Warning: This article contains some light spoilers for Alien: Romulus.
Alien: Romulus starts with something of a goofy premise. For 20 years after the events of the original Alien, apparently, the xenomorph-obsessed Weyland-Yutani Corporation has been searching for the Nostromo and the monster its crew brought aboard. When they finally find it, they discover the original alien that Ellen Ripley blew out an airlock at the end of that movie. Somehow, the creature survives, allowing the scientists to capture it and study it–with predictably lethal results.
Alien: Romulus has to jump through a lot of hoops to create a situation in which some of the most frightening creatures ever committed to film can do their thing and scare new audiences. It’s a little peek at what kind of mess the Alien franchise’s overarching story has become. The knots Romulus twists itself in so it can stay true to the story of Alien, Aliens, Prometheus, and Alien: Covenant are a pretty good argument for why it’s time for the Alien franchise to drop all its past stories and start fresh.
See, the setup of Alien: Romulus, where scientists find a creature that was ostensibly killed already and use it as the premise for a whole new movie, is the result of choices made by James Cameron. They’ve been compounded over the years by the folks in charge of the Alien franchise, with bad choice after bad choice, and all those decisions actively hamstring the stories that the franchise can tell.
Cameron famously pitched his take on a 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 couple lines to convert the “S” into a “$.” The funny part of the story aside, Cameron’s idea to escalate Alien turned out to be a great one but also required him to create a pretty specific situation. The movie needed to bring back Ripley but stop her from warning anyone about the creature, and it needed to create a lot of victims for the alien instead of just one.
Cameron’s solution was a 57-year time skip, jumping way into the future from the original Alien. That allowed him to put a colony on the planet where the Nostromo crew found the derelict ship full of eggs and to fill it with people, opening the door for alien$.
The trouble with the 57-year jump is that it imagines nobody encountered the aliens for all that time, or at least, anybody who did was unable to report back to let anyone else know. It also imagines that nobody else ever encountered the alien anywhere other than LV-426. Those established facts put some very big brakes on the Alien franchise–if anybody did encounter the alien in those 57 years, they didn’t live to tell anyone else about it, and the aliens never became such a threat that other people encountered them. If anybody does bother to tell stories during those 57 years, they have to make sure those stories jive with the established facts that nobody knows about the alien and nobody has ever seen it before.
Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection made the situation even worse. Both movies solidify the idea that maybe those aliens on LV-426 were the only aliens. In Alien 3 (after unceremoniously killing off Newt and Hicks for no reason, another brutal move in smashing up the ongoing story), Weyland-Yutani comes after Ripley herself for the alien inside her that’s left over from Aliens, and she kills herself in order to destroy it.
The series more or less ended there for years, until Alien: Resurrection brought it back with another ridiculous time skip, jumping forward another 200 years. Resurrection sees scientists cloning Ripley to clone the alien she died to destroy, showing that, yeah, there are no other aliens anywhere. Thus, anyone trying to stay true to the established story of the Alien franchise is stuck dealing with a bunch of weird issues–and that’s why Romulus has to go pick up a single alien floating in space in order to create its story.
So thanks to the original series, we’ve got a situation in which aliens only ever seem to show up with Ripley, and basically only in one location. When the characters “nuke the site from orbit” in Aliens, they effectively render the species extinct. We get a few other stories that include the aliens–namely the Aliens vs. Predator movies–but they’re even less serious about making the whole situation make sense. So we’re stuck either with stories that throw in the aliens as novelty monsters to battle other novelty monsters, or we’re working in a franchise that has completely undercut itself in allowing anyone else to meet the aliens or for an increase in the stakes of those stories.
Then comes Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, two movies that are a lot more interested in things like the fossilized Space Jockey from Alien than they are in the creature itself. Both movies center on a genetic weapon created by the Space Jockey’s race, the Engineers, and how it eventually leads to the aliens at the center of the franchise. Alien: Covenant is about how David, the first synthetic created by Peter Weyland, used that genetic weapon and some experimentation to create the “xenomorph” version of the alien from the original movies.
I’ve always found this idea to be a frustrating one that makes the alien less scary, rather than more. The idea that the xenomorph was created by a single, unhinged robot, for the fun of making something awful, is a lot less interesting than the idea that the aliens were born through the forces of evolution. It’s way scarier that the universe might naturally create something so horrifically lethal as the alien–and that’s a point the creator of the FX Alien show, Noah Hawley, seems to agree on, since he said he’s ignoring the aliens’ origin from Alien: Covenant.
Alien: Romulus doesn’t ignore that origin, though. Instead, a mere one movie after we see David use the Engineers’ weapon, which looks like black goo, to create the aliens, we’ve got Weyland-Yutani using the aliens to reverse-engineer the black goo.
That’s a pretty tight box for Alien: Romulus to work within. It has to find an alien without disrupting the story of what happens on LV-426, it has to put its characters in a situation where nobody will have heard what happened to them, and it has to pay off the idea that the aliens contain some powerful genetic weirdness as suggested by Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. And then there’s the ongoing villainy of Weyland-Yutani (or in Alien: Resurrection, the futuristic United States military), as they continually chase the alien for monetary ends.
What’s more, not a lot is really gained from sticking with these stories. Alien: Romulus doesn’t need its many references to Alien to be good, and if anything, they hold it back. It’s just a lot of needless baggage and tight confines for an Alien story to deal with. The more stories that get added to the franchise, the smaller the box they can fit into becomes.
There are a ton of Alien comics and novels that also add to the franchise, and demonstrate that it’s at least possible to take the concept in other directions. It’s worth noting that a lot of those novels aren’t particularly good–they tend to rehash what the films have already covered, like the continual attempts of the Company to capture the alien, only for everyone to get eaten. But a few imagine great riffs on the formula, like my personal favorite, Aliens: Phalanx by Scott Sigler.
Those other Alien stories are able to play a little more with the concept, and what I like about Aliens: Phalanx is that it finds ways to focus on what makes the xenomorph scary by putting it in new and novel situations. It doesn’t need to create new mutagenic weirdnesses to add drama to the situation, like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant did, and it doesn’t have to worry about revisiting the one planet where the aliens were found, like the films keep doing. It just runs with a good idea.
And that’s what the Alien films should do. The ins and outs of who found which alien where, and who is chasing it for what corporate ends, aren’t what’s important about the story. The important part, the essential element of what makes Alien good, is the simplest: encountering a huge, unknowable creature that wants to use you to feed its young. I want Alien stories that focus on the unknowable terror of venturing out into the universe and finding it incredibly hostile–and if we need a reboot to recapture that feeling, then so be it.
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