In the Foreigner In the movies, a Xenomorph is a monstrous, all-consuming life form that exists solely to make more and more copies of itself. Once the first Xenomorph appears, it’s only a matter of time before all those shiny chrome walls are covered in creepy black slime and people are hanging lifeless from the ceiling in slime webs with their chests ripped open. The Xenomorphs aren’t curious about the world. They don’t care that they’re in a spaceship in the middle of space. To them, we’re all just warm bodies in which to hatch their young. All they want to do is keep making more and more and more of themselves.
When a franchise has exhausted its own central metaphor, it certainly cannot continue for much longer
Anyway, Alien: Romulus is the seventh film about these particular monsters. According to the producers, the film takes the franchise “back to its roots.” So we have a group of grimy crewmen who must pilot a big rustbucket of a spaceship, pick up an alien stowaway, and ultimately use their wits and courage to survive as it devours them one by one.
And it’s not a bad movie. It’s nicely scary, the special effects are good, the acting is perfectly decent. In fact, I could give you a normal review of Alien: Romulusbut just writing it is driving me a little crazy. It is not a bad movie, but it is also a direct copy of a much better movie that already exists. This movie is called Foreignerand it came out in 1979. Sigourney Weaver starred in it. It hasn’t disappeared. If you have a Disney+ subscription or a torrent client, you can watch it tonight. Why did we do it again? What’s the point? Why have we spent the last 45 years—longer than I’ve been alive—making seven different versions of the same movie? What on earth is going on here?
People like to repeat things. Young children in particular like to watch the same movie over and over again. Lately, mass culture has treated us like a bunch of overgrown children, and we haven’t done much to show them that they’ve misunderstood us. Freud believed that children repeat things because they are trying to work through trauma. GK Chesterton had a more optimistic view: “Because children have an exuberant vitality, because they are wild and free in spirit, they want things to be repeated and unchanged. They keep saying, ‘Do it again,’ and the adult does it again until he is almost dead. Adult people are not strong enough to wallow in monotony.”
But Chesterton never had children of his own: he missed out on that one very special way that adults “do it again”. That is what the Foreigner Movies are actually about it. The reason the 1979 original is a great movie and not just a fun monster movie is that it’s really about us; the Xenomorph is us. Its alien form is just a hideous mash-up of our ordinary, slimy human genitalia. This monster is your libido: a ravenous, irrational thing that wants to use your body to reproduce. The whole thing is about the horror of pregnancy, of childbirth, of sexuality in general: our human compulsion to reproduce and to repeat ourselves endlessly. The insane compulsion to do it over and over again. That’s why these movies always need the android, clinically asexual, standing outside this whole sordid affair so you can see it more clearly. “I admire his purity,” says an android in the first Foreigner.
However, over the last 45 years Foreigner The franchise is increasingly less confident in us recognizing these obvious themes for ourselves. The latest installment really is a slap in the face by bringing an actual pregnant woman aboard the ship. There’s a final act that essentially undoes the entire metaphor that has carried the franchise for so long. Our heroes might as well turn to the camera and say, “Births are pretty scary, right? Reproduction – weird, right?” It’s a horrific ending, but it gives me hope. If a franchise has exhausted its own central metaphor in this way, surely it can’t go on much longer. Please, please, let this one be the last.
