I could see from some distance that the Bagdad marquee had changed. Deadpool & Wolverine had moved on. Carrying my full shopping bags, I took the longer route home so I could read the sign up close: Alien: Romulus had arrived.
I resolved to drop off the groceries and walk right back for the 7 pm show. Neighbors were already converging, in the mood for a summer movie.
I'm just going to capture a few impressions here, having to do with Romulus and Remus looking like two halves of the same brain, an organ haunted by its own icky sticky fears. Life is gross.
Wow, deep huh?
I happen to be reading An Illustrated History of the Horror Films by Carlos Clarens, G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1967. I appreciate the Alien franchise for planting itself firmly in two genres: science fiction and horror. These genres only partially overlap, and when their tropes and motifs combine, one gets new synergies.
We have the climactic Golum at the end, and the uneasy Dr. Frankenstein question: what characterizes the line between living and not living? The androids, still cogent when disemboweled, bring up the question in Spielberg's Artificial Intelligence (inherited from Kubrick). I see the overlap with Jeepers Creepers, and the Half Life computer game series from Valve through Steam. I see Solaris.
The protagonist, and her relationship with her Black android, hearkens back to Huckleberry Finn, transposing slavery and racism to the robot realm. Andy is an energy slave, with a prime directive (re-programmable). But then what are we then? Some of us certainly seem to put the company first, even if that means betraying crew and family.
The Aliens movies have generated their own aesthetic, down to minute detail. The ships are ponderous, heavy, and present their own laws of physics around gravity, which may be switched on and off. We switch it on, but not before the director proves this movie is fine with tackling zero g. We're among professionals. The effects are masterful.
The claustrophobia of a mining planet where the sun never shines, and where indentured servant workers might as well be slaves: we've all been their many times in science fiction, and likely for real in our least favorite roles.
Our heroic crew seeks liberty and we can hardly begrudge them that. But how does one escape one's own brain? Such a separation is usually considered catastrophic, in terms of keeping it together as a coherently animated team player.
The homunculus, a mutated version of what would have been a human baby, reflects the biology of ambivalence that mothers may express. It's not far fetched to cast the aliens' aggression in terms of rape, a serious violation of personal space, which violent act may literally result in progeny, but of a parasitical nature.
Horror, when serving a therapeutic role, helps us process in a different register, in a galaxy safely removed from what's darkly private and personal, unmapped to the perennial and archetypal. Not all horror films have an ability to inspire higher consciousness. Besides, it's the viewer, the spectator, who provides the ultimate projection booth. Given the right critical mood, even bad films may prove instructive.
I'm not saying Alien: Romulus is a bad film however. I think it upheld its side of the bargain, and since I was in a mood to be erudite, I found it cathartic to "pen" this review.
I'll be thinking more about the Roman or NeoRoman aspects of this movie. My seeing the preview for Gladiator 2 (again) in the lead-up to the feature, only primed the pump in that respect.
You might be wondering what's up with me studying horror as a film genre in the first place. That has to do with my tuning in the "liminal spaces" meme thanks to Ryan B.
The liminal spaces include these ostensibly empty backrooms and hallways (a trope, a motif), that may turn out to be haunted, by an apparently inhuman or nonhuman intelligence, giving to lie to our "control room" labs, not always so capable in retrospect, given how mother nature is so wild.
The mapping of these memes to our movie is pretty obvious then. We're both haunted and hunted by this sense of a predatory "other". Welcome to Planet Earth my hominid friend, a dangerous place, but certainly not without its upsides. No aliens. No Godzilla. We make up for it though, by scaring and abusing each other. How NeoRoman.
