[COLUMN] In Space, No One Can Hear You Meme | by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Note: This piece contains spoilers for Alien: Romulus. Like, full spoilers. So consider yourself warned.

There is a surreal moment towards the climax of Alien: Romulus, as Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her synthetic brother Andy (David Jonsson) attempt to flee the eponymous space station, pursued through an elevator shaft by xenomorphs. The creatures grab Rain, prompting Andy to leap to her defence using an assault rifle. He fires furiously into the creature, riding its carcass to the bottom of the shaft. Then, standing over its body, he delivers his one-liner: “Get away from her… you bitch.”

Obviously, this is an allusion to one of the most iconic moments in pop culture history, as Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) confronts the Alien Queen at the climax of Aliens. Wearing a power-loader and trying to scare the monster away from her surrogate daughter, Newt (Carrie Henn), Ripley spits the line with contempt. It is brilliant. It is instantly recognizable. It has been homage and referenced countless times. It is one of the great moments in the Alien franchise.

Andy’s delivery of that line is clearly meant to be a moment that gets the crowd cheering. It’s a moment that establishes the movie’s franchise bona fides. It is undeniable proof that Romulus is part of the Alien franchise, because it features a big climactic moment where one of the characters repeats the big iconic line from one of the earlier films. There’s no way that the audience could be confused and think that they have bought a ticket to the wrong movie. This is an Alien movie.

Romulus is a movie with ideas. There are points where it feels like Romulus might coalesce into a movie that is about something. There is, for example, a certain tenderness to the relationship between Rain and Andy, a dysfunctional and recycled synthetic with a stutter and clumsy reflexes, that could be read as a metaphor for a character caring for a relative with a disability. It provides a nice contrast with the emphasis that Weyland-Yutani Corporation places on perfection and eugenics.

There is also a sense in which director Fede Álvarez is a good fit for the Alien franchise. Romulus retains Álvarez’s distinctive identity. Indeed, the plot of Romulus shares a lot of similarities with Álvarez’s breakthrough slasher, Don’t Breathe. Both are movies about disadvantaged young characters who break into private property in the hopes of landing a big score, only to quickly discover that they have bitten off more than they expected.

The movie has a grimy tactility that is often missing from modern blockbusters. It is tangible in a way that films like Deadpool and Wolverine or even The Fall Guy simply are not. Álvarez is a properly nasty horror filmmaker, one who doesn’t temper depictions of sexual violence in films like Evil Dead or Don’t Breathe. It’s no surprise that Álvarez fits fairly comfortably in a franchise that writer Dan O’Bannon originally conceived as a metaphor for “homosexual oral rape.”

The climax of Romulus leans into Álvarez’s strengths. Fleeing the xenomorphs, the pregnant Kay (Isabela Merced) injects herself with a compound manufactured from the mysterious black substance featured in Prometheus. (This is one of the film’s lighter continuity touches.) The injection acts quickly on Kay’s foetus, which gestates in a matter of minutes. Kay births an inhuman monster, a grotesque alien and human hybrid that parasitically feeds on her to the point of killing her.

This makes sense within the larger context of the Alien franchise, which has always been a horror series about procreation and forced birth. However, the climax also feels somewhat timely. As with both Immaculate and The First Omen earlier in the year, Romulus gestures very broadly towards post-Dobbs horror, tapping into anxieties in American popular consciousness about the stripping of women’s autonomy over their reproductive decisions.

However, it’s also perhaps a bit much to argue that Romulus is meaningfully “about” any of these ideas. They percolate through the film, but never find a coherent or unified expression. There is nothing here comparable to the dread and nihilism that permeates David Fincher’s Alien 3. The film is unburdened by the spiritual uncertainty that shaped Ridley Scott’s Prometheus or the metatextual anxieties that bubble through Alien: Covenant.

Romulus is ultimately about little more than being an Alien movie. It is designed to remind audiences of other Alien movies and to hit all the beats expected of an Alien movie. This is obvious in the film’s design. Romulus is an “interquel”, set between Ridley Scott’s original Alien and James Cameron’s sequel Aliens. While it ends up folding in continuity from Prometheus, it is clearly designed to make the audience think of those two movies, and not the contested sequels and prequels that followed.

The threat of this sort of brand maintenance has been looming over the larger franchise for quite some time. For years, Neil Blomkamp had been working on a sequel to Aliens that would remove Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection from continuity. However, the project died in 2017. In January, Blomkamp admitted the odds of it getting made were “slim.” In May, Scott announced the project was dead and there “never was a script.” By June, Blomkamp conceded that it was “totally dead.”

Indeed, given that Álvarez met with Scott about making an Alien movie “right after Don’t Breathe”, it seems like Romulus effectively replaced Blomkamp’s aborted sequel. While Romulus doesn’t explicitly erase the other Alien movies from continuity, it is positioned in such a way as to appeal very directly to the nostalgia for Alien and Aliens above all else. It is a “back to basics” approach to the Alien franchise, in some ways comparable to what Dan Trachtenberg did with Prey.

This is obvious from the movie’s opening credits. Not only does Álvarez use the same font as Alien, he also mirrors specific shots as a ship’s computer comes alive after detecting something in outer space. The film features a digital recreation of the deceased actor Ian Holm as the synthetic Rook, effectively reprising the actor’s iconic performance as Ash in Alien. Recalling Ash’s iconic final scene in Alien, Rook spends most of Romulus as a sinister dismembered representative of Weyland Yutani.

Álvarez borrows his visual references from both Alien and Aliens. When Tyler (Archie Renaux) teaches Rain how to fire a plasma rifle, Álvarez frames and edits the sequence to evoke a similar scene between Hicks (Michael Biehn) and Ripley in Aliens. The final sequences on the station make a big deal of the cargo lift, recalling Ripley’s escape from the colony in Aliens. Like Aliens, Romulus has its heroes escape the infested installation for a surprise third act confrontation on their own ship.

Each of the previous Alien movies had a distinct aesthetic. In Scott’s own words, Alien was about “space truckers” on an old cargo-hauler. Aliens sent a bunch of marines to the ruins of a dead colony. Alien 3 was set on a religious prison planet. Alien: Resurrection followed a cast of space pirates escaping a lab run by military and private interests. Prometheus followed a privately-funded scientific expedition. Covenant found a crew of colonists knocked off-course.

Each of those films had a very different look and feel. Even the xenomorph was prone to change dramatically between films. Romulus is the first film in the franchise that is completely lacking in visual innovation. Even the film’s boldest element, the hybrid, is a fusion of both the Engineers from Prometheus and the previous alien-human hybrid from Resurrection. Romulus is a horror film that is desperately afraid of unsettling its audience by offering anything outside their expectations.

Much of the dialogue in Romulus echoes earlier Alien movies. When Bjorn (Spike Fearn) describes androids as “fake people”, Andy quotes the synthetic Bishop (Lance Henriksen) from Aliens, “I prefer the term artificial person.” Rook repeatedly talks about “the perfect organism”, echoing Ash’s description of the xenomorph in Alien. The movie’s closing lines are a voiceover from Rain, identifying herself as “the last survivor” of the expedition, recalling Ripley’s log at the end of Alien.

There is, to put it frankly, something very uncanny about all of this. Watching Romulus often feels like watching a group of superfans role-playing their way through a themed Alien campaign, packed with easter eggs and references winking at the audience at home. This gets at the big issue with packing so many of these references into the film. It has the unfortunate effect of pushing the viewer out of the narrative, inviting them to appreciate the film as a tribute act, not a movie of itself.

This is not a problem unique to Romulus. Many modern nostalgia-driven blockbusters recycle familiar lines from earlier films – not catchphrases or mottos, just dialogue. In Spider-Man: No Way Home, Norman Osborn (Willem Dafoe) repeats a meme from Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man by stating he is “something of a scientist” himself. In Deadpool & Wolverine, Blade (Wesley Snipes) repeats his iconic line from Blade that “some motherfuckers are always trying to ice-skate uphill.”

Do these characters watch their own movies and cheer when they deliver their own one-liners? Are those lines really the best thing these people have ever said, and something that they will specifically remember in the context of all the other (presumably life-and-death) stuff happening around them? Outside the narrative, this emphasis on memetic dialogue reduces narratives, characters and stories to nothing more than a collection of recyclable “moments” that exist outside of context. Perhaps this is what happens when movies become “content.” They become just memes tied together.

However, it’s even stranger in the specific context of Romulus. When Andy tells the xenomorph to “get away from her… you bitch”, the audience understands it to be a reference to Ripley’s big moment from Aliens. However, Andy doesn’t know Ripley. Because Romulus unfolds between Alien and Aliens, Ripley hasn’t even said the line yet within the film’s continuity. Even outside of that, why is Andy using a gendered insult to refer to an alien that has historically been gendered ambiguously?

It is a strange moment in the context of Romulus because it isn’t earned. It is instead a reference to a line that another character will say in another situation that hasn’t happened yet within the world of the movie but was a key moment in a film released over three decades ago. More to the point, it undercuts the emotional power of the character beat between Rain and Andy in Romulus, by taking a big moment of Andy protecting his sister and making the audience think about Ripley instead.

Ridley Scott famously described the original Alien as “a haunted house movie in space.” Romulus finds the Alien franchise haunted by itself.