Alien by Manabu Yashiro

Ripley by Matías Bergara

Alien: Romulus

Ever since Star Wars: The Force Awakens netted two billion dollars for Disney it seems that the done thing, when resuscitating VHS-era franchises, is to remix the instalments that imprinted themselves on the audience. These kind of deliberately nostalgic quotations are a difficult thing to get right though, especially in such a late-arriving sequel. Obviously, co-writer-director Fede Álvarez's Alien: Romulus plunders its beautifully appointed predecessors for grist - quite apparently the gap between productions is too long and too creatively disconnected for it to be otherwise - but it's how these pieces are refined or transferred into the new whole that really matters. So, hearing notes in Benjamin Wallfisch's Romulus score that are reminiscent of Elliot Goldenthal's turbulent, shrieking Alien³ Adagio, while an astronaut thrashes around with clawed horrors in the void of space, isn't just thematically fitting, it underlines the sheer, surging quality of the sampled work. The move is celebratory too: Goldenthal's music a beloved (and perhaps underappreciated) aspect of an unfairly maligned sequel. 

What absolutely does not work though is the decision to reanimate an actor who has, sadly, already passed on. Romulus' recreation of Ian Holm's face is frozen inside a role that the actor played over forty years earlier. This is perhaps the most overt aspect of Disneyfication that Romulus is subject to: ransom demand-level amounts of money spent on deep fake AI processing (and, no doubt, scores of end-of-pipeline tweaks courtesy of multiple computer animation vendors), all to spit out a dented puppet that is far more physically repulsive than any of the other, evolving nightmares on display. These periodic reminders that Disney is very heavily invested in these uncanny regurgitations of extremely real people has never not been alarming. It goes beyond the simple revulsion of a human face untethered from time or the personality that previously animated it. The practice is reductive, imagining human value in stark, temporary terms: the periods in which a person impacted upon some property that can be franchised off into the future. What is the end game here? Summer blockbusters packed with marionettes of these digital undead? The resurrection we're subjected to here isn't even canny enough to be brief. This shade lingers, relentlessly regurgitating lines from its point of origin. 

This is another, vivid problem in Romulus. Although the special effects departments, the stunt performers, the creature effects people and the actors themselves are very often working in fabulous concert, Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues (or perhaps the Disney bean counters) cannot help themselves, excreting famous lines from previous instalments all over this film's crowning moments. It's actually kind of maddening. Why work hard to add something new or genuinely exciting to such a well-worn property if the final revision is so desperate to remind its audience of older, greater episodes? Are viewers really so enamoured of reading these signposts? Of being given the opportunity to elbow the neophyte they've tricked into sitting next to them, then confidently state which sequel the quip originated from? It all depends on how you view these films really. Are they important milestones in science fiction cinema or are they the latest opportunity for a sentimental, box office haul? Thankfully, for those of us who would put the first three Alien films over any similarly lauded trilogies - Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings shrink beneath their brilliance - there is still meat to get your teeth into. 

Ron Cobb's design for an atmospheric processing tower is lifted out of Aliens then deposited onto the mining colony where this film begins. Surrounded by open-air markets and an abundance of human squalor, the pyramid takes on a sinister quality. Although it never made it into the final film, when prepping Alien, Giger imagined the egg chamber residing in a bulbous, organic pyramid; an enormous boil that had been deposited onto this inhospitable landscape then, somehow, flourished. Cobb's mastaba serves a similar function here. Not only is it a risen symbol that denotes an extraterrestrial befoulment, it allows the audience to get a sense of what one of Weyland Yutani's shake and bake colonies looks like a couple of decades down the line. Comparatively, the twin facility we saw back on Acheron was trapped in a specific moment in time. Hadley's Hope was staffed by young families looking to make a name for themselves on an unknown and unmapped planet. Jackson's Star, the Romulus equivalent, is the home of Cailee Spaeny orphaned Rain. It is a full-blooded company operation that imprisons generation after generation of its citizens into a hopeless, life-draining servitude. The frontier romance experienced by the Jordans, before they trespassed onto a prehistoric derelict at least, has long been paved over. 

Accompanying Rain throughout Romulus is David Jonsson's Andy, a gentle and childlike alternative to the other, usually far more malevolent, synthetic beings in this universe. Liberated from a rubbish tip by Rain's now deceased father, Andy is a decommissioned artificial person that has been reprogrammed to be a guileless and ever-present companion. The simplicity of this rewiring, as well as the obvious misuse of Andy before he became a part of Rain's family, has left this mechanoid vulnerable and prone to debilitating seizures. Although Rain treats Andy with the fatigued care of a glass child, her friends respond to him as either a useful gadget or as a target for bullying derision. Unexpectedly, Romulus takes a similarly sympathetic position as Ridley Scott's prequels, asking us to identify with a being built purely for slavery while still worrying what shape his self-determination will eventually take. As Andy trespasses deeper into Romulus' decaying mausoleum, his fragged directives begin to reorganise and re-emerge. Jonsson effortlessly switches back and forth between these two, clashing perspectives, using the slights aimed at his depleted form to inform an angry, emergent personality that has been radicalised by company doctrine. 

Despite any worries generated by Romulus having such a young and apparently carefree cast (not to mention the project's beginnings as a straight-to-streaming feature), Álvarez's film is actually far more considered than expected: a conscious effort to return the series to its blue collar roots. No longer are we stowing away with billionaires as they pursue their follies. We're generations removed from middle-class, middle-aged professionals attempting to hot desk in from a wooden cabin that resides in a different galaxy. The subjects here are the children that followed in their wake. The displaced, despondent youths forced to grow up malnourished under churning, leaden skies. Their dreams are tiny: Rain genuinely yearning only for a feeling of warmth on her face. No wonder they want to escape, to raid a deteriorating satellite and pilfer enough stasis tech to die a little death and be transported somewhere that has slipped through The Company's grasp. Romulus' slower, earlier passages are its best: bickering teenagers trampling over the wreckage of some doomed, inhuman experiment, completely oblivious to the danger that they are in. Although we are eventually subjected to an entire menagerie, Álvarez's film happily builds several set-pieces around the scurrying threat implied by the facehugger; that leathery-looking arachnoid that has been side-lined as a serious, ambulatory threat since the mid-1980s. 

In fact, Romulus so successfully repositions the parasite stage of the Alien as a legitimately entertaining danger that its eventual progeny registers as somewhat superfluous or, maybe more accurately, formulaic. Ever since Paul WS Anderson's AVP: Alien vs Predator, the creature's lifecycle has been in overdrive, with chest-bursters following rapidly after even the briefest of infection. Romulus does not buck this trend, with towering drones nosing around dripping corridors seemingly moments after their rib-cracking birth. The presence of these adult creatures foretells a rough, structural gear shift in Romulus as well, a move away from sweaty, creeping tension and on to a more triumphant style of redress. Of course Rain gets her hands on some heavy weaponry. Naturally, the creatures line up to get their pearlescent domes detonated as well. What else where we expecting? To Álvarez's credit though, these fist-pumping moments quickly segue into the immediate and unintended consequences of all this blood-letting, with weightless nebula clouds of hull-melting acid spiralling towards heroines dressed in little more than company-stamped sweats. It helps as well that, prior to Rain's zero gravity manoeuvres, we have a recent reference point for the kind of danger this substance represents: fingers instantly melted down to their knuckles; sternums, and the organs they encase, reduced to smoking boreholes by only a trickle. 

Finally there's Romulus' addition to the Alien lifecycle, a fourth act creeper who reveals its hairless head after several overlapping countdowns have concluded. Romanian basketballer Robert Bobroczkyi, underneath a thin layer of desiccated make up appliances, plays Offspring, another example of a ruthless biomechanoid's vision for an evolved, space-faring human being. In Romulus that brief is interpreted as a swaying, sexless giant riddled with pulsing orifices and a barbed tongue that it uses to extract sustenance. This Offspring also provides the filmmakers an opportunity to tweak and reassess Chris Cunningham's Newborn, a creature designed for Alien: Resurrection that began its life as a diseased etching that combined the black carapace of Giger with the overlong and atrophied limbs of the terminally undernourished. Unfortunately, that chimera was rendered for the screen as a slathering goo monster. Resurrection's failure to accurately translate this sickly intermingling of human-presenting flesh and airbrushed Necronom is to Romulus' benefit though. While not as visually striking as a Big Chap, Offspring allows the filmmakers to portray an Alien in the same singular, hair-raising terms as the original film. 

Although only a final stretch player, Offspring impresses because the threat it implies isn't simply that of the tooth or claw. It stalks and looms, appraising its quarry with a leering fascination that is genuinely uncomfortable to consider. Successive sequels have drained the series of the idea that the Alien isn't a static creature that will always grow to similar dimensions, it's a reflection of humanity: our basic, reproductive drives written into a massive, androgynous insect that is incapable of coupling with or even raping its prey. Hives and matriarchal scaffolding have elbowed out the notion that this orphaned mayfly doesn't necessarily want to strike and bite on sight. In Scott's film, the Alien certainly slaughtered the men it encountered but the women trapped on the Nostromo gave Kane's son pause. It appraised them, fascinated by the sight of their soft skin or some (undetectable to the audience) scent that issued from them. Romulus follows suit, even having a shot of its Offspring - drawn up on its hind legs - as if about to issue some awful, engorged member from the little crocodile button that sits centred in the frame. Romulus doesn't subject its battered cast to that kind of outrage but some underlying intent does seem to be on display. The Offspring doesn't nuzzle the bleeding mother that birthed it. This infant invades her space and prods its beak-like nose at her, using it's size and weight in such a way that an intent is clear: it's demanding to be noticed, it wants to be embraced by the shrinking, dying woman beneath it. 

Alien by Marc Aspinall

Alien by Oleg Bulakh

Alien: The Original Screenplay #5 by Walter Simonson

Alien: Covenant

On paper, it's easy to read Alien: Covenant as Ridley Scott's bristling response to the criticism that greeted his gorgeous but deliberately flippant Prometheus. For a start the marbled, swaggering Engineers are completely dispensed with, shunted off stage into a delirious, Biblical oblivion that underlines their complete irrelevance to what will unfold here. Rather than pick at an idea of explanation, using rejected Alien concepts to build the nursery, Covenant is woven around a more forthright telling of where the original creature has sprung from. The facts that unfurl here might not align perfectly with everything we've seen before but their emotional, thematic truth work beautifully.

Scott and screenwriters John Logan and Dante Harper approach their sequel with the tried and trusted methods of James Cameron. They take their predecessor's leftovers, boil them down to their constituent parts then explode them on a mythic, sweeping canvas predicated on an easily understandable psychological state. The inherited character is precious, existing on a level entirely above any of the newcomers. Dramatic urgency will spring from, and function around, their objectives and desires. So while Cameron's Aliens transformed habitual survivor Ripley into a superheroic mother capable of physically confronting her nightmares, Logan and Harper raise Michael Fassbender's broken, glitching David up to the level of a towering, Satanic evil.

Covenant abandons Prometheus' questions about humanity's makers to instead ponder our race's future on a galactic scale, asking what legacy we might hope to leave behind. The film's answer is iterative and generational, concluding that mankind is essentially immaterial to what is to follow. We're catalysts, meat grist to power the pupal stage of our offspring. Just as our creators have been swept away, so too will we. It's a big, science fiction idea - the tools we've created to help us chart the stars have actually rendered us bovine, bordering on irrelevant. In this detail Covenant operates as a complementary piece to both Blade Runner and the moment in Alien when Ash praises the perfection of Kane's son.

Covenant's synthetics are a rolling, real-time explanation of why Roy Batty and pals were saddled with such a definitive expiration date. If mankind is able to create a life form that betters them in every way, why then should that being take orders? Covenant reorganises David as something of an anomaly, an old man's hubristic attempt to create a flawless but servile companion - two behavioural aspects that can't help but clash instantly. Walter, a deliberately less capable revision of David, occupies a social standing one down from Prometheus' duplicitous butler. Many of the human spacefarers that interact with Walter treat him like a self-sufficient gadget that just happens to be shaped like a man. In Covenant, synthetics are treated as emotionally invisible automatons, they're an underclass expected to bow and scrape. No wonder the greatest amongst them chose to divert, to seize on his father's works and imagine the next evolutionary leap.

Alien by Ninjatic

Alien by WBYK

Alien vs Predator by Mike Mignola

Sci-Fi Revoltech #001 Alien and #016 Alien Warrior by Sabres21768

ISOLATION

After years of reducing HR Giger's Xenomorph to jittery cannon fodder, video games have finally decided to play around with the creature as a persistent, singular threat. Alien: Isolation puts you at the mercy of one prowling bug as you desperately attempt to escape from a malfunctioning space station.

There's been a bit of a stink about the player character, you take control of Ripley's daughter, but I'm not sure that it's a deal breaker. Yes, it reeks of a studio notes style hook and messes around with a beat from the Special Edition of Aliens, but we already know there can be no reconciliation. Instead the idea seems to suggest that Creative Assembly are approaching their game as a stand-alone sequel that maybe even replaces Jim Cameron's masterpiece. The first two (three?) Alien films are forever. Even Ridley Scott himself couldn't undermine them. Why not treat chronology as a malleable thing if it takes us new places? It certainly worked for the two dozen Godzilla films I watched recently.

Safari

Alien by Simon Bisley

OBCY

Prometheus

Conceptually, Prometheus is pretty wonderful. The lead dick of the Alien franchise's evil corporation hustles together an elite team of scientists to investigate a series of prehistoric cave paintings that point off into the heavens. After a couple of years of hyper-sleep, the team finds a planet spotted with unused Alien concept art, and a progenitor race of marble headed scumbags. Prometheus proposes a scenario equal parts Erich von Däniken's Chariots of the Gods?, and Yoshiki Takaya's Bio Booster Armor Guyver battle manga. To wit: humanity is but an experimental building block in a chain of biomechanical monstrosities. It's an enticing proposition that organically feeds into the lifecycle shock established by Ridley Scott's first trip to the stars. Unfortunately this slither of excellence is buried in mulch.

Prometheus had a well documented dance with the American ratings board, pinballing back and forth between PG-13 and R certificates. With ratings, there's the idea that the difference between them is minor, amounting to little more than detailing. PG-13 affords you one 'fuck' and some bloodless pounding. Score an R and you can have as much sexualised swearing as you like, with a glut of dismemberment to match. This is wrong. Ratings damage at the conceptual stage, affecting tone and even structure. Despite the certificate Prometheus ended up with, it is clear that the film began life as a teenager friendly summer blockbuster. This isn't a film for adults. The mechanics are much too insulting. The characters, despite their apparently world beating scientific credentials, are buffoons. How else to explain a biologist who ignores the skull of an extraterrestrial astronaut to run around like a headless chicken? With two members of his crew stranded in an inhospitable murder pyramid, how might you expect the ship's captain to react when he gets a lifeform reading in their neighbourhood? Why, he'd laugh and slink off to put the moves on the nearest blonde of course. These aren't world class brains struggling through an existential horror, they're teenagers inclined to froth until danger becomes explicit. It's interstellar exploration as a drunken lark.

Despite Scott's rambling about sharing DNA, Prometheus doesn't remotely resemble Alien. That film posited a fairly believable situation in which a gang of space truckers utterly failed to cope with an aggressive first contact. The crew argued, the fought, and finally whimpered in the face of the insectile rapist that haunted their ship. The staff of the Prometheus are numb by comparison. No-one bothers to follow up on an episode in which one of the crew hijacks an executive surgery pod to abort the squid growing inside her. The doctors she beats senseless prior to this process don't even blink when she rocks up two scenes later clutching her stapled gut. They're too busy nursing a wildly unexpected plot development back to health. Everything in Prometheus is weightless. Rather than track one accidental infection and how it impacts on a close-knit group, the film juggles several contaminations, playing them like aces when they suspect the attention of their childish audience is starting to drift. There's no sense of tension or claustrophobia then, just witless downtime while we await the next creature attack or unheralded twist. Prometheus is a bit of a fumble. The unknowable, fossilised horrors of Alien repackaged as dull, meandering murderers in a film ordered like a Friday the 13th kill flick with sequel stings strung haphazardly throughout the credits.

Alien by Walter Simonson

Walter Simonson's take on Giger's Star Beast. For a complete look at Archie Goodwin and Walt Simonson's adaptation of Alien for Heavy Metal, head over to Grantbridge Street & Other Misadventures.

SMILE DAVID

Michael Fassbender kills it as the (presumed) ancestor to the Ash and Bishop 'droids - David 8 - in this Prometheus viral tease. Fass plays David distracted and daydreamy, like the skin-job science officers of the first two Alien films. There's also a twist of disingenuous play-acting, with Fass staring his audience down like an amoral car salesman, or a cable TV God-botherer. He doesn't believe any of the shit he's saying, it's just what he thinks you want to hear. He's a human shaped instrument, programmed with fealty and deference. He's absolutely incapable of not acting in your best interest. Honest Guv'! I also quite like the idea that his number designation fits in with vague Alien / Blade Runner micro-continuity, David 8 as the successor model to Scott's idea of Deckard as a Nexus 7 synthetic.

Ripley by Robert Ball

Fizzy Pop

It is a widely held belief that the greatest indignity the Alien series ever suffered was a rash of witless crossovers with Fox stablemate Predator. Au contraire! Real sci-fi masochists are directed towards this shit shill for Pepsi; a 1992 event commercial that features the Alien 3 draft of the Xenomorph struggling to locate two scruffy young grungers in a smokey alley, whilst suffering some incredibly shitty comedy vermin sound effects. Fincher's flick made the creature look like a writhing mess of copper tubing and polished black diamond. Nightmarish contrast! This burper has all the visual sophistication of a light creeper on a cable TV children's channel.

"In space..."

This May 1979 teaser trailer for Alien functions rather nicely as a standalone acknowledgement of Ridely Scott's debt to Tobe Hooper's The Texas Chain Saw Massacre - Scott hoped to take Chain Saw's basic model of sustained imperilment and transpose it into a science-fiction setting. This ad even plays with the visual and aural language of Texas Chain Saw. Like that film, here sound is used as a tool for relentless, unsubstantiated assault. The soundtrack is overloaded with blaring space sounds that pulse over a driving, throbbing beat. Similarly, the visuals splutter forward in a constant state of harassed movement, mirroring Sally's sustained torment in Hooper's 1974 flick. Everything is shot tight and claustrophobic, full of agitated, hand-held fragments of people fleeing. Although we never see a particular threat, we know it's there, and we know it's hunting.