‘Alien: Romulus’ and the Shackles of the Past
Great movie, difficult question: how do we move forward when we only want to look back?
Going into Alien: Romulus, I was very excited. I’d just rewatched the original theatrical cut of Alien earlier in the week, and I was looking forward to seeing if the latest instalment really could recapture the magic of the original. That’s a tall order, considering its status as one of the best sci-fi horror films of all time.
Coming out of the cinema, I was pretty enthused about the film. Over the years I’ve become much more appreciative of stories that contain themselves rather than try to overreach into multiversal hubris. Romulus’ scale is much smaller than the mythological ambitions of both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, constructing a story truer to its sci-fi survival horror roots.
The actors — all young stars from buzzy (if lowkey) projects of their own from the past few years — cement themselves as able to carry blockbusters like this. Cailee Spaeny and Isabela Merced in particular stand out. Cailee looks young and naive at first, and you can’t help but worry about her. It’s what made the visual of her as Priscilla Presley in Sofia Coppola’s 2023 film so uncomfortable; Spaeny, cast because she could pass for 14, looked tiny next to Jacob Elordi’s towering frame.
That characterisation works so well here in Romulus, in stark contrast to the original’s Ellen Ripley. In the 70s, most female leads were cast as “damsels in distress. From the beginning of the movie, Ripley distinctly wasn’t that. She was the one the cast members should’ve listened to. She was the one who knew exactly what she was doing. She was the one who was making the right calls.
Rain Carradine, Cailee Spaeny’s character in Romulus, is not Ellen Ripley. She’s trying her best to take care of her brother Andy, and she goes along with her friends’ reckless plan out of sheer desperation. She’s out of her depth, and she doesn’t know what she’s doing. What makes her arc satisfying is seeing her evolve into her version of an Ellen Ripley figure.
The situations she and her motley crew find themselves in are genuinely frightful. Almost every sequence of the film is gripping and tense in a way that only a good horror director (like Fede Alvarez) knows how to execute. A lot of it is novel, too, managing to flit deftly between the action-horror of Aliens and the more tense horror of Alien — I’m thinking of that one specific zero-g sequence, which was brilliantly built up throughout the film. The final 15 minutes, too, are edge-of-your-seat terrifying, with a novel twist on Alien’s themes of violation and motherhood.
Safe to say that I really, really enjoyed the film.
What irks me in the back of my mind, when I think about it a bit too much, is the same thing that’s irked me about a lot of other movies from the past few years: how shackled they are to recreations of the past.
To be completely honest, this doesn’t bother me that much. It didn’t make me enjoy the movie less once I realised that it was very intentionally trying to “recapture the magic” of the original. I didn’t really care that it’s structurally the same film, with the added bells and whistles of a 2020s blockbuster. Alien: Romulus is, at the end of the day, beautifully constructed.
That said, with this continuous push toward the past, how do we truly move towards the new? Look at the highest-grossing movies of the 2020s; the vast majority of them are sequels or based on existing IP. Compare this to the highest-grossing films of the 1980s. Sure, there are sequels and threequels on there, but there are just as many new films there. They’re the same films that we keep referring to and trying to “recapture the magic” of.
The difference is, at the time, many of them were genuinely fresh. Star Wars was an expansion on existing science fiction and fantasy tropes, but it combined them and expanded them into a film that was fresh and new. It’s the same thing with Indiana Jones and Alien; their component parts weren’t completely new, but they pushed the medium forward and created films that would be referred back to for the decades to come.
I don’t see any of that in the 2020s list. There aren’t many there that genuinely feel like they pushed the culture forward and created anything new, with maybe a handful of exceptions. The great films from the past didn’t just bring something new to the table, they were successful because of it. They opened audiences’ eyes to new visions of what movies could be like and expanded the form in the broader public consciousness.
Even if we lift the restriction of only considering strictly new IP, what broad, widely successful films have done that in the past decade? There are some truly fresh movies, but they don’t receive a fraction of the marketing power, the filmmaking budget, or the audience demand that nostalgic titles get.
Worse: when some do try to push past nostalgia and shift into a different gear, audiences just don’t seem to like it. Case in point: Rian Johnson’s The Last Jedi took a hard look at the Star Wars formula and very intentionally broke it open, to move the franchise away from the cyclical path it was on. Audiences hated it, calling it a betrayal of their childhoods.
We (and I include myself in this too) just don’t get excited about new things anymore; like with Alien: Romulus, we justwant to see old things done better. So, the question that we’re left with is this: if pop culture continues to retread the same paths, leaving fresh ideas to be consumed in niche groups at the periphery, how will we get anything new? If all we want is the comfort of nostalgia, how will movies as a popular art form progress?
