Alien: Giger counter

The alien, which gives Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror classic its title, appeared for about four minutes across a runtime of nearly two hours. Not to suggest the title was misleading. Not even remotely. Scott knew — or at least once did — not to use a tablespoon where a pinch would do. The sinuous creature, designed by HR Giger, scared us not in spite of the nominal screen time but because of it. Thirty-five minutes in, a facehugger books a ride aboard the working-class spaceship Nostromo with a non-consensual kiss. It isn’t until an hour into the film that the uninvited stowaway takes its final form — a streamlined killing machine with a hardened exoskeleton and acid for blood. “A perfect organism,” Ash (Ian Holm), the android science officer, calls it. “I admire its purity. A survivor, unclouded by conscience, remorse or delusions of morality.” The description applies just as well to the crew’s employers, Weyland-Yutani Corp, a galactic conglomerate willing to sacrifice lives for profits.

Under siege by a lone but formidable predator, the crew of Nostromo face an almost impossible challenge for survival. The film doesn’t reveal the alien or the damage it can do all at once. We catch a fleeting glimpse of its brinjal-shaped head here, its razor-tipped tail there. We get a tight close-up of its salivating teeth. We learn it slides in and out of ventilation ducts and stalks from pockets of shadow. If our final girl Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) survives at the end, it’s because she uses the space, inside and outside the ship, to her tactical advantage. All it took Scott was a single alien as adversary to deliver an unflinchingly tense game of cat and mouse. The choice to not show the alien a whole lot and keep some mystery alive are what embedded the monster firmly in the pop culture hive mind.

But with each new instalment, the mystery has all but evaporated. The more xenomorphs (as the species came to be known) we have seen, the more inured we have become to their tricks. Demystifying their biology and the larger franchise mythology has only defanged the creature. While Ripley was brought back and even cloned to confront all kinds of monsters of corporate greed, the xenomorphs picked off endless crews of human workers, androids, gung-ho Vietnam War metaphors and trophy-hunting Predators. But the sense of jeopardy is gone. The latest, Alien: Romulus, pits a group of young space colonists against dozens of xenomorphs on an abandoned research station. Canonically set between Scott’s 1979 film and James Cameron’s 1986 follow-up Aliens, the new movie is another reverential and handsomely shot reconstitution of an extant mythology from writer-director Fede Álvarez and close collaborator Rodo Sayagues.

After defying expectations with their Evil Dead reboot and defiling a legacy with their Texas Chainsaw Massacre reboot, the Uruguayan duo split the difference and settle for adequacy with their Alien reboot. Romulus neither manages to recreate the miasmic terrors of Alien nor the kinetic thrills of Aliens. As reboots come, this is as safe as it gets. There are no fresh frights. Just stale ones more likely to startle than scare. Almost every crisis is a rehash of one we have already seen. Beats pass by with a been-there, resurrected-that inevitability. The combination of VFX and practical effects (puppetry and animatronics) provide nothing more than a cosmetic tweak to the predator-prey dynamic. The choice to digitally resurrect the late Holm as Ash lookalike Rook is a particularly misguided one. Some likened it to “graverobbing” and “necromancy.” Romulus indeed feels like the work of a competent ventriloquist treating a legacy franchise like a fetish object.

All sorts of ritual abuse and polymorphous perversions sprang from Giger’s nightmares onto his canvas. Goggle-eyed foetuses are loaded like bullets, one by one, from the uterus of a pistol. A woman clapped in irons gives birth through a barrel between her flayed legs. Fleshy bodies are hooked up to heavy machinery. Spinal columns are held in place with bolts and rivets. Orifices are plugged by tubes. Humanoid creatures seem locked in a state of both pain and pleasure. By melding the organic and the metallic, the Zurich artist explored a new conception of corporeality. The biomechanoids of his otherworld made the boundaries between man and machine increasingly nebulous. His monochrome artwork imagined our possible transformation through technological advancements, questioning our readiness to accept a future where evolution may necessitate man and machine coexisting in the same space and even the same bodily form. The world he imagined could be seen as a monstrous extension of The Gadget Lover: Narcissus as Narcosis (1964), in which Marshall McLuhan described technology taking on the functions of limbs and eventually the central nervous system itself. “We are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism,” as Donna Haraway wrote in A Cyborg Manifesto.

No wonder Giger’s art worked its eldritch spell on Scott during the pre-production of Alien. Once the director peeked inside the artist’s 1977 compendium Necronomicon, the images stuck in his mind like an alien larva. Named for the Book of the Dead from HP Lovecraft’s fiction, Necronomicon contained among others two lithographs of an oblong-headed being that became the basis for the xenomorph. Italian special effects maestro Carlo Rambaldi brought Giger’s creation to life, an alien both phallic and yonic, asexual and sexual. Just as the disembodied genders interfacing with machines and each other in Giger’s skeletal landscapes, the sexual connotations aren’t exactly subtle in the Alien films. The xenomorph has a giant penis-shaped head; behind its teeth is a second set that shoots out like a spring-loaded vagina dentata; it kills and reproduces with an act of penetration. The hosts who happen upon its pulsating egg sacs can’t help but poke and peer inside. Curiosity leaves a transfixed Kane (John Hurt) vulnerable to the facehugger which leaps out and attaches itself to his face. The parasitic life form coils its tail around his throat with a death grip while it injects an embryo into him. The embryo gestates for a few hours before a tiny alien gnaws its way out of his chest. Kane’s impregnation seized on “male fears of female reproduction,” according to David McIntee, author of Beautiful Monsters. “Alien is a rape movie with male victims,” he wrote. “It also shows the consequences of that rape: the pregnancy and birth.” Recording the life cycle of the xenomorph within the duration of a single film gave a whirlwind intensity to those fears of bodily violation by a parasite. Within hours of scurrying away, the tiny alien grows in mass and malevolence. The adult drone sure shows its glistening teeth when it goes on a violent rampage.

Academics over the years have described the film as “Freudian in its depiction of birth trauma, Nietzschean in its will to power,” an abortion parable, a feminist allegory, a study into the horror of the unknown, a critique of the inhumanity of capitalism, etc. The sequels and the prequels have made the alien less metaphorical, more literal. Each entry has topped up the zoology lessons. In Aliens, we learn the xenomorph society has a clear hierarchy like a wasp hive: the much larger Queen breeds a caste of workers and warriors. In Alien³, we learn the xenomorph adopts select physical attributes of its host. If a creature that bursts out of a human can stand upright, one that bursts out of a dog can run on four legs.

Scott and his screenwriter Dan O’Bannon had created the mythology around the alien, building on details from Giger’s designs. In Alien, the crew of Nostromo stumbles on a distress call from nearby planet LV-426 and divert to investigate, as per company policy. Once there, they discover a crash-landed spaceship of unknown origin. The cavernous insides of the ship, arched by vertebral columns, house a fossilised pilot who appears to be of elephantine and extraterrestrial origin. Scott doesn’t bother explaining who this leviathan is. Nor does he bother explaining how his ship crashed with a clutch of xenomorph eggs inside. The film lets those who lay eyes on this ghost from another world and another time linger in the dread of being dwarfed, a reminder to mankind of its smallness against the vastness of the universe. Another unholy offspring of Giger’s twisted imagination, the space jockey (as he came to be known) just lies there in his infinite sleep, like a Great Old One who has escaped from Lovecraft’s fiction, only to die alone and forgotten.

Such unexplained details of the film invited viewers to fill in the margins. For years, we were left wondering. Until Scott himself decided to canonise a prehistory lesson with 2012’s Prometheus, a film which reveals the space jockey belonged to a race of hairless aliens called “the Engineers.” Like the Old Testament God, the Engineers planted the seeds for the birth and evolution of humankind until deciding to wipe the slate clean. Only they end up losing control of their genocidal weapons and perish themselves. An early draft of the screenplay even hinted at Jesus being “an Engineer.” Worried it would be “a little too on the nose,” Scott decided against so explicitly Biblicising the lore. Of course, it didn’t stop him from calling the follow-up Alien: Covenant and loading its creation myth with a character playing God.

Covenant at least looked to spin the franchise into a new orbit. Romulus, on the other hand, is happy to simply compile the greatest hits of the franchise with barely any new notes. This time around, it is a crew of young dreamers looking for a way out of their depressing lives on a mining planet. The way out is on a derelict space station carrying travel essentials. Also waiting there are facehuggers itching for a kiss. The air of ceremony is understandably reserved for the re-emergence of the adult showstopper as it uncoils itself, quiet and nimble as ever. The first half sneaks along a path laid by Alien prioritising exploration and stealth. The second, like Aliens, lets pulse-rifle-toting action take the wheel. Álvarez braces the same ideas that have defined the franchise: the horror of having your body hijacked; the working class under threat of a megacorp with profits and genetic engineering on its mind; androids whose directive to protect the crew can be easily overridden by company agenda. Mother, the AI mainframe aboard Nostromo, feels more maternal towards the company than the crew. Ash is under secret orders from the execs at Weyland-Yutani to bring the alien back to Earth to be weaponised for profit. “All other considerations secondary. Crew expendable,” reads the company order.

Employee welfare has never been a matter of great importance to the top brass at Weyland-Yutani. In Alien, we hear the crew complain about wages, bonuses, shares and the lack of “decent food.” In Romulus, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her friends are indentured labourers working on a Weyland-Yutani mining colony. The colony lies on a sunless planet, a dystopia where life is one endless night. Rain’s parents lost their lives working in the mines. To avoid the same fate, she and her adopted brother Andy (David Jonsson) join her friends on a scavenging mission for cryo-chambers, without which they won’t be able to make their escape to the sunny planet of Yvaga. As a young woman hoping for a fresh start, Spaeny is the one flashing beacon in a film too indentured to fan service. To call Rain a straightforward analogue of Ripley though is not only inaccurate but an injustice to Spaeny’s scream queen talents. Rain’s bond with her android sibling Andy provides the film an emotional tether. We feel invested in their safety. But the rest of the characters are so devoid of personality that we don’t quite the feel the same investment when they are put through the wringer.

No doubt the baton hand-off from Weaver to Spaeny goes a lot more smoothly than from Scott to Álvarez. With an Alien TV series on its way, creator Noah Hawley would do well to learn from Romulus’s mistakes and remember that the longevity of a franchise lies in its ability to reinvent, not repeat. The original Alien played on the fear of the unknown. The viewers at the time, like the crew of Nostromo, had no idea what they were getting into. Questions like what was the creature capable of, what could possibly stop it, what would it feel like to be consumed by an infinite and indifferent cosmos, all compounded the fear. Not knowing the rules of survival left everyone feeling desperately unmoored. Because second-guessing where the xenomorph is lurking is much scarier than watching the creature shoot its mouth-within-a-mouth into the heads of its victims. When the unknown becomes known, the suspense, the intrigue, the horror are all gone.

Seeing as Andy loves his dad jokes in Romulus, here’s one that outlines a way forward. What do you give an alien franchise in need of a rethink? Some space.

Prahlad Srihari is a film and pop culture writer. He lives in Bangalore.