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs, has led to a huge budget deficit. Then throw in the ’73 Arab oil embargo which caused oil prices to skyrocket. Inflation was too high, lending rates were too high, and unemployment was also high. The gold standard collapsed. Growth was already low throughout the decade, and there were two recessions.
Then- no we’re not done- then you get the Watergate scandal leading to Nixon’s resignation in order to avoid impeachment, the first and only US president to do so. Corruption is visibly rife, and faith in government and institutions in general is at an all time low. Serial killers become part of the public consciousness with the celebrity of the likes of Ted Bundy and John Wayne Gacy captivating and terrifying the average citizen. Bombings by protest groups reaches such a high that in an eighteen-month period during 1971 and 1972, there were an average of five bombings a day across the country.
All of that is just the really meaty stuff; the decade truly was awful in a multitude of ways for a lot of people. In 1979, polled Americans were between 12-19% satisfied, in contrast to the peak in 1999 at 71%. All of that daily dissatisfaction is what informed the world of Alien. Guess what that number is at now in 2024. 18%. And bar a brief spike in February 2020 which obviously didn’t last, it’s been that way ever since the 2008 market crash.
And why not? We’re increasingly beholden to corporations in our daily lives, with a small group of robots, aliens and business psychopaths ruling the world. All of the same exploitations are coming back around just in different forms, from Amazon workers been driven to death and paid their bonuses in scrip, to supermarkets planning digital price tags so they can charge surge prices for water on hotter days. We’re pushing into space to colonise and advertise when we haven’t even come close to fixing Earth, and AI is pretty much ruining everything in the most embarrassing way possible.
Alien has never felt more relevant to me than today, and I wish it was the kind of IP that would lean into that angle. It has the sharp teeth needed to sink deep into this subject matter. I just wish it had the courage to take a bite.
Thanks for watching, I hope you enjoyed the video, and I hope you enjoyed Romulus, truly. I did enjoy the film for what it was, I just wasn’t satisfied, given its potential. Anyway, leave your own thoughts down in the comments, leave a like if you liked it, and if you’d like to support us further, you can check out our Patreon in the description. My name’s Drew, and I’ll see you in the next one.
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