Alien: Romulus and the Problematic Saviour

Appropriately for a film named for warring mythic twins, this paper identifies a shift in the Alien Mythos and analyzes the tension in a key oppositional duality of Alien: Romulus. I suggest that director and writer Fede Alvarez collapses the separation between the Weyland-Yutani company and the xenomorphs as distinctly separate metaphors for social organization. In doing this the director ends the hitherto association of the protagonist’s heroism with the alien creatures. In this vein I explore the confrontation between a pathological rationalist position, represented in the company android Rook; and a more sympathetic, though problematic, individualism communicated through the central protagonist Rain and her group of friends. The article suggests that the colonial overtones of Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, the real-world referents of The Great Depression (1929–1939), and the concept of a frontier mentality are apparent in the film’s imagery and exchanges, helping us to understand anxiety around a desire to escape the industrial modernity that persists in contemporary societies.