Warning: This post contains spoilers for Alien: Romulus.
The possibility of life beyond Earth is a profound question for humanity. But if the answer turns out to be a terrifying alien species, we might wish we hadn’t asked.
In the Alien film universe, that fear is already a reality. The franchise, born in 1979 with the iconic sci-fi thriller Alien, has instilled a deep-seated dread of the predatory Xenomorphs. Now, a seventh entry, Alien: Romulus, expands on this long-running horror saga.
Directed by Fede Álvarez (Evil Dead, Don’t Breathe) and produced by Ridley Scott, Romulus follows 25-year-old Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her adoptive android brother Andy (David Jonsson) as they join a group of young colonists seeking escape from the dystopian Jackson’s Star mining settlement and the oppressive Weyland-Yutani corporation. They aim to infiltrate a decommissioned space station orbiting their planetoid, hoping to find the technology for a better world. However, they encounter something far more horrifying and deadly.
While Romulus features a largely standalone plot, it also pays homage to its predecessors, directly connecting to the original Alien and its Scott-directed prequels, 2012’s Prometheus and 2017’s Covenant.
“We went to great lengths to ensure canonicity, avoiding contradictions or disrupting anything established in the previous films,” Álvarez stated. “It’s a special feeling to love certain movies and then see nods to them in a new film. It feels like only you in the theater are getting the reference. It’s truly tailored for fans.”
How Alien: Romulus connects to Alien
Set roughly 20 years after Alien (which takes place in the year 2122) and 37 years before James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens (set in 2179), Romulus reveals that the legendary Big Chap Xenomorph from Alien actually survived being ejected from the Nostromo ship’s shuttle Narcissus by Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). It was later recovered from space, while believed dead, and brought to Weyland-Yutani’s Romulus research station for experimentation.
After Rain, Andy, and their friends board the drifting Romulus, they reconnect an incapacitated synthetic named Rook – a doppelgänger of the late Ian Holm’s android Ash from Alien – to understand the situation. Holm’s likeness was digitally resurrected for the film, a controversial practice previously used by Disney to bring back Mark Hamill and Carrie Fisher in the Star Wars franchise.
What about Prometheus and Covenant?
Rook explains that the Romulus scientists extracted the mysterious black goo material from Big Chap, introduced to the series’ lore in Prometheus and Covenant. The exact nature of this substance remains unexplained, but it acts as a potent mutagen capable of creating and destroying life forms. In Covenant, we saw android David (Michael Fassbender) using the black goo to reverse engineer Xenomorph DNA.
According to Rook, the Romulus scientists attempted to transform the black goo into a miracle cure that could “upgrade” humans and create better workers for Weyland-Yutani. However, things went disastrously wrong when Big Chap, still alive, massacred the crew, laid Facehugger eggs in the ship, and created a Xenomorph hive.
The supposed cure doesn’t work as intended, as evidenced by the grotesque Xenomorph-human hybrid that emerges from Rain’s pregnant friend Kay (Isabela Merced) after she injects herself with the black goo to heal her Xenomorph injuries.
Whether or not a sequel to Romulus explains the black goo’s true nature, it’s clear that humans should stay far away from it!