The sci-fi series is back with all the mid-20th century tropes that Ridley Scott used to made it fly.
Alien: Romulus, the latest in the space-based scream franchise, is released today.
So what? Class war has returned to sci-fi. Fearless women are back rescuing men. And the Wayland-Yutani corporation reprises its role as capitalist supervillain, this time with AI that audiences might actually recognise.
The Alien series has always been about more than monsters in space. Each film in this most political of sci-fi franchises has varying levels of social satire, mocking the work and wealth of its day.
Pedigree. The new episode slots narratively between Ridley Scott’s 1979 debut and James Cameron’s 1986 sequel, with the worn-out tatty tech aesthetic of Scott’s first film. It follows a group of teenage serf-workers trapped on a sunless planet seeking freedom via an abandoned space station. Mayhem ensues.
Spawned in the wake of Star Wars as a blue-collar story bereft of lasers and starships, the first Alien film was pitched as “Jaws in space” but it also had:
- a proletarian script by Dan O’Bannon, son of a carpenter;
- direction from the Geordie Ridley Scott, whose sci-fi visions were shaped as much by West Hartlepool steelworks as Stanley Kubrick’s Space Odyssey;
- a working-class tugboat crew who spend most of their time bitching about low pay and poor conditions;
- a monster that enters the story because a vast quasi-military corporation inserts a clause into workers’ contracts requiring they investigate a mysterious beacon or forfeit their wages; and
- a company shill who tries to fire insubordinates.
In space no-one can hear the Final Girl scream. Cailee Spaeny, who stars in Romulus as an orphan trying to flee corporate indenture, follows in Alien’s tradition of powerful female leads saving or protecting hyper-masculine men.
Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley is one of sci-fi’s first feminist heroines, fighting off monsters for the first five films.
Elizabeth Shaw, played by Noomi Rapace, spanked the extra-terrestrials in 2012’s prequel Prometheus.Katherine Daniels, played by Katherine Waterston, smeared the beasts in 2017’s Alien: Covenant.
Capitalism is worse than monsters. But the real enemy in the series is Wayland-Yutani Inc. and its AI servants. As a rule of thumb, the more class consciousness, the better the film. In Romulus the dreaded corporation enslaves the young and experiments on the monsters; in Alien, it sacrifices the crew of the Nostromo; in Aliens it burns a team of Vietnam-style young marines; in Alien 3 it tries to force Ripley to birth an alien; in Resurrection it reanimates her to steal her DNA and in Prometheus its founder Peter Weyland – an immortality obsessed Silicon Valley type – releases an AI called David that ends up creating the monsters in the first place.
Spoiler alert. Spaeny’s android best friend, played by David Jonsson, is brutally reprogrammed by Wayland-Yutani in the new release.
A multiverse too far. According to a bonus diary entry on the Steelbook Blu-ray edition of Prometheus, Peter Weyland was mentored by Dr Eldon Tyrell, founder of Blade Runner’s Tyrell Corporation. As the Weyland Corporation also appears in Alien vs Predator, this extends the Alien Cinematic Universe into areas no-one was asking it to go.
Star Wars v class war. George Lucas imagined heroic pilots defeating an evil empire. Ridley Scott explores how blue- and white-collar workers are debased, overstretched and ultimately sacrificed by the superrich in the name of interplanetary wealth and corporate expansion. How’s SpaceX going, Elon Musk?
