Is Alien the ultimate directors’ franchise?

Alien: Romulus, new to theaters this weekend, is the first entry in the 45-year-old sci-fi franchise that aims more for a dopamine hit than an adrenaline rush. It’s basically a greatest hits of the Alien franchise, remixing elements and images from what came before it. The production design closely mirrors that of Ridley Scott’s original, down to the use of onscreen technology that only looked futuristic in 1979. The dialogue is peppered with the most famous, iconic lines from the first and second movies. And the plot nods to almost all of the sequels and prequels in one way or another. Yes, even the derided Alien: Resurrection gets a callback.

While it’s cool that Romulus acknowledges its whole lineage, as opposed to only the most widely beloved strands, this kind of fan-fiction approach is a disappointing direction for Alien to take. Part of what made the series special for so long was a bold disinterest in repeating itself. Every Alien sequel felt almost hostile to its predecessor. Aliens jettisoned the entire strategy of Alien, ditching horror for action. Alien 3 cruelly walked back the hopeful ending of Aliens. By cloning Ripley, Resurrection negated the well-earned finality of Alien 3. And when Scott returned to the franchise with Prometheus, he took that rejection of the past full circle with an origin story that, paradoxically, barely resembled the film that launched the saga.

Alien, in other words, long existed in a state of constant reinvention. And a big part of that was the way that each sequel landed in the hands of a new visionary. If the Xenomorph was the constant of the series (alongside Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley, until she jumped ship), the X factor was the person behind the camera. The result was a series uniquely amenable to the tastes and interests of the filmmakers who came aboard — a true directors’ franchise rather than an IP content mill. The closest we’ve come since is probably Mission: Impossible, and even that seems to have settled on a house director after years of one-and-done hires.

It’s sort of remarkable that 20th Century Fox didn’t angle for some exact copy of Alien when they set out to make a sequel. (Earlier this summer, Scott revealed that he was neither approached about doing another one, or even informed when the studio moved ahead with it.)  That first film’s power and popularity is inextricable from what Scott brought to it as a confident commercial director with an eye for a striking image and an appreciation for surfaces. Upon every industrial nook and cranny of the Nostromo does he lavish an attention previously applied to automobiles and other products. Alien would be an above-average monster movie without Scott’s meticulous, diabolical craft — his innate understanding of how to manipulate a consumer with every angle and cut.

Again, they could have made a half-dozen more in the same sleek mold. Instead, they brought aboard James Cameron, who reconfigured the material around his own obsessions: military hardware, robust action set pieces, and a newly locked-and-loaded heroine who flipped the gender stereotypes of the era on their ear. Aliens, with its cornball banter and mounting intensity (a quality that applies to The Terminator and Titanic alike), is as much a James Cameron movie as an Alien movie. In part, that’s because Fox was willing to allow “Alien movie” to remain undefined.

David Fincher might slug you if you called Alien 3 “a David Fincher movie.” Like Scott and Cameron, Fincher was early into his filmmaking career — at the very start of it, in fact. Alien 3, his first feature after a run of successful music videos, was a notoriously chaotic production, rewritten constantly and subject to competing creative ideas. Fincher lost most of his battles with the studio and Weaver. “To this day, no one hates it more than me,” he said of the movie in 2009.

Still, plenty of what we would come to think of as Fincher’s signature moves made it into Alien 3. It’s almost a dry run to his second feature, Seven, emphasis definitely not on the dry: We get lots of slicked surfaces, shafts of putrid light, and industrial-grunge textures. There’s also a great crosscutting sequence, the one that depicts the birth of a newly quadrupedal Xenomorph, that hints at the seductive flow of action that characterizes his propulsive procedurals. 

And then there’s Resurrection. Befitting a story about the mad-science splicing of human and alien DNA, the fourth installment in the franchise merges the sensibilities of two distinctive creative authors: the oddball French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet and screenwriter (and future disgraced geek mogul) Joss Whedon. There’s plenty of both in the movie, which marries Whedon’s neo-Buffy wisecracking to the baroque future-weird world building of Jeunet’s Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children. The latter’s imprint can also be seen in everything from the casting (including Ron Perlman and regular collaborator Dominique Pinon) to the exaggerated camerawork, as during a scene where we go down the throat of a screaming character to find the gestating alien within right as it bursts out.

Hell, even the much-maligned Alien vs. Predator — a crossover considered non-canonical by just about everyone — is an auteur work. Its director, Paul W.S. Anderson, essentially auditioned for the gig with his earlier Event Horizon, which arguably has more in common with the first Alien, stylistically speaking, than any of the Alien sequels. With AVP, he stuck the Xenomorph into a geometric deathtrap fortress that could easily be inserted into one of his video-game adaptations. The choppy, arcade action plainly marks the film as the work of the guy who made all those Resident Evil adaptations with his wife, Milla Jovovich.

Some might argue that the recent prequels fit cleanly into any appreciation of Alien as a showcase for a revolving door of singular filmmakers. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant are as handsome, star-studded, cleanly staged, and littered with digital landscapes as any of Scott’s latter-day work. For better or worse, they are Ridley Scott movies through and through. What was disappointing about these polarizing blockbusters — beyond however well they managed to meet the expectations of the fans — was how they seemed to finally halt the passing of the Alien baton. A series that once functioned as a transferable creative license had fallen back into the hands of its first director. The game of musical (director) chairs was over.

To that end, there’s something superficially heartening about Romulus. Its filmmaker, Fede Álvarez, isn’t some anonymous journeyman. He has his own set of identifiable trademarks and interests, many of them present and accounted for in the new Alien. The script, with Álvarez co-wrote, combines the sibling dynamic of his Evil Dead remake with the home-invasion premise of his Don’t Breathe. And the movie’s best scenes — a climb up an elevator shaft, a slow creep through a room swarming with Facehuggers, a zero-gravity ballet with scalding stakes — are built around his flair for generating suspense via silence and environmental obstacles.

But Romulus is too much of an Alien movie to ever fully become a Fede Álvarez movie. That’s its critical error: It pays fetishistic tribute to a series that, for most of its years, never settled for doing the same thing twice. The movie wants to be the ultimate Alien sequel, but in borrowing so freely from past entries, it loses the glorious evolutionary tactility of the franchise. A good Alien sequel destroys what came before it, like a parasite emerging bloody and new from its host.

Alien: Romulus is now playing in theaters everywhere. For more of A.A. Dowd’s writing, visit his Authory page.