Although horror viewers have been complaining about incompetent characters for decades, Alien: Romulus is set to revive one hated aspect of Prometheus by bringing them back. If there’s one thing that horror fans hate, it is characters who act illogically and against their best interests. Admittedly, no one knows how they would react in life-threatening circumstances. Nonetheless, it is infuriating to see innumerable gormless characters run upstairs instead of out the door or walk into a dark basement alone without a weapon after hearing a strange noise. The director of the upcoming Alien: Romulus isn’t immune to this recurring trope.
Fede Álvarez’s movies often revolve around clueless protagonists. Most egregiously, the Gen Z stereotypes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2022, which Álvarez produced and has a story credit on, practically walked into Leatherface’s chainsaw blades. However, even the director’s better movies, like Don’t Breathe and particularly Evil Dead 2013, feature characters making some truly dumb mistakes. One reads from a book bound in barbed wire and covered in demands to keep it shut. The Alien franchise rarely included any characters this foolish, although one outing did give Álvarez’s characters a run for their money. Now, Alien: Romulus may repeat this.
According to an Entertainment Weekly interview with the director, Álvarez wanted Alien: Romulus’s main characters to feel hapless and inexperienced. Per the director, the Alien franchise’s timeline is littered with tough heroes who know their way around complex spaceships, carry and operate high-powered weapons, and are more than ready for any threat. Álvarez wanted his characters to be comparatively innocent and inexperienced, as new to the perils of space travel as the average viewer. While this could potentially be an intriguing premise, it ignores the fact that incompetent horror protagonists are the norm outside the Alien movies.
It is so common for slasher movie characters to make blatantly bad decisions that Scream called out these clichés almost three decades ago. The stereotype of a clueless hero walking straight into danger without a weapon or a second thought has become a mainstay in parody for a reason, and Alien: Romulus risks un-ironically leaning into this tired trope. Although Alien: Romulus’s droid characters promise an interesting break with the usual Alien lore, this particular change seems counterintuitive. In subverting what viewers typically expect from the franchise, Álvarez may ironically end up reviving one of its biggest problems.
While Álvarez notes that the heroes of Alien and Aliens were famously tough, no-nonsense workers and Marines, he doesn’t mention the characters of Ridley Scott’s 2012 prequel Prometheus. The infamously uneven Prometheus featured plenty of incompetent characters, and their frustrating decisions were made all the more inexplicable by their ostensible scientific experience. Prometheus’s main characters explored an alien planet on foot instead of sending a rover or a drone first, trusted their duplicitous droid David far too much, and initiated contact with various alien life forms without any safeguards.
One character lost their life to an alien while another was killed by an Engineer. Even the movie’s heroine was impregnated by a Xenomorph after their first expedition to the unwelcoming planet. Alien: Romulus has already avoided horror reboot mistakes, but this litany of bad choices makes it tough to agree with Álvarez’s assessment of the franchise’s characters as hyper-competent professionals.
To be fair to the director of Alien: Romulus, the idea of introducing some less experienced heroes to the series is solid. The Alien franchise is overdue some younger protagonists, and it would be interesting for viewers to experience the troubles of space travel alongside the heroes instead of relying on their existing know-how to guide the plot. The lead characters of Alien, Aliens, Alien 3, and Alien: Resurrection were all tough adults, so it would be a fun change to see how more innocent characters fare against the monsters. However, Prometheus proves this is tough to pull off.
To effectively revive Ridley Scott’s famous sci-fi franchise, Alien: Romulus needs to make the inexperience of its characters empathetic and not embarrassing. A nail-biting scene where the heroes try and fail to work out how an airlock operates could be terrifying since viewers have no idea how this technology functions either. In contrast, a scene where one character sticks their hand out to touch a strange snake-like alien will simply annoy the audience. To dodge Prometheus’s problem, the heroes of Alien: Romulus must feel as experienced and intelligent as the viewers, if not the experts.