ALIEN ROMULUS SPOILERS:
“Alien Romulus,” the latest installment in the “Alien” franchise, is a solidly constructed film with two carefully written main characters at its center. One is Rain (Cailee Spaeny), an orphaned miner who joins a daring scheme to break into a decommissioned space station, steal life forms still in suspended animation, sell them to the highest bidder and escape to a new star system and a new life. The other big character is Rain’s “brother,” Andy (David Jonsson), an android who was programmed by Rain’s father to be her protector but, because of his cognitive issues, is more of a ward.
Unfortunately, the movie becomes less special as it goes along, taking on a heightened form of IP karaoke. The point isn’t to fully commit to a new story within a familiar universe and follow it into new narrative places, but to reimagine and interpret cleverly retooled new versions of the series’ most memorable scenes into a “greatest hits” package. These include the “aliens underwater” sequence from “Alien: Resurrection,” the “this is how you use a pulse rifle” and “elevator to hell” sequences from “Aliens,” snippets from the prequels “Prometheus” and “Alien Covenant,” and of course a ton of stuff from the original “Alien,” including the bit at the end where a young brown-haired girl is trapped in a tiny spaceship with monsters and has to put on a spacesuit while talking fearfully to herself. All the “Alien” movies are remakes to some extent, as are all the James Bond films, and part of the fun is seeing how they can rearrange the Jenga blocks without bringing the building down. But in this movie there’s a chaotic tug-of-war between innovation and replica that stands out from the start, and in the end, the replica wins out.
But by far the worst element of this type is the virtual resurrection of Ian Holm, the secretly murderous android from the original film, as a different android named Rook, who attempts to corrupt Andy into resurrecting the space station’s original mission and delivering xenomorphs to the Weyland-Yutani corporation, the franchise’s true villain. Not only is there no narrative reason for this android to have looked like Ian Holm, who died four years ago, by having Rook be the same “model” as Ash from the original film, but Alvarez and company introduce an element of confusion that wasn’t there previously.
Namely: in Foreignwhich is set 20 years before Romulus, no one aboard the original ship, The NostromoI knew that Ash was, in Parker's (Yaphet Kotto) words, “an ag-amn robot.” In all the other Alien films, the implication is that all of these “synthetics” are unique and it's hard to tell they're “artificial people,” to use Bishop's phrase from “Aliens,” unless they start behaving strangely due to a program glitch, or bleed white fluid. If you can buy an Ash or Rook model robot at the robot store, the story's recurring device of not knowing who's human and who's robot makes less sense. Even if it's a vast universe and there are many different models of androids to buy at the robot store, wouldn't people come to know the various makes and models like they do brands of computers or cars? Especially if they work in industries where androids are as common as, say, power shippers or dropships.
Much has already been written about the narrative effectiveness of this decision by Álvarez and co-writer Rodo Sayagues, or the lack thereof. That's why it makes no sense to go over it all in detail again here. It can all be summed up in The GuardianWendy Ide, who called it “macabre, exploitative, disrespectful and unnecessary.” To me, it seems like a case where the same nostalgic/commercial impulse that led Alvarez to create a more upscale “greatest hits” package (complete with repeated lines from other installments in the series) is also what led him to resurrect a dead actor to fill a role that could have easily been played by an actor we’ve never seen in an “Alien” movie. (Another plot element that feels somehow related to the fake Ash: The original “Alien” xenomorph is revealed to be the origin point for this film’s plot. Apparently it wasn’t killed by Ripley in the first film, but instead went into traumatized hibernation and was eventually found by the Company, who took it to the space station where it would eventually wake up and wreak havoc. This element of the film is a bit like “The Phantom Menace” having Ben Solo, aka Kylo Ren, come into possession of his grandfather Darth Vader’s helmet, which somehow survived the destruction of the Death Star, so that he can obsess over it like it’s a memento in a display case at ComicCon.)
But here's the thing: If you're dead set on going with the idea that “there are only a certain number of types of robots in the 'Alien' franchise, and if you travel around the universe long enough, you'll encounter the same ones over and over again,” why not put Lance Henriksen from “Aliens” or Winona Ryder from “Alien Resurrection” in the movie? They're both still alive and working. I'm afraid the answer is, “Because the technology now exists to have the role played by a copy of a dead man's face, and we wanted to use that.”
The filmmakers had an infinite number of possibilities to fill the void now occupied by Ian Holm’s character, but they didn’t go with any of those other options because, obviously, they wanted to. Ian Malcolm, in the original “Jurassic Park,” had the final say on the matter: “Their scientists were so worried about whether they could do it or not, they didn’t stop to think about whether they should do it.”
The filmmakers have defended the choice for a couple of reasons: Ian Holm’s family gave their consent, plus this isn’t generative AI (the flashpoint for so much controversy right now, mostly because generative AI is an ethical cesspool — a plagiarism machine created by “scraping” the work of living artists without permission or compensation). Rook is a mechanical puppet voiced by a different actor, with a CGI gloss based on Ian Holm’s features. I think it’s debatable at best whether the latter “improved” the performance — Rook is an obviously evil villain with, at best, one and a half dimensions. He’s nowhere near as fascinating as Holm’s 1979 portrayal of Ash as a complicated “person” capable of envy, rage, a superiority complex, and, it seems, something approaching self-loathing. The result of all the technological tinkering in “Romulus” is possibly the only bad performance Ian Holm has ever given.
As for Holm's heirs giving their permission: so what? That doesn't solve anything. Saying “Well, the heirs gave their okay!” is a non-answer. Heirs do rude, thoughtless things for money all the time. In the case of a performer's image, they often accept payment for something stupid, bad, or corrupt, so that the custodians can pay off credit card debts or buy a motorboat and defend it as a “tribute.” Think of Those ads from the 90s in which a vacuum cleaner was turned into archival footage of Fred Astaire dancing, or scenes from the 2004 sci-fi film “Sky Captain and World of Tomorrow” in which Laurence Olivier, who had died 15 years earlier, “played” the role of Dr. Totenkopf, courtesy of motion-captured archival footage plus a voice dubbed by another actor. Last year there was a report that James Dean, who died in 1955, would “act” in a film with the approval of Dean's estate. One of the filmmakers said, seemingly with a straight face, that they had thought long and hard about who would be best suited to play this particular role and came to the conclusion that the best choice was a digital approximation of an actor who died nearly 70 years ago.
Rook in “Alien Romulus” is perhaps a little less evil, morally and technically, than a direct copy of Gen AI’s Ian Holm would have been. But it’s part of the same disturbing trend that seems to be gaining traction even as states like California pass bills designed to protect human actors against the possibility of being forced to consent to a scan of their faces and bodies in order to receive payment for a job and then lose additional work because of their own virtual replicas.
There’s always another way to make a story point happen in a work of fiction. There’s no universe in which the only possible solution is to find a way to virtually reanimate a dead actor. You can write a new character who accomplishes the same narrative function, or come up with a previously unmentioned relative or former business partner with similar motivations, or recast the role. When Richard Castellano decided he didn’t want to be in “The Godfather, Part II,” Francis Coppola fictionally killed him off and wrote an entirely new character to replace him, and the film was a hit that became the first sequel to win a Best Picture Oscar. When Santino Fontana didn’t return to the CW series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” the producers recast the role with Skylar Austin, who didn’t look much like Fontana, made a joke about it, and continued with the story. The sky’s the limit if you’re willing to think beyond the technology.
Now I'm going to make two claims and encourage people to try to refute them:
- Whether it was Laurence Olivier in “Sky Captain,” Peter Cushing in “Rogue One,” or Ian Holm in “Alien Romulus,” there is not a single case in the entire history of entertainment where some sort of “resurrecting a dead actor” was urgently needed to tell the story.
- There is not a single case in the entire history of entertainment where a resurrection was technically good enough to overcome the “wow, that's… strange” a factor that surely interferes in scenes with dead actors “acting” in them.
There’s also an inherent irony in the fact that the makers of “Alien Romulus” made a “Weekend at Bernie’s” out of Ian Holm’s picture. This franchise (from “Alien 3” onward) has increasingly been concerned with issues raised by Mary Shelley in “Frankenstein” hundreds of years ago. Shelley’s novel warned of the horror and misery that would accrue if humanity decided to play God and ignore the number one rule of existence: When you’re dead, you’re dead.
Of course, you can “bring people back” through art and writing and sentimentally remembering them with friends or family. But we all know that’s a substitute for having flesh-and-blood people physically available to us. And that’s okay! Death is a part of life. And death is a part of life. deadWhen we say we want a deceased person to “live forever in our hearts,” we don’t mean an implant. Trying to pretend that death is a reversible condition or that it can somehow be prevented by technology is asking for trouble. Serious trouble.
There is something deeply sick about this widespread collective desire to deny the reality of death through corporate-created art. I fear we are going down a very bad path by continuing to not only allow it but encourage it, and by allowing tech companies to skirt the ethical and legal questions inherent in the act. The dead cannot consent. The dead cannot create, sing, paint, dance, or act. Those who have heard all the objections and warnings but choose to ignore them are participating in a collective, slow-motion death of the soul that will eventually corrupt the entire species, as well as making it nearly impossible to determine what is real and fake, what is true and what is a lie. We have been warned about this, not just by Mary Shelly but by ghost story tellers throughout time. The dead cannot seek justice in court, but they have other ways.