Oh, Alien franchise. How I love you, and how bad you treat me sometimes. But never, ever so bad as this.

I’m going to do something I rarely do. I’m going to review a movie I hated. It pains me to do this, but do it I must: because this film is terrible in ways that are important for the history of horror and for contemporary feminism.

First, let me list the not important things about Alien: Romulus that don’t work. (Note there are spoilers to come.)

1. The racial politics of the film are troubling. The casting directors obviously went out of their way to cast a very diverse set of main actors: Black, Latina, East Asian, South Asian, and white. I’m all for that. But then all of them die or are horribly damaged, except the white girl. Making matters worse, they die because the Black character—who is markedly not human—is at first a malfunctioning synthetic, and is then taken over by an English-accented (corporate-colonial) microchip. To sum up: White girls are the ones who get to survive; Black boys are synthetics who are subject to hostile takeover. How this thing got green-lit, I shall never know.
2. The film is a teen film. Yes, that’s right: The entire main cast appear to be between about 14 and 20 years old. The slightly care-worn, slightly over-it, slightly middle-aged Ellen Ripley—who was 30 in the original 1979 Alien, and whose hard-nosed energy is so much of what made the original franchise so compelling—is replaced by wide-eyed, bushy-tailed, tearful innocence. It does not work. Like, at all.
3. There is a very annoying missed opportunity in the film to take the Black synthetic human character—Andy—and reinvent the Alien franchise’s fixation on aliens as a fixation on AI. That could have been interesting, but it doesn’t happen.
4. The suspension of disbelief bar is set way too high. Oh, be nice, Eleanor. It’s an interstellar horror film; what do you expect? Well, I expect basic scientific principles to be maintained, like conservation of momentum. There is no possible way that Rain (main character) could have snaked her way through a zero-G room full of floating particles of alien acid-blood without getting burned. All those particles would have been moving at different rates and in different directions based on the blast angle they were hit at, and they would have been moving fast. No way. I also expect that, if there’s going to be a discussion of non-Newtonian fluids (which there is), that the discussion will do something with the idea of non-Newtonian fluids (which it does not.)
5. The title. Romulus is one of the two mythical twins from the Aeneid who are said to have suckled at the teat of a wolf as infants. Romulus eventually committed fratricide, killing Remus, before then founding Rome. The film does nothing interesting with this potentially electric literary historical touchstone. Nothing. I kept expecting the main character to kill her “brother” Andy in the film, but no: She saves him. If that’s the lesson—that we have to turn away from Rome-style corporate imperialism in order to “save our brothers” rather than killing them—the lesson should have been made, like, a lot clearer and earned with a lot more narrative scaffolding. FFS.
6. The film is not scary. It is infuriating.

Remarkably, these aren’t even the most important ways the film pissed me off. Let me cut to the chase.

The most important thing about the original Alien film, both from the standpoint of film history and from the standpoint of the history of American feminism, is that it told a story about violent, predatory rape and forceful impregnation as something that could—and did—happen to men every bit as readily as it could happen to women. Remember Kane? Yeah, me too. And so does literally everyone who’s ever seen the original film, because he was a man who got raped and then died “giving birth” to his alien offspring. The Alien franchise is about rape and forcible reproduction.

That focus was totally clocked by James Cameron, who amplified it in the sequel, Aliens. So did the very weird Alien Resurrection. All good there. Romulus clocks it too, but does things with the rape and forced reproduction dynamics that don’t make any sense at all and totally dilute the reproductive-rights rigor of the original two films.

It’s crazy to me that a franchise that’s been centrally concerned with rape and forced pregnancy would abdicate that focus in the post-Dobbs era.

In Romulus, one of the teen heroes is a woman named Kay (Isabela Merced), who is pregnant. She is pregnant with a human baby. When I heard that, I leaned forward: This could be interesting, I thought. When the group of kids dock on the derelict spaceship that they’re planning to hijack—in order to get away from their wage-enslaving and eco-ravaged homeworld—they pretty soon discover a whole bunch of alien larvae: the “face-huggers” from prior films. Navarro (Aileen Wu) is the first to get impregnated—because, remember, the film is killing off the kids of color, one by one. Okay, so she gets impregnated. But when the alien hatches out of her, it comes out through her upper chest, not her abdomen. Yes, of course, people call these scenes “chest-burster” scenes, but if you go back and look at Kane’s death, the alien emerges from his belly—it doesn’t crack through his rib cage. And that matters, because it keeps the iconographic meaning of Kane’s death in the realm of pregnancy and parturition. When Navarro dies, we see broken ribs and cardiac tissue. It’s no longer a pregnancy, but a parasitic infection. Boo.

Why boo? Because we’re in the era of post-Dobbs horror—and I mean “horror” both in reference to the film industry and about the actual lived experience of women seeking medical care for reproduction-related states, conditions, and complications. Given that we are living in an era of vitriolic and panicked contestation about women’s reproductive rights, why on earth or any other planet would you make a film that decenters questions about forcible pregnancy and termination?

Making matters worse, a couple of scenes later, the film does appear to address pregnancy termination head-on, but it does it in the worst way possible. The mean-spirited boy character, Bjorn (Spike Fearn) attempts to kill the growing alien baby while it’s in a pupal state. He finds it inside what appears to be a massive, wet vulva, attached to the wall. (This visual is a direct rip-off of the scene from Species (1995) where Sil transitions from being a little girl to a full-grown woman.) So we’re looking at a big, steaming vulva, oriented vertically and complete with labia. Mean little Bjorn takes a long electric prod—shaped like a phallus—and he shoves it into the vulva, to electrocute the little alien inside.

Now I get it, he wants to kill the alien. But I’m going to say this: If this is Romulus’s best effort to showcase the importance of reproductive freedoms, it missed its mark by a mile. I don’t want to see a male character shoving a phallic probe directly into a giant vulva; I venture to say that you also don’t want to see that. Nor do I want to see that gigantic vulva then leak acidic vaginal secretions all over the place—almost as if the vulva is now excited by its rape. Someone in editorial should have thrown a red flag on this whole scene.

So now, I’m getting desperate. They botched the alien birth from Navarro’s body. They introduced an interspecies rape scene, in which the humans are the assailants. But maybe, just maybe, I thought, they would do something interesting with Kay’s pregnancy. And they almost do.

Thinking she’s dying, Kay injects herself with this non-Newtonian alien blood DNA extract serum goop (it’s really not explained well) to try to save herself and her baby. Astonishing no one, her experiment backfires, accelerating fetal development violently, and causing the fetus to be born as—you guessed it!—a half-human, half-alien hybrid. We’ve seen this move before, in Alien Resurrection. And it doesn’t work any better here. Kay quickly discovers that her breasts are leaking a mucus-like black and clear fluid; this is what non-Newtonian nursing looks like, I guess. (The black fluid breast milk thing is a pretty clear shout-out to Julia Ducournau’s infinitely superior film Titane, also about a hybrid pregnancy that results in the leakage of black fluid from the mother’s body.) So the alien suckles her to death. Meanwhile, Kay’s brother Tyler had also died. So now we’ve got three dead young people of color (Navarro, Kay, Tyler), one dead mean white boy (Bjorn), a severely compromised Black “synthetic” (Andy), and an entirely unscathed white girl (Rain). Blergh.

Rain and Andy make it to the end, though it’s clear Andy will die when they exit Weyland-Yutani airspace, because he will become decommissioned automatically. “I will fix you,” says Rain to him at the end. But who would believe her, when she has reprogrammed Andy so that his prime directive is no longer “do what’s best for Rain,” but instead, “do what’s best for both of us”? Why not reprogram him to “do what’s best for Andy”? The answer, of course, is that he doesn’t get to choose. He doesn’t get to have full agency. Why not reprogram Andy to do his own will?

This is where the film could have done something really interesting with AI ethics. Instead, it just choked. Since he has no choice but to follow his prime directive, that would have forced him to become an independently willing being, not attached to his white “sister” at the hip. But no, the film wants Rain to be safe, and Andy just to be, like, upgraded a tiny bit from servant to caregiver.

So off they rocket for a nine-year hypersleep, until they get to a vacation planet, far, far away. Not kidding, that’s the goal. A vacation planet where the young Black character will most likely die—sorry, he will be “decommissioned.”

I find this an astonishing place for the film to end. What’s up with Rain being all virginal, innocent, teary-eyed, and totally unscathed? Why make Navarro’s death not read as a fatal birth? Why make Kay’s pregnancy turn catastrophic only because of some non-Newtonian glop she mainlined? It’s crazy to me that a franchise that’s been centrally concerned with rape and forced pregnancy would abdicate that focus in the post-Dobbs era.

It’s not as if Hollywood broadly is turning a blind eye to using body horror as a way of exploring what it is to live in the post-Dobbs world as a woman. Other horror films have taken on the mantle of anti-Dobbs horror and worn it proudly and with rage: Look at Immaculate, in which Sydney Sweeney is raped and forced to carry a pregnancy she never wanted. Look at the surprisingly excellent film The First Omen, in which Nell Tiger Free is also raped and constrained to carry an unwanted pregnancy to term; her delivery introduces Damien—the anti-Christ—into the world. Allegory? Realism? You tell me.

And why, for the love of heaven, title the movie Romulus, leading viewers to think the film is going to charge headlong at Rome-style patriarchy, the patriarchy of patriarchies, and make some kind of allegory about American sexual politics?

The only answer I have come up with is this: This film is primarily concerned with its aesthetics, not with its ethics. That’s why the interstellar visuals are so beautiful; that’s why the alien body structures are so meticulously maintained throughout (something not true, for instance, in Alien Resurrection); that’s why the weaponry looks so true to the original film, as do the ship’s interior spaces, the fonts on the computer screens, and the cryo-pods. They even brought back Ash, the synthetic from the original film, because they wanted the film to look good.

And it does look good. But post-Dobbs, the latest Alien film needed to do more than look good. It needed to do what Alien did in 1979: Give Americans the opportunity to think about what the world would look like if men—and not just women—could be raped, forced to carry that pregnancy to term, and die. 

Featured image: Cailee Spaeny and Archie Renaux in Alien: Romulus (2024)