The new installment in the Alien franchise is pretty good. Spoilers begin….. NOW.

There were good things (proper vibes, look, and sound, characters/performances throughout), there were bad things (resurrected Ian Holme) and a few fucking weird things (why are we getting another xenomorph baby thing? Isn’t this too close to the end of Resurrection, albeit pulled off with way more panache?). This permutation takes the thematics of the preceding films and brings them to the opposite pole from where they began, that is, the interplay between the body, parentage, progeny, and technology.

The first three films foreground the relationship between Ripley and the xenomorph as that of mother/daughter, although whom fills which role oscillates. Suffice it to say that theorists working after Julia Kristeva and Barbara Creed have gotten plenty of mileage off of the first two or three films via the application of a sort of feminist/Lacanian sensibility that characterizes the horrific stakes and provides the uncanny backdrop for the conflict between the monster and Sigourney Weaver. These are not the only kinship relations, either. From Holme’s Ash onward the synthetic person is thrown into the mix, operating as a parental figure to the “perfect organism,” demonstrating a sort of cold alienation at the difference of having been manufactured rather than born, and culminating in Michael Fassbender’s David, who becomes frustrated in his role of synthetic son to Peter Weyland and tries to compensate by parenting the bioweapon of the Engineers to its own sort of perfection.

The failure of the family is constant throughout – Ripley outlives her daughter while in hypersleep, her make-shift family from Aliens is killed between the end of that film and Alien 3, and she resists the call to motherhood, even hardening herself to Lance Henriksen’s pleas as she swan dives into molten lead (do we need to talk about Alien: Resurrection? I guess I’ll just say that the term “failure” is relevant to the film in several ways, some of which have to do with the relations of kinship portrayed therein). The Prometheus/Covenant arc features a shift from motherhood to fatherhood and brings the figure of the son into the cold fluorescent light. David overcompensates for his insecurity as a synthetic being by engineering the xenomorph that we have come to know and love. But Prometheus also has a subplot where Elizabeth and her husband suffer from infertility, a detail that lays the groundwork for her horrifying “pregnancy” later on.

Given that this franchise is predicated on different relations of kinship and practices of reproduction, it is shockingly non-sexual in its content. While there is tension of a sexual nature between some characters some of the time, it is not often romantic (or in the case of the relationship between Ripley and Hicks, the relationship is essentially only romantic as they play the chaste action heroes/parents of their daughter, Newt, and their pet, Bishop). Alien offers a glimpse of sexuality in the form of voyeurism, when Ripley undresses into her famous tiny tshirt and low-rise underwear before the final fight against the xenomorph, a move that offers both the prurience of the peeping Tom and the aesthetic contrast between the hard, black carapace of the xenomorph and Ripley’s vulnerable, pale flesh. Aliens adheres to the Reaganite sensibility of ultraviolence and childish notions of sexuality, offering a surrogate family in lieu of sexual desire. The sex in Alien 3 is interesting in that it is either in the form of the threat of sexual violence or it is instigated by a Ripley whose head is shaved and who is unknowingly carrying around a xenomorph queen in her chest cavity, challenging the tropes around desire, sex, and reproduction. And while there is some sexual congress between Elizabeth and her husband in Prometheus, this is again grounded in the desire for a family rather than lust.

Cue Romulus. First, these actors are young. While previous installments saw main characters that were adults with established careers, some even entering middle age, the Romulus cast represent people who are just shedding the trappings of teenhood: ties of kinship are severed through mortality on the mining colony above which most of the film takes place, another character’s pregnancy is seen as a shock, and even more shocking once we find out the father, and so on. These characters are about to come of age and are doing so in part by fleeing their indentured servitude to W-Y. The most telling bit here about this immaturity and the ambivalence with which it is treated comes from a bit of fan service at the end, when Rain prepares for hibernation, stripping down to a version of Ripley’s suggestive attire, but without the suggestion, featuring a looser top and shorts and reminding the viewer of standard PJs rather than the near-nudity of Ripley’s outfit. There is something to unpack here about the fact that the plot and the thematics of this permutation’s register of horror are so implicated in pregnancy and reproduction. It reflects a cultural moment that is very preoccupied with sexuality, consent, and reproductive rights. The film wants to gesture at sex with a wink and a nudge by featuring a pregnancy that was conceived, as far as anyone can tell, with a similar array of gestures. It wants to remind us that we spied on Ripley at the same time that the xenomorph was stowing away on the escape pod, evoking the situation but denying the “scopic pleasure” of the voyeur by insisting on Rain’s childishness/youth/innocence and giving her the authority to cover her body. The pregnancy plot, particularly its outcome, has everything to do with connecting reproduction and indentured servitude in a post-Roe America, of course, drawing an explicit parallel between the lot of the workers and the fate of the mother/child dyad in the narrative. The young escapees are mangled by the xenomorph in trying to escape the slavery which is foisted on them, within a manufactured legality on the mining colony in much the same way that the technology of the Engineers corrupts the pregnancy that Kay seems intent to keep from not only W-Y’s claws but even the father of the child, promising a new era of sunshine and freedom to the fetus and entrusting Rain with helping her to realize it.

Finally, I don’t want to give a false impression. I’m not saying that this movie in particular should have been different. This is, however, an especially sexless time in film and TV and the horror genre doesn’t function as well when the terror lacks a complement in its opposite – and implied – affect in lust. An even better example that could be its own post (or book) would be the latest Evil Dead, which continued a series that was always predicated on the sexual tension of young adults going away to a cabin in the woods with an installment that was almost entirely devoid of sexual undertones, a move that makes the film a suffer fest and gives us as an audience, if not less clarity, then a different type of clarity around the stakes of the narrative. It does, however, demonstrate something about how we handle issues of family, reproduction, autonomy, and desire in contemporary media.