Romulus avoids the issue entirely

This piece contains spoilers.

In Alien: Romulus, Rain Carradine (Caylee Spaeny) and her android “brother” Andy (David Jonsson) are marginalised and exploited by their mining colony. They join a group of young people who stage a raid on an abandoned space station in the hope of stealing equipment so they can planet hop to a better world.

But in the Alien universe, space vessels are never abandoned for no reason. The group soon find themselves falling victim, one by one and in gruesome ways, to science fiction’s most ferocious predator.

That much is to be taken as read the minute you buy your ticket for any of the movies in the Alien franchise. And there is another thing you can take for granted: the Alien franchise has always been about women, and it has always been about mothers.

Each entry has taught us how to think about women and mothers, and about the wave of feminism – or the backlash to feminism – contemporary with its making. Unfortunately, this latest contribution to the series seems to not be interested in feminist politics at all.

Riding the waves of feminism

As the Alien franchise has evolved, so has its relation to waves of feminism, particularly in the way it recruits ideas about reproductive choice.

Alien (1979) is the product of Second Wave feminism. One of the achievements of 1970s feminism was winning women the right to reproductive choice. Alien gives us an androgynous action heroine who resists motherhood in all its forms. Ripley (Signourney Weaver) first encounters the alien via its monstrous “children”, the facehuggers.

One of these eventually hatches into a ferocious, full-grown xenomorph, which Ripley must battle. She survives, but only by the skin of her teeth.

In her foundational work The Monstrous-Feminine, cinema scholar Barbara Creed said Aliens uses the grotesque body of the alien mother to explore those physical and psychological reminders of our debt to our mothers we would rather distance ourselves from.

There are two mothers in Alien: the alien mother, who remains off screen, and “Mother”, the shipboard computer. Computers and androids are never quite to be trusted in Alien films. As it turns out, Mother’s prime directive is to bring back the alien lifetime for the sinister Weyland-Yutani corporation. The crew are expendable. Ripley must fight Mother to escape.

In Aliens (1986), Ripley encounters the alien mother, and becomes the adoptive mother of a human girl, Newt, who she must protect from the alien mother.

This pitting of good mother against bad mother may seem a wholesome development. However, it represented a step backward in terms of the film’s feminist credentials: it aligned Ripley with traditional patriarchal models of motherhood during an era of anti-feminist backlash.

As feminist scholar Tania Modleski said, Aliens registers the simultaneous co-optation and disavowal of feminism during this era of backlash:

the heroine is shown to be capable and strong, but only so that she may […] vanquish an image of the maternal as monstrous and filthy, deserving of destruction.

Then, in Alien: Resurrection (1997), by means of genetic experiments, Ripley becomes the mother of a monstrous alien-human hybrid as medicine and technology encroached on human reproduction in the era of in vitro fertilisation.

As films in the Alien franchise progress, Ripley and the women who succeed her are driven back towards motherhood. Their exercise of reproductive choice is made monstrous, or denied altogether. While the first film had strong feminist credentials, these became weaker with each subsequent film.

The Alien films fit into the genre of “gynaehorror”: a class of filmmaking which exploits physically disgusting and psychologically disturbing images of motherhood to acknowledge women’s power – but that acknowledgement is fearful.

This trajectory reaches its climax in the DIY caesarean of Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) in Prometheus (2012), and ends bitterly in Covenant (2017) when Daniels (Catherine Waterson) becomes an incubator for alien foetuses.

The Alien films are contradictory. On one hand, Ripley and her successors model bracing action heroism that seems exemplary of feminist empowerment; on the other hand, the films are reactionary against the key claims of feminism, particularly concerning reproductive choice.

Alien: Romulus

Directed by Fede Álvarez, Alien: Romulus comes in the wake of Fourth Wave feminism, including calls for greater inclusion of diverse people and the #MeToo movement. But here, feminism is notably absent. Young women’s greater sexual and reproductive agency and assertiveness barely seem to register and the film’s star turn belongs not to a woman, but to a man.

One of the group is a hapless, listless young mother barely out of her teens (Isabella Merced). Her pregnancy is exploited to make her death more harrowing. But not before monstrous pregnancy returns forcibly. She has her human pregnancy hijacked by alien DNA.

Álvarez’s version is less about mothers than about siblings. The drama leans heavily on the relationship between Rain and Andy, with themes of love, betrayal and abandonment. Jonsson gets as much airtime, and a more interesting role, than Spaeny.

As Rain Carradine, Spaeny has her share of Ripley moments, but she would have to toughen up considerably to stand toe-to-toe with Weaver. Ripley’s iconic lines are taken from her by Andy.

So what do we learn about women from this entry in the Alien franchise? That they continue important as alien incubators, as pretexts for gynaehorror, but otherwise they are important chiefly in their relationships with men.

This is a step backwards in terms of Ripley’s legacy. As critic Peter Bradshaw asks, “Did we need another Alien film?”

I suspect not, or at least, not this one.