Warning: This article contains some minor spoilers for Alien: Romulus.
Alien: Romulus begins with a silly premise. Apparently, 20 years after the events of the original Alien, the alien-obsessed Weyland-Yutani Corporation has been searching for the monsters brought aboard the Nostromo and its crew. When they finally find it, they discover the original alien that Ellen Ripley blew out the airlock at the end of the movie. Somehow, the creature survived, allowing scientists to capture it and study it—with predictably fatal results.
“Alien: Romulus” had to overcome many obstacles to create a situation where some of the most terrifying creatures in cinema could come into their own and scare away new audiences. This gives us a sense of just how confusing the overall story of the Alien franchise has become. The way Romulus twisted itself to stay true to the stories of Alien, Aliens, Prometheus, and Alien: Covenant is a good argument for why it’s time for the Alien series to abandon all that it has done in the past The story begins again.
See, the premise of Alien: Romulus is the result of a choice made by James Cameron, where scientists discover an apparently slain creature and use it as the premise for a brand new movie. Over the years, the people responsible for the Alien series have compounded the problem by making poor choices, all of which have greatly hindered the stories the series could tell.
Cameron famously made his take on the sequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror masterpiece by writing the word “Alien” on a whiteboard, then adding an “S” to the end and then drawing A few lines convert “S” to “$.” Interesting parts of the story aside, Cameron’s idea of upgrading Aliens proved to be a great idea, but one that also required him to create a very specific situation. The movie needs to bring back Ripley, but prevent her from warning anyone about the creature, and needs to make many victims for the alien, not just one.
Cameron’s solution was to jump 57 years in time from the original Alien to the future. This allowed him to establish a colony on the planet where the Nostromo crew found the derelict ship full of eggs, and fill it with humans, opening the door to aliens.
The problem with the 57-year jump is that it imagines no one Aliens have always been encountered, or at least, anyone who has encountered one has not been able to report it and let others know about it. It also imagines that no one else has encountered aliens anywhere other Than LV-426. These established facts pose a major hindrance to the Alien franchise – if anything. did During those 57 years of encountering aliens, they never lived to tell anyone about it, and aliens never became such a big threat. other People meet them. If anyone is going to bother telling the stories of those 57 years, they have to make sure they fit with the established fact that no one knows anything about aliens and no one has seen it before.
Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection made it worse. Both movies support the idea that those aliens on LV-426 may be only alien. In Alien 3 (which killed off Newt and Hicks for no reason, another cruel move that shattered the ongoing story), Wayland-Yutani pursues what remains of the alien inside Ripley The alien hunted her down, then she killed herself to destroy it.
The series more or less ended there for many years until Alien: Resurrection brought it back with another ridiculous time jump, jumping forward another 200 years. In “Resurrection,” scientists clone Ripley and the alien she died trying to destroy, showing that, yes, there is There are no other aliens anywhere. As a result, anyone trying to stay true to the established story of the Alien series is going to run into a bunch of weird problems – which is why Romulus had to pick up an alien floating in space in order to create its story.
So, thanks to the original series, we have a situation where the alien seems to only appear with Ripley, basically in one place. When the characters in Alien “nuked the site from orbit,” they effectively wiped out the species. We also got a few other stories that included aliens, namely the Alien vs. Predator movie, but they didn’t even take themselves too seriously to make the whole situation make sense. So we’re either stuck in a story where aliens are new strange creatures fighting other new strange creatures, or we’re getting a franchise that completely undercuts itself and allows other people to see the aliens or Raise the stakes with those stories.
Then there’s “Prometheus” and “Alien: Testament,” two movies that were more interested in things like Alien’s fossilized space jockeys than the creatures themselves. Both films center on the creation of genetic weapons by a race of space jockeys known as the Engineers, and how it ultimately leads to aliens becoming the central characters of the series. “Alien: Covenant” tells the story of how David, the first synthetic human created by Peter Weyland, used genetic weapons and some experiments to create an “Alien” version of the alien from the original film.
I’ve always found this idea frustrating, it makes aliens less Terrible, not more. The idea that aliens were created by a deranged robot in order to create something terrible is not nearly as interesting as the idea that aliens were born through the forces of evolution. What’s even scarier is that the universe could naturally create something as terrifying and deadly as aliens — and FX’s Alien show creator Noah Hawley seems to agree, as he says he ignored the aliens Origin: Covenant.
However, “Alien: Romulus” does not ignore this origin. Instead, just one movie after we see David using the Engineer’s weapons (which look like black goo) to create aliens, we see Weyland-Yutani using alien Man reverse-engineers black goo.
For Alien: Romulus, that’s a pretty tight box. It had to find the aliens without disrupting the story of what happened on LV-426, it had to put its characters in a situation where no one knew what was happening to them, and it had to deliver on the idea that the aliens Contains some, as Prometheus and Alien: Covenant hinted at, powerful genetic weirdness. Then there’s the ongoing evil of the Weyland-Yutani (or, in Alien: Resurrection, the futuristic U.S. military) as they continually chase the aliens for monetary purposes.
What’s more, there’s nothing really gained by clinging to these stories. Alien: Romulus doesn’t need a ton of references to Alien to be good, and if it had, they would have held back on it. It’s just a lot of unnecessary baggage and strict limitations for an Alien story. The more stories you add to a franchise, the smaller the box they can fit into.
There are also a ton of Alien comics and novels that have also added to the series and shown that it’s at least possible to push the concept in other directions. It’s worth noting that many of these novels aren’t particularly good – they tend to rehash stuff the movies have already covered, such as the Corporation’s constant attempts to capture aliens, only to have everyone get eaten. But there are also those who imagine brilliant riffs on the formula, like my personal favorite Scott Sigler’s Alien: Phalanx.
Other Alien stories could have played more with this concept, and what I love about Phalanx is that it found a way to focus on the horror of the aliens by putting them in novel situations. It doesn’t need to invent new mutant weirdos to add drama, like in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, nor does it need to worry about revisiting the planet where the aliens were discovered, as in the movies. It just runs with a good idea.
That’s what an Alien movie is supposed to do. The details of who discovered which alien where, and who pursued it for the company’s purposes, are not important to the story. The big part and essential element that makes Alien great is the simplest of all: encounter a giant, unknowable creature that wants to use you to feed its young. I wanted the Alien story to focus on the unknowable terror that comes with venturing into a universe and finding it incredibly hostile—and if we need a reboot to recapture that feeling, so be it.
