My Review of Alien Romulus: Some of the Nastiest Freak Shit I Have Ever Seen in My Life

Let's get yucky, bloody, and goooooeeeyyyyyyyyyyy, bby girlzzzz!!!!!

Me hiding from the very real possibility that someone is going to write self-insert porn about themselves and the xenomorph hybrid. I would say I see the vision but TBH even I couldn't freeze/fawn/fuck my way through this.

JUST got back from the theater (*author's note: "just" was, at the time, 12-ish, but it's now 3:30-ish, just for the sake of clarity) and immediately opened up my laptop (CHERRYPI has her finger on the mf'ing PULSE, people), which. Wait. Why are my last two articles movie reviews? Not loving this little Roger Ebert moment. Yuck.

Anyways. If you're not interested in reading Alien: Romulus spoilers (or pregnancygoreporn fun facts at 12am on a weeknight), turn back now.

But for everyone else: EWWWWWWWW. DID YOU GUYS SEE THAT SHIT TOO. SO DISGUSTINGLY AWESOME. EWWWWWW. EWWW. EW. Did you-? And-? And when it-? OMIGOD. Ew.

Really really sad, really humiliating confession: I've never actually seen the OG Alien movies, only the two weirdo ones with the Michael Fassbender selfcest robots. So tee-bee-aych I was a little surprised no director has really taken the franchise this far in its UteroHorror premise before!!!

I've heard whispers that a different installment in the franchise played with the human-xenomorph hybrid idea, albeit in a much more tame (read: less ballsy, SMH) manner, but as far as I'm aware some other elements of the film were new...

Xenomorph lactation and breastfeeding, for example, seem to be a new frontier.

The giddy film-goer in me is scandalized. The human-being-with-eyeballs in me is nauseated. But the POET LAUREATE in me is alive (one could even say pregnant) with creative inspiration.

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The movie sets us up early for its eventual Eraserhead moment: we learn fairly quickly that Isabela Merced's character Kay is pregnant, which for any movie-goer with a brain might as well be a bumper sticker on her stomach reading "ALIEN BABY ON BOARD". When she eventually injects herself with a xenomorph-gene-containing compound to buy herself some health XP, it seems clear her fate is sealed.

What is unprecedented, though, is the exact direction the movie takes with its pregnancy horror plotline.

After helping Kay give birth to what seems more like a xenomorph cocoon than a human fetus- although it still has an ubmilical cord attached- our intrepid heroine Rain bundles the slippery egg sac up in her arms and takes off running, presumably to throw it out an airlock or something. She's stopped when it starts to drip corrosive acid and uncurl, revealing a HUMANOID FETUS INSIDE. Gasp.

Cue immediate ethical questioning, Bioethics 101 style.

Fortunately, we're saved from our fraught internal debate about the morality of shooting a baby with a ray gun when the thing speedruns puberty into some grosser, infinitely more offputting, type of freak shit.

The thing's existence is scandalous enough. It has a fairly humanoid head, perched onto a fairly humanoid body- if that body were ran through the taffy puller from Willy Wonka's Chocolate Factory- but with long, grotesque limbs, and blacked-out eyes, upping its Uncanny Valley Factor by approximately nine million. It seems innately motivated to do nothing except scamper around creepily. It seems weirdly...sexual in nature???? (And not in a good way. But more on this later).

But noooo, director Fede Alvarez just can't stop there.

Instead, poor Kay reaches down her shirt to pull out a palmful of BLACK GOO dripping from her breast. God, hasn't this girl suffered enough?

(No, but really. This bitch takes a nap, wakes up to hold her BFF as a xenomorph jumps out of the other girl's chest like a stripper out of a birthday cake, passes out again, wakes up, gets left to die by her friends, passes out, wakes up, gives birth to Sci Fi Slenderman, starts lactating alien ooze, gets violated by her own disgusting ugly baby, and then dies. What a life.)

Eventually, Rain rounds the corner and sees the hyrbid crouched over its mom's chest, presumably ingesting the aforementioned black goo with its FULLY-FORMED ANTHROPOMORPHIC ADULT FACE. Kay, I'm so sorry. I think by this point she's dead but if not I almost feel worse for her.

It is truly one of the most horrifying moments of horror filmography I've seen recently (don't shame me if you're, like, a horror aficianado and have seen three Alien Man Breastfeeding Scenes this week, please). I don't know, to me there's just something pretty unmistakably revolting about giving birth to an 8-ft-tall nightmare creature and then waking up with its weirdo face grinning at you while it skips straight to third base. Maybe that's just me though.

But anyway.

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If the film was only intending to scandalize its viewers, it certainly accomplished that. But on the more serious, analytical side, I'd argue it also succeeded in pushing the basic thematic premises of the original films to a new height.

The original movies didn't shie away from the subliminal roots underlying what made their body horror horrific. The xenomorphs as an antagonist have always preyed on studio audience's deep fears of bodily violation, rape, unwanted and violent pregnancy, etc... so adding lactation and nursing to this list of potentially terrifying transgressions against the body is a fascinating and clever move by the film.

But: it also feels distinctly poignant considering our recent political landscape and its focus on bodily autonomy, especially for (AFAB, although on the whole bodily autonomy issues heavily effect trans/intersex people of all orientations as well) women. Where the original movies heavily used the idea of a symbolic "rape" as a scare tactic, it seems fitting that Alien: Romulus has expanded this fear beyond the insemination and the birth and into the actual raising of the child.

For Kay, the absolute horror of her motherhood doesn't end when Rain severs the umbilical cord. Instead, she watches her own baby hunt her and drain her body to quench its own thirst. Her body isn't just violated; it actually betrays her by producing xenomorphic breast milk, in some ways creating an exchange between the two (she has contributed human DNA to this creature; it has hijacked her own body and made it distinctly alien and unnatural).

Unlike the past victims of the franchise, she isn't so lucky as to die when the fetal alien rips itself out of her chest.

There are obvious ties to our culture today. Control over reproductive healthcare is increasing, and threatens to get even stricter. Like the Big-Brother-esque "company" in Alien, women's bodies are playgrounds for legislature, beaurecracy, and capitalism, no longer something we have autonomy over but instead vessels loaned out to us by someone else.

And: much like the hybrid that leers at Kay before feeding off of her, we are becoming more and more afraid that we cannot save ourselves from the fate of raising sons that simply cannot wait to grow up and subjugate women just like their mothers.

Childbirth itself isn't just painful for Kay. The real horror is giving birth to a monster. Likewise, the recent increase in disillusionment with having a family- and the condescension directed torwards "boy moms" seen on social media platforms- speaks to a growing lack of faith that children (especially male children) can be raised to "break the cycle". Instead, pregnancy also carries with it the fear of having a child that will hurt, insult, terrorize- even sexually objectify- its own mother, particularly on the basis of her sex.

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This is only one aspect of what made the pregnancy horror of Alien: Romulus so stimulating, and the pregnancy horror itself is only one facet of a largely well done (though, of course, not entirely without fault, particularly where racial dynamics are concerned IMO) film.

But to me, (all jokes aside) this line of thinking, this drive, is the substance beneath what is elsewise a forgettable movie: the stuff that will last as an example of the social and political climate of our time even when the gross-out factor and box office hype has passed.

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ok going to bed now xoxoxo but what did you all think? cherrypi is desperate to hear your thoughts