Hollywood films may be filled with chest-bursting, face-hugging extraterrestrials yet, in real life, the silence from space is deafening. This summer, director Fede Alvarez returns the notorious Alien franchise to its monster-movie roots, and feeds yet another batch of hapless young space colonists to a nest of “xenomorphs”. It remains to be seen if Alien: Romulus will do more than pay loving tribute to Ridley Scott’s original 1979 Alien , but it hardly matters - Alien is a franchise that survives despite the additions to its canon , rather than because of them.
Even the worst sequels have failed to bankrupt its grim message, while the most visionary reimaginings have done nothing to alter it. The original Alien is itself a scowling retread of 1974′s Dark Star , John Carpenter’s nihilist-hippie debut, about an interstellar wrecking crew cast unimaginably far from home, bored to death and intermittently terrorised by a mischievous alien beach ball. Dan O’Bannon co-wrote both Dark Star and Alien , and inside every prehensile-jawed xenomorph there’s an O’Bannonesque balloon critter snickering away.
O’Bannon’s cosmic joke goes something like this: we escaped the food chain on Earth, only to find ourselves at the bottom of an even bigger, more terrible food chain Out There among the stars. You don’t need an adventure in outer space to see the lesson. Carpenter went on to make The Thing (1982), in which intelligent and resourceful researchers on an Ant.