But this binding is also a new edition, inspired by the characters Ellen Ripley and Bishop in Aliensand David and Meredith Vickers in Prometheus. Romulus is ultimately a film in which familiarity is the most important maxim. Alvarez said it himself: “If Alien was a band, we wanted this to be the concert where we play all the hits and then a few new songs so that they say: ‘Wow, that’s pretty good!'”
It’s not. You can see the wheels turning in every scene, and you can feel the film dutifully avoiding alienation, the unknown, and discomfort. In some ways, that orthodoxy might be protective. “I love all of those movies. I didn’t want to leave any of them out or ignore them when it comes to connections on a story, character, technology, and creature level,” Alvarez said, embracing the series’ less revered entries. Tying them all together through reams of references is an act of recovery in that sense.
That’s nice, I guess, but not particularly strange. Great sequels use the foundations of their predecessors to take them in a new direction. Those that deal with the familiar, such as Aliens, 10 Cloverfield Streetor preyuse that recognition to play with audience perceptions. These films are exciting because they break rather than repeat, and veer left when you expect them to veer right. Nostalgia can do so much more than appease and flatter. It can mislead, it can undermine, it can nausea. But in the age of intellectual property, filmmakers, studios and audiences crave only comfort. Isn’t that the opposite of horror?
