Just out in the rooms, Alien: Romulus At least seems to keep a first promise: marketing. Cannot miss the new feature from the signed saga Fede Álvarez the baton is ubiquitous. And if there's one thing we're holding back immediately, it's that strange title. Romulus. That diantre comes to make the founder of Rome in the title of the new film Alien ? Attempted response and disclosure in perspective...
In the beginning was Marseille
The story of this umpteenth Alien (Saga's seventh film, but set between Alien, the eighth passenger and Aliens, return) focuses on Rain (Cailee Spaeny, the young and brilliant actress already present in Civil War). Triming on any moon-factory lost in our solar system, she only thinks of one thing, joining another planet from which one would see daylight. When his gang of buddies told him that they had discovered an abandoned spaceship filled with equipment, the idea of being able to decamp easily germinate in their heads. Yet when they approach this huge station split into two modules – Remus and Romulus – they will soon realize that it was abandoned only by humans...
And as soon as they enter this strange castle of space, a first visual reference appears. Hanging on the wall, Michel Serre's painting, View of the city hall during the plague of 1720 (as shown above). An apocalypse scene where the French baroque painter depicts himself in self-portrait (in the foreground on the right, on the boat) ravaging the disease in the Phocean city.
The reference would be obvious (they are about to face up to a real army of Facehuggers ready to infect them, like the miasms of a cosmic plague about to decimate them) if the camera did not quickly zap this global painting to concentrate on a tiny part of it: a baby still alive if one believes in the color of his skin, tainting the blemish breast of his dead mother. A striking image which should be questioned, but which at least immediately echoes the title of the mythological atours of the work.
From Marseille to Rome
The supposedly founding twins of Rome – Rémus and Romulus – are more likely to retain a very similar image, where the representation of death takes the form of a moat with opulent mammellas. Michel Serre's unwittingly abandoned baby becomes a duet of cherubins, equally neglected and collected by a Canis lupus female, as shown on this title sculpture Lupa Capitolina.
A complex legend of which we are not going to make the exhaustive genealogy here, if it is not to report that this so-called moat was more surely a prostitute: lupa Indeed, a peripatetician (hence the French word "lupanar") was more than the wolf's female, but it would have tinted the legend of a little less mystic... Worse still for the beauty of the myth, there is much to bet that they were little or no children of a rape: the Roman god of Vulcan fire appeared in the form of a phallus to a servant whom he would have put pregnant (see article Mars and the Maruts Jean Haudry). In short, heavy passives for these marmots that will quickly become the very symbol of violence, notably by the fratricidal act and then by the dashing of deaths surrounding the figure of Romulus.
When we know The importance of sexual metaphor in the saga (especially in the first part), it is not difficult to bring the figure of Romulus closer to the events depicted in the world Alien : the birth of a rape (the oral rape of Facehuggers, very graphic in the version of Fede Álvarez), the predatory genealogy, the filiation with a god of fire (to be brought closer to Prometheus and therefore to Prometheus)... The Romulus ship becomes the mechanical matrix of the creation of a new species, half-man, half-predator, resulting – we have seen – from a dead mamele sucked down in one of the (too) few truly disturbing scenes of the film. And to say that this matrix would simply have drifted into the space with her her untrapped offspring had Rain and her friends not set foot in it...
The bridge to Prometheus
You remember the great Prometheus ? This film which, with Alien: Covenant, removed the camera from Ridley Scott's hands for the sequel to the saga Alien regarding the financial concern of the 20th Century studio? Well, it's a direct bridge with this movie there. Romulus built, well beyond the simple mythological reference they share in their title. A chronological frieze created by the Horroflix account even proposes to resituate the films in relation to each other, useful for a marathon of the saga...
For what is born at the end of the film, this strange biped at the edge between the humanoid and the Slender Man, is similar to the physicals of the Architects (bodybuilding and proteins less) detailed in the prequels made by Ridley Scott. Approaching her "mother" who has just evicted her, the baby's nightmare (in a vision that flirts with the grotesque without ever falling into it, swelling this feeling of a bad contagious dream) propels her mouth-harpon to a breast once again dead. The image replays itself, convokes this painting by Michel Serre and again questions the theme of maternity in a saga swallowed with amniotic fluid.
And it may be there that Álvarez takes a little foot in the carpet: to refer too much his film in a global carcan reminiscent as much of the other films of the saga (multiplication of the winks d'oeils, repetition of the gimmicks, adherence to the codes of the all-coming screenwriter...), he ends up amputating to Alien: Romulus his own identity. From the musical score to the archetypes of the characters, to the story itself, you must admit, Romulus Don't make up anything.. Worse, it becomes almost a forgotten strand, lacks the plume that surrounded the gore of its flap dEvil Dead and simmers in a (very) widely entertaining, but frustrating touch.
Conclusion
You will understand, to have joined to Alien: Romulus All superlatives, the unreduced promo game may have caused disproportionate expectations to rise for a film clearly above the average of the mainstream crushed and spit out by the studios, but unfortunately a little too smooth. Don't we prefer to recycle? Covenant or Prometheus ? You decide. It prevents him from offering us quite a dose of entertainment, doped by a multiplication of his climax worthy of a Cameron... Then just wait for next year, and the series Alien: Earth which will amuse to extend a little more the universe of the saga, this time in serial format... Case to follow, or not!
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