Alien: Romulus

The children’s crusade

I saw Alien back in the dark ages, before everyone knew what a nightmare of a slyly subversive monster movie screenwriters Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett and director Ridley Scott had crafted. Three-quarters haunted-house movie, one-quarter the best monster ever — a nightmare that emerges from an egg, looking like an oversized, shell-less crab / scorpion mix and grows, freakishly quickly, into a bipedal praying mantis / human mash-up with not one but two sets of jaws, one retractable, lined with metallic-looking teeth, plus that viciously stabby tail —insectoid anatomy merged with oversized humanoid arms and legs, acidic saliva and a parasitic reproductive process. It only takes one to produce a swarm in record time. Granted, the biology changes — mutates, if you will — to some extent within the corpus of films released since Year One. But the essential alien-ness is a fixed point. They are never, ever going to be invited to join any interstellar united anything.