I once heard someone remark about Alien that during the Reagan era the capitalist hegemony against workers was so complete that the only way to represent the struggles of working class was to set to set it in space. Such a comment is not entirely accurate about the film, it came out in 1979 after all, but does say something about its place in popular culture. Alien introduced the space worker, worried about the bonus situation and struggle with a company that deemed him or her expendable. The space worker has appeared again and again in film, in Outland, Moon, and The Expanse.
Cain and Andy are looking for a way off of their mining colony, for a life outside of corporate control. This question, how can one becoming something more than, or other than property of the company, is something that the audience is asking as well, even if they do not know it. We find ourselves to be indentured servants of franchises that are trying to squeeze more money out of their initial investments. Disney-20th Century Fox is our Weyland-Yutani.
I will say that the film definitely has its moments. The abandoned Romulu/Remus space station makes for some great scares and there are some great "set-pieces" to use the parlance of our times, and Johnsson's Andy is very good. Where it all comes crashing down is in the film's use of callbacks. The most egregious, and reported on, is the recreation of Ian Holm to play the space station's science officer, and synthetic person, Rook. A lot could be said about this, I found it unnecessary, and have to admit that I was absolutely loving the film until it showed up. It did not ruin the film for me, but it definitely brought it down a few stars if I was one to rate films based on stars. I don't do that, but I do think a lot, too much perhaps, of the way in which "the order and connection of cultural production is the same as the order and connection of material production." In other words, without the Spinoza joke, how the content of our popular culture duplicates and represents its form, its conditions as not just a commodity, but a commodity made to continue and perpetuate investment in the franchise or brand. Films are intellectual property in the sense that capital is property: the exist not to be used, enjoyed, but to create more revenue in the form of sequels, prequels, and spinoffs. In this case the connection is direct and immediate we have Cain and Andy who are trying to find a life outside of the servitude to Weyland-Yutani, and in their attempt to escape they are confronted with the visage of Ian Holm who is still captured, still owned, long after his death by Disney-20th Century Fox. In its own way this is a callback to Alien: Resurrection in which Ripley discovers that she is still owned by the company long after her death.
There are multiple callbacks in this film. Holm's Rook delivers Ash's signature line, "I can't lie to you about your chances, but... you have my sympathies." In the first film that line was delivered to a crew that Ash had worked with even though he was a double agent. It made sense. Now it makes less diegetic sense and seems more like a reminder of the series we are watching. This is even more true of Andy's "Get away from her...you bitch!" which seems completely out of character for the soft spoken and gentle artificial person. In moments like that the franchise overpowers and subsumes the film and its pleasures. These moments of fan service are supposed to provide their own pleasures, pleasures based on recognition, but ultimately recognition is not as enjoyable as surprise.
Reflecting on the film I reminded of something that Samuel Delany said in an interview. He was asked once by an editor at DC comics to come up with some worlds for them to use. His response was that the world exists in and through its narrative disclosure, and vice versa. As Delany writes,
"You can see, certainly, he was working from the theatrical model. It's hard to explain to someone in such a situation that what they're asking for is virtually impossible—that the vividness of the world or setting in a science fiction novel or story is as much a matter of where, for example, in the course of the scene, you mention the details of its description, as it is what those details are; or, indeed, to explain that the fact those details are written with a minimum number of words—especially adjectives—is a direct factor in how vividly the reader perceives the scene."
As Delany argues (in a different interview), where SF differs from "literature" of the non-genre kind is in that it has something like a universe, and not just a plot. (Of course "literature" has a universe too, it is just assumed that the diegetic universe is identical to the present or past world we inhabit). As Delany writes,
"Plot, story, diegesis, history, the solving of problems or the failure to solve problems—the whole generation of fiction only begins when character and universe, subject and object, are conceived, seen, and set in a local tension. I choose to see in this device a manifestation of that particular antimodernist, paraliterarily narrated subject-that-doesn't-evenexist-without-objects SF has taught me look for, to find, to propagandize for, even as I consign much in the device that strikes me today as too executive, as too proscriptive, to the realm of the metaphorical or to the historical givens among a tradition of writers who considered themselves craftsmen first and artists secondarily, if at all."
Delany's point is to insist on the world and universe even in literature that is supposedly about craft, to see objects even in writing that is primarily identified with subjectivity, with character, experience, etc. This point can be inverted, and we can insist on the way that universe comes to light only through character in science fiction. This seems to me to be very true when it comes to Alien, the first film. We do not know much about the world that the film takes place in, and what we learn comes to us as a surprise or twist in the story. What we know is that the crew of the Nostromo are workers, they are subject to the demands of their employer and worried about the bonus situation. That is the cognitive grasp that the later estrangements are structured around. The realization that Ash is an android comes as a shock in the first film. As a narrative the first film can be defined as a series of shocks--the face hugger scene, the chest burst, Ash's betrayal, the true corporate mission to capture the alien. They are part of a world, or, as we say now, a universe, one populated by aliens, androids, and corporations, but what makes them work, what makes them worthwhile, is their role in a narrative of workers against an employer who sees them as expendable. Franchises are driven by a drive to place brand above universe, and universe above story.
Three of the big science fiction franchises of the eighties, Terminator, Predator, and Alien work because they are very simple stories. They do not build complex universes like you find in Star Trek, with different alien civilizations, or even huge casts of potential characters, as in the world of Marvel Comics. They function because of their narrative economy, all of which boils down to some variation of The Most Dangerous Game in which human beings find themselves hunted. Turning them into intellectual property comes up against the particular limits of this simple story, you can try to expand the story, make it into a universe, as in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant did to dismal results, or you can accept the limits and serialize it, make it all happen again, as in the case of Prey or even the underrated Predator 2. Alien: Romulus at its best does something of the latter, gives us new workers against Weyland-Yutani, workers struggling not against being expendable but against the debt they owe to a company.
The film's debt to the intellectual property that it is being made into are paid in a series of callbacks. I will say this about Alien: Romulus is that usually these sorts of callbacks only serve to remind me that I should have just watched the original film. With Alien: Romulus I liked the film and wanted to enjoy it, but all the fan service got in the way.
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