Editor's Note: The following contains spoilers for Alien: Romulus.
The Big Picture
- Alien: Romulus introduces new protagonists facing xenomorphs in a bleak mining colony, blending fresh narrative with familiar franchise elements.
- The film's connection to the original Alien is evident from the start, tying in with the xenomorph's origins and showcasing its deadly nature.
- Weyland-Yutani's dark experiments with xenomorphs and mutagenic goo drive the plot, leading to terrifying confrontations for the young crew.
1979 was a banner year in sci-fi-horror history, launching one of cinema's coolest creatures (in the magnificently otherworldly xenomorph) and all-time best protagonists (Sigourney Weaver's unforgettable Ellen Ripley) in one fell swoop. Ridley Scott's Alien gave us a moderately near-future where the space-faring crew of the Nostromo are sent to a mysterious planetoid containing a long-dormant and very much inhuman starship. One member of the crew, Kane (John Hurt), becomes unwittingly infected with a deadly, multi-stage parasitic organism that grows and changes until it becomes a hulking, deadly predator — the xenomorph,a creature so hauntingly well-designed and dangerous it spawned an entire franchise.
The franchise is taking a new turn in Fede Álvarez's Alien: Romulus, following a set of youthful new protagonists who desperately want to escape one of Weyland-Yutani's bleak mining colonies and end up under xenomorph assault. It's an interesting continuation of the series that contains a lot of callbacks and details calling to mind the world of the prior films, but which sidesteps Ripley, the android David (Michael Fassbender), and many other legacy characters entirely, forging a narrative that feels both fresh and familiar. But what's it all about?
Alien: Romulus
R
- Release Date
- August 16, 2024
- Director
- Fede Alvarez
- Cast
- Cailee Spaeny , David Jonsson , Archie Renaux , Isabela Merced , Aileen Wu , Spike Fearn
- Main Genre
- Horror
- Distributor(s)
- 20th Century
- Franchise(s)
- Alien
What Is 'Alien: Romulus' About?
Alien: Romulus begins 20 years after the events of Alien in a grimy mining colony, Jackson’s Star. Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is an orphaned young woman working for the Weyland-Yutani company, like seemingly all of Jackson's Star's colonists, desperately seeking to earn her way off-world to Yvaga, a place with daylight and fewer toxins. She's protective of her "brother" Andy (David Jonsson), a less functional android model programmed by her father to care for her after his passing. Rain is devastated when exactly at the moment she should have earned her off-world transit permit, the company changes the rules and cost to be wildly out of reach, dooming her to further years of hard labor under sunless skies.
Enter her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) with a small ship and smaller crew — his kind sister Kay (Isabela Merced), talented pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu), and Tyler’s Android-hating cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn). The plan? To board a seemingly derelict floating Weyland-Yutani vessel and steal its proprietary hypersleep chambers,allowing the young rogues to travel to brighter futures outside the company’s control. They land on board the ship, finding it in severe disrepair as they attempt to find the technology they came for (and the energy to power it). What's worse: they encounter the remains of a mysteriously eviscerated android, and due to the outpost's powerless trajectory, they have only a small amount of time to salvage what they came for before the outpost is eviscerated by a nearby asteroid belt.
The Extraterrestrial Threat In 'Alien: Romulus' Connects Directly To 1979's 'Alien'
While the film begins with our protagonists and really kicks into gear inside the outpost, its connection to the franchise is set within the very first scene. In space, audiences see a mysterious excavation of the wreckage of the Nostromo to collect the xenomorph that terrorized it. As it turns out, said creature was taken to a now-derelict outpost, whose staff (inside the suspicious research wing, Romulus) worked to study the creature in secret. This is all discovered when Tyler and Bjorn first board the outpost with Andy, whose programming they need to access the ship. They enter Romulus' cryo chamber to grab fuel before it closes behind them. Unfortunately, Andy isn't the Romulus' Science Officer, so he can't open the door, and the chamber's residents gradually start to thaw: a large number of frozen facehuggers, all trapped with our protagonists. Rain and Navarro rush in to try and save their trapped companions, grabbing a memory chip from the nearby, ominously ripped-in-half android Rook that was on board the Romulus (a CGI replication of Ian Holm, who played android Ash in the original Alien).
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Hug a Xenomoroph With Regal Cinemas' 'Alien: Romulus' Merch Collection
The products include a pair of popcorn buckets as well as a T-shirt.
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Rook's chip upgrades Andy's system but also overrides his prime directive, rendering him first and foremost in service to Weyland-Yutani's xenomorph-harvesting goals rather than doing what's best for Rain. He helps open the door, but a cavalcade of facehuggers follows the crew as they flee, implanting a chestburster into Navarro. Fearing that Andy might pose a danger to Navarro, Bjorn and Navarro flee to the young crew's ship, the Corbelan. It's clear to any fan of the Alien franchise what her fate will be, and she soon finds herself beset by chest pains. On board the ship with the secretly pregnant Kay, Navarro's chestburster cracks and bursts through her front chest. She dies, and Bjorn and Kay now have a baby xenomorph to contend with. Navarro's death also causes chaos, slamming the small ship into the larger outpost, damaging the hull, hastening the outpost's proximity to the belt (and thus its destruction), and crash landing in one of the outpost's landing bays. Rain, Tyler, and Andy try and get to the ship despite the outpost being overrun with thawed facehuggers.
What Is the Goal of Weyland-Yutani?
As the stranded young crew came to realize, the Romulus residents were experimenting on the xenomorph collected in the beginning (and the host of facehuggers they collected over time). Their purpose was to collect the xenomorph's essence, the mutagenic fluid introduced in Prometheus. The stated goal, the crew discovers thanks to the newly reactivated Rook, is to adapt the biologically weak human species to the toxicity and dangers of space, harnessing the xenomorph's extreme genetic adaptability via creating human-xeno hybrids that can survive the myriad dangers that interstellar travel and colonization expose one to. It's evidently not a limiting factor for the company that the fluid turns every biological entity it touches into violent, mutated creatures, but I digress. Propelled by Rook's carefully selected advice and Andy's programmed drive to serve the company, and seeing only the liquid's ability to heal beings, they grab some.
Tyler, Rain, and Andy make their way toward their crashed ship, running from facehuggers as they do so, but it isn't the safe haven they hoped. Navarro's chestburster has since become a full-sized xenomorph, killing Bjorn and injuring the pregnant Kay, pulling her into the shadows, and complicating the crew's ship-boarding efforts. Rain, Tyler, and Andy try to escape its clutches, and they discover evidence of a deeper infestation of xenomorphs, and Tyler hears Kay, putting himself back in harm's way to save her. He heroically sacrifices himself to combat the angry alien (after finding a weapon cache with auto-aiming assault rifles), saving Rain and Kay. Kay isn't much use to anyone while pregnant and bleeding, so she is sent to the ship with injectable vials of the black mutagenic goo. Rain tells her not to use them on her injuries, and to put herself safely into cryo-sleep, but she doesn't listen.
Kay Gives Birth to a Xenomorph-Human Hybrid at the End of 'Alien: Romulus'
Rain and Andy make their own discovery while trying to escape the outpost: there's a full xenomorph hive onboard the outpost. Armed with a trusty assault rifle and taking advantage of the ships' fluctuating gravity, Rain easily dispatches a host of rampaging xenomorphs while trying to avoid their acidic blood. It disables Andy promptly, allowing Rain to finally take Rook's chip from Andy and restore his personality, but with a new directive: "Do what's best for us." She and Andy carefully climb through the floating acid mist and dispatch a final xenomorph in an elevator shaft, making their way back to Kay. Fans of the Alien franchise can count on the combination of a xenomorph mutagen and a woman character expecting to produce a calm pregnancy and a healthy human baby. Just kidding! Just when it seems Rain, Andy, and Kay are going to escape to Yvaga and have their happy ending, Kay gives surprisingly quick birth to a monstrous, lanky, human-colored hybrid, dubbed The Offspring. It's a hideous beast that's more than a little reminiscent of Alien: Resurrection's hybrid monstrosity, but with an Engineer-like face (and without that creature's intentionally prominent genitalia). Kay doesn't survive long (but long enough to have the Offspring breastfeed off her).
Rain and the Offspring have a tense back-and-forth showdown as she prepares to escape the ship, with Rain ultimately launching it into space via the ship's air ducts. They board their own vessel just in time to escape, as the creature and the station alike crash against (and are ripped apart by) the asteroid belt. She sets a course to Yvaga with Andy in tow, a bright but probably traumatized future ahead.
Alien: Romulus is in theaters now. Click below for showtimes.
