Back in the 1990s, the Alien franchise’s biggest problem was its inability to dispose of its iconic characters once it became clear they no longer had a meaningful part to play. Remember Ellen Ripley’s unexpected return as a xenomorph-human hybrid clone of herself in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection, at least two movies after she should probably have been retired? Honestly we’d have preferred her to come back from the dead as a holographic robo-zen life coach, floating serenely around a doomed space colony to remind everyone to breathe through their terror as they’re facehugged by an extraterrestrial octopus. Anything would have been better than watching Sigourney Weaver morph into a hybrid space gymnast with the strength of 10 forklift trucks who casually drips acid blood as if she were leaking engine coolant.
But that was then, and this is now. Since 1997 fans have had to sit in disbelief as pretty much the only character we did actually care about in 2012’s Prometheus, Noomi Rapace’s Elisabeth Shaw, was casually dispensed with before 2017’s Alien: Covenant, leaving us with only David the nutty android and an entire army of tedious dead Engineers to kickstart the next instalment. This would have been bad enough if it wasn’t a virtual repeat of the mistakes made by David Fincher’s Alien 3, which killed off Aliens’ Newt and Hicks before the opening credits.
The series has an unfortunate, occasional habit of resetting each time a new instalment debuts, an approach that looks increasingly iconoclastic in an era when Hollywood prioritises continuity more than at any time since the chapter plays of the 1940s ruled cinemas. Perhaps that’s a by-product of Alien’s horror roots – this is, after all, a genre that welcomes protagonists with the survival skills of a potato – but it also creates the kind of disconnect that leaves audiences wondering if the scriptwriters were victims of an annual Men in Black-style memory wipe.
All of which leads us to the welcome news that both Cailee Spaeny’s Rain, and her adoptive android brother, David Jonsson’s Andy, will be returning for a forthcoming sequel to this year’s Alien: Romulus. Steve Asbell, the head of 20th Century Studios, told The Hollywood Reporter: “I fell in love with both of them, and I want to see what their story is.” He also confirmed the studio is in talks with Uruguayan film-maker Fede Álvarez to return for part two.
As the credits rolled on Romulus, Rain and Andy were apparently on course for the supposedly utopian planet of Yvaga III. And yet trouble almost certainly looms here – as we already know that the nice people of this supposedly perfect society are not particularly keen on androids. It’s also pretty obvious that the pair must be carrying something nasty with them from the messed-up Weyland-Yutani research station Renaissance, or there will probably not be much for the creative team to dig into when they eventually hit Happyville.
The alternative doesn’t really bear thinking about: an Alien movie with nary a xenomorph in sight, in which Rain and Andy find themselves wandering through sunlit parks filled with friendly androids, artisan coffee stands, and precisely zero predatory life forms lurking in the shadows (waiting to impregnate them with something that’s likely to grow up in about 15 seconds and eat them). A gorgeous future for our heroic pair, perhaps, but a movie that would probably see Disney’s share price fall through the floor like it’s just been hosting a gaggle of hungry xenomorphs with drool issues. This is just not going to happen.
All we really ask is that Alvarez and his team don’t cheat by sending Romulus’s unlikely survivors on a tangent to somewhere completely unconnected to the events of the first film, as has happened a number of times before. Please give us more Weyland-Yutani scheming, more on the development of Z-01, the xenomorph-derived fluid that the corporate meanies apparently believe will one day (or at the rate of xeno-development, in about 10 seconds) allow humans to survive in space. Perhaps they could even finally link this whole thing up with Blade Runner, and bring back the techno-ghost of Rutger Hauer as replicant Roy Batty. It’s not as if Ridley Scott hasn’t been dying to do this for years.
I’d even be up for seeing more of the incredible Robert Bobroczkyi’s human-xeno hybrid, or at least one of his future cousins. Just don’t cop out this time and give us a remote colony of religious space bros, or a cosy commune of intergalactic vegan meditation instructors who believe they can “emotionally rehabilitate” the xenomorphs by talking to them about empathy and chakra alignment.
Romulus’s power lay in its ruthless singlemindedness. Like the xenomorphs themselves, it was the perfect movie organism, a simple slasher-in-space tale of a bunch of kids lost in the cosmos who find they have bitten off more than they can chew, and are about to be bitten back hard. Part two should really be more of the same but somehow bigger, and yet the distinct impression from this mercurial saga is that whenever somebody tries to widen the Alien canvass, they wind up with a sprawlingly portentous or downright weird mural where we really just wanted a nasty little close-up.
Perhaps all we need next time out is another hyper-focused horror romp, with just the tiniest side order of Weyland-Yutani intrigue. Anything more, and once again there’s a danger that this sleek and venerable old beast starts looking like an unwieldy colony ship with a leaking fuel line and a loose facehugger in the cargo hold.
