Caveat lector: This review discusses in detail the whole sequence of events of Alien: Romulus.

Back in 2017, I let myself get triggered into watching Alien: Covenant twice—the second time to take notes for revenge—and writing an extremely long blog post lambasting Ridley Scott for unraveling the ambience, themes, and rules of the world he introduced. “Sometimes to create, one must first destroy,” muses the villainous David in the movie, and with years of separation from my aggravating theatrical experience, I’m now convinced that Scott, like said robot, had a purgative agenda, intentionally destroying a creation so plainly undeserved by fans who cried foul at his ruminative and ambitious prequel Prometheus.

At the time, I couldn’t envision the Alien franchise getting much worse than Covenant. It was the most cynical and patronizing film in the series, extensively reanimating scenes from the fan-favorite installments with uglier digital cinematography and a glut of rushed CGI. Such thievery resulted in an uncanny, David-like imitation of an Alien film, glowering at the inferior life forms that made the mistake of trusting it. With the new soft reboot Alien: Romulus, however, Covenant may see some absolution as an auteur work with meaning; whereas the latter has a palpable hatred for its audience and for Scott’s critics that communicates something interesting about the author’s ego, Disney’s first stab at the IP since acquiring Fox reeks of the company’s hatred of humanity and even of life itself. At the request of absolutely nobody, Romulus adapts the structure, sights, and sounds chiefly of Aliens, an action movie doubling as an ode to motherhood, for an anti-natalist culture in decline, stripping the story of its mythic power and timelessness.

After a brief prologue in which some astronauts retrieve an organism that they ought to have left drifting in space, our protagonist Rain is introduced sitting on a hill admiring an idyllic sunrise all by herself similarly to Rey in the Star Wars: The Force Awakens—already off a great start. This moment of serenity is revealed to be but a dream, though, for in reality she’s stuck slaving away for the Weyland-Yutani corporation (one of very few in the Alien universe) on a mining colony that sees 0 days of sunlight a year. Rain’s parents passed away to disease contracted through the hard labor, leaving her with a robot (or “synthetic” by the films’ vernacular) called Andy that acts cognitively impaired and requires constant supervision on account of being either damaged or an older, less sophisticated model. Rain refers to Andy, played by a black man who could hardly be more contrasted with her in features, as her “brother,” which should immediately tip off vigilant Alien fans and students of the decay of Disney to myriad problems that will accumulate, fester, and tear the movie apart from the inside.

Andy the robot is not just central to everything wrong with Alien: Romulus (which, it must be noted, has no clear thematic link to the founding myth of the Roman Empire) but emblematic of many dire consumerist, transhumanist, and cultural Marxist trends in what passes now for Hollywood escapism. The deconstruction of the nuclear family and veneration of a “found family” of unrooted co-workers that the Guardians of the Galaxy movies got down to a science undergo another evolution here, that being the romanticization of technological playthings that remind one of lost childhood innocence. In Romulus, the new zoomer Ripley played by Cailee Spaeny—a tiny actress so well suited to portray Elvis’ naive and dainty beloved in Priscilla yet so bereft of the physicality and masculine energy to pull off a blue-collar badass—often seems to fret more about the welfare of her bumbling android companion than she does about the survival of her human friends. “You don’t see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage,” no longer speaks that tersely to the moral quandaries and challenges faced by the financially and demographically dispossessed descendants of Boomers. A more current-year quip would be “You don’t see them fucking each other over for an iPhone,” but that would be a lie, as Rain does pretty much the same thing at all the crucial junctions of the movie.

The cloying sentimentality with which director Fede Álvarez treats the question of whether Andy will remain intact and keep the same childlike, borderline retarded “mind” that Rain adores (midway through he’s reprogrammed and augmented by swapping out a module akin to a SIM card in his neck, which renders him less sympathetic and eerily natural than preceding synthetic characters) flies in the face of six better Alien movies where synthetics are othered or outright vilified. Ash in the first film is a menacing and rapacious mechanical symbol of the corporate greed unleashed upon the unsuspecting crew of the Nostromo; who could forgot how he forces himself on Ripley with a dirty magazine in hand, spewing a puddle of gooey white “blood” when interrupted? David, an obviously duplicitous and untrustworthy agent of entropy, affects a butler-like affability throughout Prometheus to put his masters at ease as he subordinates their health to the scientific process, and while Covenant dumbs him down significantly, his transformation into an obsessive, Wagner-appreciating serial killer doesn’t feel outside the realm of possibility for Alien robots.

The most likable android in the series, Bishop, does overcome Ripley’s initial distrust of him through his competence and dependability, but he’s not treated by the characters or by James Cameron as much more than a tool; when the alien queen dramatically rips him in half, the effect isn’t to draw tears for the suffering of an “artificial person” but to heighten the peril of the only characters who truly matter, Ripley and the orphaned colonial survivor Newt. And when Ripley pulls Bishop out of the garbage to pry him for information in Alien 3, she doesn’t relax her tough face at the sight of his mangled remains—after all, he’s just a robot. All this recap is to drive home the triteness and intellectual languor of Álvarez’s attempt to reframe the synthetics’ place in the Alien universe, throwing a hackneyed pity party over boring prejudicial abuses heaped upon a robot for some metaphorical anti-racist bona fides that are completely detached from the series as a whole.

Of the many scenes Romulus vandalizes and distorts, it botches none more instructively than Aliens’ climax of Ripley arming up and riding down the elevator to rescue Newt. For one, there’s the glaring absence of sexual tension between Rain and the not-Hicks guy who demonstrates how to use a pulse rifle. The Wikipedia article claims that these characters used to be dating, a baffling revelation seeing as, in typical post-#MeToo Disney fashion, there’s little to no potentially problematic flirting, touching, or lusting to be seen among the young and presumably horny cast. The repression of Romulus, so out of place in a series awash with sex and sexual iconography, accidentally reflects the blackpilled ennui of Western and east Asian men who have been opting out or ruled out of dating, sex, and marriage in previously unrecorded and potentially catastrophic numbers. Racially ambiguous not-Hicks’s admission that he learned about aim assist through video games could be a nod to an inspiration such as Alien: Isolation, but it also sounds like a radfem Twitter user’s dripping-with-revulsion theory on why the mining workers we see aren’t getting laid. To return to Álvarez’s bastardization of Aliens, though, more egregious than the sex negativity are the circumstances of the heroic act.

Rather than descending into the pit to save a little girl who’s come to lean on her as a motherly protector, Rain decides to split from her pregnant friend who was just kidnapped and traumatized by an alien because she deems rendering aid to an immobilized Andy more important than escorting two human souls to safety. While as distinctly outside Alien tradition as one could get, the narrative focus on saving the Siri (Andy literally tells inoffensive AI jokes when prompted to do so) does situate Romulus nicely in a litany of sci-fi productions banally asking, “What makes us human, anyway?” and celebrating characters betraying their own kind to support a marginalized, often nonwhite-coded out-group (The Creator, Avatar and its sequel, the Planet of the Apes reboot trilogy, The Shape of Water, Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom and Dominion). That Spaeny is a white American and Andy’s actor David Jonsson is not just black but British further cheapens the familial symbolism Álvarez appears to want to carry over from Aliens; family is not flesh and blood, an unbreakable bond with special duties grafted onto it, but a self-serving, mushy state of mind toward a platonic fellow traveler, in this case a static, puppy dog-like gentle giant who offers a security blanket to his human in her monotonous and fruitless 4-hour life. If Rain had a brother, Disney wants you to believe, he really could have looked like Trayvon Martin (that Weyland-Yutani would design such a model of slave robot in the first place also strains credulity, but that’s tangential).

After managing to heal Andy and restore him to his original, more simple programming, Rain gives him a new prime directive in the place of doing what’s best for the company, which he’s made his sole occupation for the last hour. “From now on, you do what’s best for us,” she says with the gravitas of an animated talking animal having an epiphany and spelling out the message of a movie for children, which she might as well be. And what an inspirational, challenging call to action that message of self-love and solipsism is. Forget the profit margins of your employer and the good of your community; just keep whatever electronic toys or, if we’re being generous, stupid and unambitious friends you need to keep from going insane close, travel a lot, and live for whatever brings you happiness.

As payback for her bailing him out of an imminent crash landing death that surely would have caused him great distress as an artificial assistant, Andy kills a xenomorph of indeterminate sexuality that’s bothering Rain, sending it off with an unconvincing, passionless “Get away from her, you… bitch.” It would be remiss of Álvarez not to miss the point entirely of an iconic line solidifying Aliens as the ultimate girl power (loader) movie, pitting one angry mama bear against a much bigger, angrier, and uglier one.

In characteristic Alien movie form, a second boss battle lies beyond the characters’ near scrape with death, this time coming from the loins of the woman Rain sent off alone earlier. It turns out that injecting herself with some science juice connected somehow to the events of Prometheus has infected her baby, and since Covenant punched the development speed of any alien organism into hyperdrive, the few survivors left are soon confronted with a terrible new hybrid life form that resembles more a Guillermo Del Toro creature than an H. R. Giger one. Some might read a pro-abortion undertone into the nightmarish egg delivery scene, but that would be crediting too much initiative to Álvarez for walking straight down the middle of the road; as soon as the women recognize the problem, the baby is already coming, so there’s no time to discuss or even think about terminating it early.

It would be more fair to describe Romulus as anti-life than as pro-choice, with its most horrifying and grotesque images being held in reserve as poetic irony for a college-aged girl who couldn’t contain her joy sharing the secret of her pregnancy. The implication seems to be that even considering bringing a child into such a broken, late capitalist world, where sunlight itself is a privilege for the rich, could only be a grave mistake. The mother’s demise in the arms of her freakish alien spawn does comprise one of the bleaker and more disturbing images in the Alien corpus, but does that make for more beautiful and enduring art? As violent and sickening and dour as the original four Alien movies could be, they always ended on a hopeful note, unlucky characters tended to die for some important reason or with courage, and there was a prevailing sense that humanity is worth fighting for even when it’s most painful.

Many of questionable character and taste in the “horror community” are willing to forgive a lack of narrative catharsis or rich subtext as long as they get a good bloodletting, and with one of the bloodiest movies of all time under his belt (the 2013 reboot/remake Evil Dead), executives probably saw Álvarez as a safe choice to orchestrate their outer space carnage. And yet Romulus isn’t even satisfying from this lowbrow, sensationalist angle, handily taking the title of the least gory, least sexy, and least scary Alien film, certain not to upset any unsuspecting normie who stumbles across it on Hulu. None of the extensive practical effects flaunted in promotional videos can compensate for the poor lighting, plodding movements, loud approach, and overexposed framing of the xenomorphs, directorial choices that end up evoking velociraptors on the prowl for Amblin Entertainment kids more than cosmic rape monsters that blend seamlessly into metallic environments and strike without their prey ever seeing them. The young actors barely try to sell the existential dread of knowing that they’ve walked headlong into their doom; notice how quickly they collect themselves and start to brainstorm how to detach a hideous, spider-like entity that has incapacitated one of their party right before their eyes. When people do die, it’s in blink-and-you-miss-them shots or off camera altogether, with little of the writhing and screaming and rending of flesh one might expect the director to keenly observe.

The original Alien, of course, was not designed primarily to test audiences’ gore tolerance, but as one of the best American horror movies of all time, it had no obligation to. Alien: Romulus is Disneyfied slasher prole slop centered on a nondescript, inoffensive princess and her danger-prone, not even cute nonhuman sidekick that doesn’t have the courtesy to make one like or dislike anyone being slashed, let alone show the slashings with anywhere near the verve and attention to detail other creative teams brought to the task. Perhaps Fede should have done what was best for the company and made a daring, idiosyncratic product viewers will grow fonder of with time (e.g., Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection), rather than doing what he thought best for himself and mentally challenged fans, rebooting nostalgic memories and installing a few misanthropic updates to the same operating system.