By Michael Marano

Disney has bought Fox, so the Alien franchise is now incapable of having an impact close to what it initially had, when it redefined what science fiction/horror films could be.

Alien: Romulus, directed by Fede Álvarez. Screening at AMC Assembly Row 12 and Apple Cinemas Cambridge.

The alien eating machine is back in Alien:Romulus. Photo: 20th Century Fox

Ridley Scott’s Alien came out 45 years ago, and it was science fiction.

No, I don’t mean it was of the genre “science fiction.”

The movie Alien itself was a science fictional artifact. Something sent from the future to help audiences deal with the Toffler-esque Future Shock we felt throughout the ’70s, a resonance that upped the impact of what was even then an instant science fiction/horror classic.

Over the 10 years previous to Alien‘s debut in 1979, America and the world had been dealing with the seismic cultural changes of the moon landing and the development of the space shuttle (in ’76, the naming of the first orbiter Enterprise after the ship on Star Trek shivved science fictional ideas into reality). There’d been corruption of Watergate. The sexual revolution, the rise of feminism, and what was then seen to be the inevitable passage of the ERA. There’d been the smackdown of American colonial aspirations when the last chopper flew out of Saigon.

As the decade ended, when none of these changes had sunk in, along came Alien, with: its Jimmy Carter spaceship captain Dallas; a commercial vessel Nostromo, named after Joseph Conrad’s epic fever dream of colonialism, and its shuttle Narcissus, named after a Conrad vessel; a hostile creature that sexually assaults its victims to death; Ripley, a heroine and lone survivor who’s a woman, when decades of Creature Feature plotting had programmed us to believe down to the cellular level that Dallas would save Ripley and they’d be paired off for a final smooch as the end credits rolled.

Alien was stunning, because it was so ahead of its time, yet felt like a logical summation of where the times were headed.

The real monster in Alien, of course, wasn’t the Xenomorph. It was the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which sent its crew, via the fine print in their contracts, to their deaths. Given that Barbara Kopple’s Oscar-winning 1976 documentary Harlan County, USA had shown us that the Duke Power Company was cool with its employees dying of black lung, this didn’t seem like a stretch.

With Alien: Romulus, we see that the corporate monster has defeated the Xenomorph with a stunning coup de grace of mediocrity and lack of imagination.

Since Disney has bought Fox, the Alien franchise is incapable of having an impact close to what it initially had, when it redefined what science fiction/horror films could be. Take a look at how the first two Deadpool movies, made by Fox, were brilliant and much-needed skewerings of bloated, over-produced comic book movies. This summer’s Deadpool & Wolverine, made by Disney, is … just a bloated, overproduced comic book movie.

Alien: Romulus isn’t plotted. It’s a rosary of Pavlovian stimuli. There are only one or two story points involving the Xenomorphs that haven’t been done better in previous entries in the series. Their retreaded inclusions here are lame attempts to reclaim the story points’ original punch. The dropping of the line, “Get away from her, you bitch!” is especially unforgivable because it has no context in the story — except as a stinky fish to get audiences to bark like seals when it’s thrown to them. The various narrative stunts used to drag Alien: Romulus to these plagiarized plot points are pure contrivance not the result of savvy construction, and therefore devoid of any sense of escalation.

Cailee Spaeny on patrol in Alien: Romulus. Photo: 20th Century Fox

To be fair, the subplots in Alien: Romulus rope in some interesting, if problematic, takes on androids, which makes this movie a better sequel to Blade Runner than it is to Alien, as was also the case with Alien: Covenant. As in Blade Runner, the androids in Alien: Romulus are corporate products, slaves with limited capacity to act against the interests of big business. Of course, this limited android capacity smacks of the same “Prime Directive” being imposed by conglomerates on the intellectual properties they’ve devoured. Just as Deadpool & Wolverine outfitted the satiric capacity of Deadpool with neuticles, Alien: Romulus undercuts the strength of the Alien franchise.

Alien was released 45 years ago, and it redefined the science fiction/horror genre because it had yet to be a franchise, a commodity fit to be acquired by a bigger Weyland-Yutani-like corporation. Corporate shackling turns genre properties into automatons, lobotomizing them of the capacity for cultural critique that made the original Alien more than innovative, but truly revelatory. What was the state of the art in science fiction/horror 45 years before Alien? It was James Whale’s The Bride of Frankenstein (albeit, itself the second movie in a franchise).

The tragic thing is, if anybody might have made a really solid Alien entry, it coulda/woulda/shoulda been Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez and his co-writer and longtime collaborator Rodo Sayagues. Álvarez and Sayagues’s first big movie was the 2013 reboot of The Evil Dead, and they brilliantly repurposed the motifs of the Evil Dead franchise and utterly subverted the trope of the Final Girl, in the way that Ripley utterly subverted the trope of the Final Girl in 1979. Was their conflation of drug addiction with demonic possession entirely successful? Nope! But it introduced something different into the Evil Dead franchise. It was a swing for the fences, of a type that’s impossible under the reign of the House of Mouse. Álvarez and Sayagues’s Don’t Breathe was a masterclass on the use of claustrophobia that should’ve been easily transposed to the corridors of Alien: Romulus‘ space environments. But the use of claustrophobia here feels like a gimmick — a bad cover of a song they originally wrote themselves.

But maybe I’ve been too harsh.

Alien: Romulus, like Alien before it, does, in fact, feel like a science fictional artifact from the future.

Too bad it’s a dystopian future of total corporate control of our culture, in which everything is spat out by AI that thieves all that had once been original.

Horror writer, writing coach, and personal trainer Michael Marano (www.BluePencilMike.com) as a 15-year-old scribbled down a bunch of ideas for sequels to Alien during the summer of ’79 to the strains of “My Sharona” and “I Don’t Like Mondays,” including a really cool one set on a Dyson Sphere. He can objectively say that some of them would have been better movies than Alien: Romulus.