Another Alien: Romulus post! This time, it's my response and breakdown to the final trailer! tl;dr—I fucking loved what I saw!
Here's the link to my video response.
In connection with Romulus and its Promethean themes, I've written a three-part book chapter on Metroidvania for my Sex Positivity book series: "'She Fucks Back'; or, Revisiting The Modern Prometheus through Astronoetics: the Man of Reason and Cartesian Hubris versus the Womb of Nature in Metroidvania" (2024). Said chapter concerns Frankenstein (aka The Modern Prometheus) and talks extensively about the Promethean Quest as it appears in popular media after Shelley's novel; it focuses on Metroidvania, of course (with close-reads of Hollow Knight and Axiom Verge), but I also talk about movies like Forbidden Planet and Alien. Click here to read the entire chapter on my website book sample series. It combines my PhD research after writing my PhD (Volume Zero of Sex Positivity), making "She Fucks Back" a culmination of my life's work on the subject; I'm very proud of it!
Note: Normally I would do an extended respond with an image breakdown, but I'm currently in the middle of proofreading and releasing book samples (see: above); i.e., for Volume Two, part two of my Sex Positivity (2023) book project, featured in my second, very NSFW book sample series, "Searching for Secrets" (2024).
One thing that I did notice about the movie that I wanted to say here was, I liked how the neoliberal critique wasn't workers vs the evil company, but criminals. Capital criminalizes labor, so having Fede Alvarez direct a movie about workers quitting their factory jobs makes perfect sense (the plot to Don't Breathe in space—sort of). Capital generally uses the Promethean Quest to express Cartesian abuses as "fire of the gods"; i.e., military technology used to genocide workers, abjected onto "alien" empires, which decay as a form of displaced critique that is then found, explored, and ultimately banished again by blowing it up.
In Scott's Prometheus, Weyland's ship lands on the moon with the lab on it—an alien temple made of stone. Basically it's an alien station/colony on terra firma where the science has "gone wrong" and escaped, serving as a metaphor for frontier Capitalism. When Weyland tries to use the technology to extend his life (and thus his control over nature), he falls victim to the same problem: Imperialism can't keep tyrants alive, but also, Imperialism decays, with false gods killing each other while trying to hold onto military technology and the power it offers (false power that kills everything and corrupts nature in the process).
By comparison, Romulus is a human space station in outer space that goes to pot; i.e., the land of the gods comes to a human frontier colony on the fringes of space, where Capitalism's abuses once more manifest as "stolen alien technology" (re: abjecting genocide onto "somewhere/someone" else). The plot reminds me a bit of Metroid: Fusion, except the heroes are weekend criminals stealing weapons technology from the company—in short, they're gun runners for the resistance. I dig it!
Free Palestine!
