Alien Remix

An Accidental Craft Talk

For fueling the imagination, you could do a lot worse than to feed it the failures of others. I mean failed work, of course — though I suppose most novelists are fascinated by the mundane, everyday failures we all make of ourselves. But failed work has a specification. There are countless bad novels, bad movies, bad albums, bad poems, bad paintings; very few are failures. To fail indicates the possibility of the alternative, and there’s something about this lost potential that ignites creativity. A failure dazzles you with the work it could’ve been by wearing it on its sleeve.

Twisters, to cite one recent expense, wasn’t ever going to be good; it just wasn’t in the cards. Alien: Romulus, however, got dealt a much better hand, and still lost. In the theater, I enjoyed both. Each is a return to a certain imagined world.¹ But the way they linger is why Romulus — which invites speculation, consideration, even revision — is a failure, and why Twisters, with its banality and stupidity, only chokes the imagination.

The basics: From its opening title to its final line (cribbed word for word from Alien), Romulus is is an Easter egg hunt. Even the neon sign for a bar on the colony where our protagonist, Rain Carradine, is living with her adoptive synthetic brother, Andy, is the exact same sign from Aliens, which we see on LV-426 when the marines arrive (37 years after the events of Romulus). Right away, this attention to detail signals to viewers who the film is really for: those who love the “original” movies — Alien and Aliens, of course, but even Alien 3 and Resurrection, which gets a full, tedious homage in Romulus’s last act. While the deviations of Prometheus (a failure in its own way) and Covenant (an awful movie with one incredible scene) are not erased, the risks those films took are in no way honored or repeated — unless we’re to assume a film with absolutely no character development is one of Ridley Scott’s late-style risks. People die in Romulus before you get a chance to remember their names; they are not characters so much as gore. As with Prometheus and Covenant, the exception to this banality of character is the artificial person: David Jonsson’s performance as Andy, whose personality is rewired for half the film, is both chilling and moving. At one point, early in the film, I thought his eyes alone would be enough to bring me to tears. Unfortunately, the film got in the way.

What’s new to Romulus is the depth of its incorporation of other Alien IP. Yes, the station (a dual structure, half of which is Romulus; the other half, where most of the film takes place, is Remus), is such a faithful homage to the aesthetic of the Nostromo that it looks like they dug the original set out of storage and rearranged its panels and pipes. But beyond that, it takes much of its appearance (and layout) from the Sevastopol — the immense station in 2014’s terrifying and award-winning game, Alien: Isolation. What’s more, at one point Rain defends herself with a new take on the classic pulse rifle from Aliens (an F44AA, we’re told, instead of the M41A), which has an “aim assist” feature that another character explains in depth. This is, of course, adapted from a video game as well — 2001’s Aliens vs. Predator 2.

Setting aside the unnecessary and hideous AI-ification of Ian Holm’s corpse reprising a copy of his original role, his regular video check-ins with Rain as she makes her way through the station, providing exposition and direction, are another way that Romulus feels like a video game. There’s even a scene involving acid floating around in a zero-G environment, which Rain and Andy must traverse, dodging as they go; one can almost imagine them hitting “save” every few seconds in case they die.

This intensity of detail w/r/t the set, the technology, the weapons, and so on, and the total neglect of things movie audiences are supposed to care about — character, plot — are what signal, to me, the movie as a failure. Romulus, it turns out, is aptly named, as the station itself is the main character, or at least its most magnetic. It reminds me a lot, actually, of my favorite haunted house from one of the worst horror movies: 1999’s remake of The Haunting. In that film, the immense and labyrinthine Hill House, whose architectural hostility is a true feat of imagination, is unquestionably the star. Similarly, the humans aboard Romulus/Remus — and even the xenomorphs, if you can believe it — are simply not as interesting, not as engaging, as the container of where this story was supposed to have taken place, and where instead we got a video game. This disparity is what, I think, fires my imagination. Another way to say this is that Romulus, like many “fan service” projects, invites me over to play.

Perhaps this shouldn’t be a surprise. Covenant came out in 2017; Disney acquired Fox in 2019.  While Scott’s prequels are messy, nonsensical, inconsistent, and sort of stupid,² they are, for the most part, original and creative. The obvious parallel here is Star Wars: The original films have a cult following; decades later, the original director makes some terrible but daring prequels; then Disney “restores” the franchise to its fans. And just like The Force Awakens, with its winks and its fan service and its “going home,” was a genuinely exciting thing to see, in 2015, one worries that Romulus is quickly headed for its own Rise of Skywalker: a committee-assembled disaster that flings its shittiness so far backward that it taints what we once loved. Disney’s invitation to play — to revisit a favorite place, to walk around its hallways, look out its windows, to hear its familiar beeps and boops — quickly becomes, as I’ve written elsewhere, a mandate to play a certain way, to follow a certain story, and to empty one’s imagination of alternatives. What Disney has done to Star Wars and comic books is to over-canonize, to fill in every gap and color in every background. These gaps and backgrounds are where imagination takes root and flowers, and without them, watching these stories feels much closer to consumption than it does fandom. And once consumed, there’s little reason to return to them.³

Achievements, in art — successes, I suppose, and even masterpieces — are a fuel of their own, and no artist can do without them. They are the rubrics for our talents. Alien is certainly one of these masterpieces, as is its first sequel. Romulus is not, but that doesn’t make it a waste — at least not yet. Talent and play — even talent and creativity — are separate, and play is only possible with these empty spaces, these incompletions. In a sense, this is what someone’s failure is: an incomplete assignment. Sometimes I tell people I could teach an entire creative writing course with only one text: 1997’s Event Horizon, which is one of the most intriguing failures of all time. A state-of-the-art, space-folding interstellar vehicle thought to be lost reappears, years later, in the blue clouds of Neptune, only to reveal to those who investigate its ruins that it’s literally been to hell and back? This, my friends, is a fucking plot. And maybe it’s the execution — horror clichés, jump cuts, terrible dialogue, weak characters, a deathmetal version of hell, a gotcha ending — that creates the real ghost story, the real thing that haunts us, because just imagine, in that absence, what it could have been. All the lessons you need, as a writer, as an artist, are in that vacuum of space.

1. Despite its lifelikeness, the Oklahoma in Twisters is not real. I’m not going to waste my time substantiating this.

2. Why would two xenobiologists on an alien planet encountering a new form of life giggle and poke at it like stoned teenagers? Nonetheless, this is the event that gets Prometheus rolling.

3. This disposability, of course, is Disney’s point: they can’t even trust you to enjoy their own classic films, and have begun stamping them out as hideous, lifeless, “live action” facsimiles — and yes, these too inflect their shit backward.