This article was originally published on August 15, 2024. We are recirculating it timed to Alien: Romulus’s streaming debut on Hulu and Disney+. Spoilers ahead for the plot and ending of the film.
Seven movies into the Alien series — nine if you count the Alien vs. Predator movies, and don’t act like you’re above it — we all have a pretty good idea of what the title characters look like. There are the skittering Facehuggers, the tiny yet destructive Chestbursters, and finally, the adult Xenomorphs, sleek H.R. Giger-designed monsters described by Ash (Ian Holm) in the original Alien as “the perfect organism.” Two mouths, one very long head, and a seemingly endless amount of slime.
But devotees of the franchise know that there’s actually quite a bit of variety when it comes to aliens. Parasitic Facehuggers borrow a bit of host DNA for the Chestburster, which is how we got the dog-infused Xenomorph of Alien 3. And Prometheus brought a new set of weird little guys to the series, from the humanoid Engineers (not so little, actually) to the squid-y Trilobite. It’s no surprise, then, that Alien: Romulus doesn’t rely solely on the classic Xenomorph, introducing audiences to a brand new creation that’s also a callback.
In the third act of Romulus, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and her android brother Andy (David Jonsson) fight off an endless onslaught of Xenomorphs, while Kay (Isabela Merced) — the one other human survivor — makes her way to the stolen cryopods stashed on their ship. Badly wounded and pregnant, she makes a desperate gamble for survival by injecting herself with a supposedly healing black liquid (synthesized from the pathogenic but also life-creating goo in Prometheus). That buys Kay a little extra time, until she suddenly finds herself considerably more pregnant and then giving birth to a giant egg sac.
What emerges briefly looks like a human baby before growing way too quickly into a towering hybrid. The new creature, one of the Alien franchise’s freakiest creations to date, looks less like its human “mother” and more like a Xenomorph crossed with an Engineer. It has the pale skin and bemused expression of the beings who made us, along with the trademark Xenomorph mouth-inside-a-mouth, which it uses to suck the remaining life out of Kay.
If this all sounds a little familiar, that’s by design. Alien: Romulus often plays as a “greatest hits” of the franchise, and the Xenomorph-Engineer abomination brings us back to 1997’s Alien Resurrection. The fourth and final film in the original series placed a clone of Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) face-to-face with her “child,” an alien-human hybrid birthed from more wacky DNA splicing. Dubbed the Newborn, this pitiful creature looks like a Xenomorph with a human skull for a face. (It also happens to have the most tragic death scene in any Alien movie, but that’s far too upsetting to think about right now.)
It’s not just the hybrid itself that makes Romulus’ last act so recognizable to fans. There’s a pattern to most Alien endings, and this film knows it well. First, one last showdown between the Final Girl and the Big Bad, culminating in the latter being bested. After Kay is killed, the hybrid gets the jump on Andy, who looks like he’s en route to android heaven. But Rain manages to use a nearby asteroid belt to her advantage, creating a hole in the cargo hold that sends the Xenomorph-Engineer creature to its doom. (The alien getting sucked out of an airlock into space is also generally how these things go.)
And as is so often the case in Alien movies, Romulus ends with our heroine in cryosleep, delivering a voiceover captain’s log identifying herself as the sole human survivor. Rain doesn’t have a cat with her, sadly, but she’s stored Andy in cryosleep, in the hope that he’ll be able to be repaired down the line. Most importantly, she’s wrested control from the Weyland-Yutani synthetic trying to send the ship back to the colony from where she escaped — the company priority will always be viable alien specimens, humans be damned — seeking a better life for herself and her brother elsewhere. The broad strokes of Romulus’ ending reflect a formula that’s worked well enough for the franchise thus far, and by this point, the film has fully announced that it is unashamed of borrowing from the classics.
There’s a thin line between homage and shameless cribbing; thankfully, director and co-writer Fede Álvarez is adept at walking it. Your mileage may vary — we live in an era of omnipresent IP, and it’s easy to become weighed down by endless references to beloved existing material. (Some of us are still struggling to pull ourselves out of a Deadpool & Wolverine-induced depression.)
But there’s something more interesting than Easter eggs at play in Romulus. Álvarez takes a mix-and-match approach to pulling from his predecessors that can be as simple as borrowing the gun from Aliens, and as complex as the film’s characterization of Andy. The new synthetic has Bishop’s genuine care for humanity, until he’s corrupted by a synthetic modeled (very directly) after Ash, turning him into a turncoat android more in line with the prequels’ David (Michael Fassbender). The alien-human hybrid is the purest distillation of Romulus’s ambitions, bringing back a 27-year-old concept with an entirely new execution.
The movie’s approach to hybridization very literally blends the mythology of Prometheus with the mutant freak show of Resurrection. It’s a bridging of the gap between the much maligned conclusion of the Alien quadrilogy and the divisive start of a prequel series that took the franchise in a wildly different direction. Every Alien movie brings a new perspective (and sometimes even a new genre) to the franchise, but it’s hard to think of two more disparate entries than the ones Álvarez pulls together for his Romulus finale. It’s a satisfying trick that plays with the thematic through lines of the series: a fixation on birth, the dangers of scientific exploration, and corporations that value profit over human lives (imagine that). Not to mention, of course, squelchy body horror.
That’s not to say that what Romulus is doing will work for everyone. The familiarity of its ending — and much of the movie that precedes it — will be dismissed by some as a pale facsimile of earlier, better films, rendering Romulus a superfluous cash-grab installment for a franchise that usually holds itself to a higher standard. Even as a fan of Álvarez’s film, I’ll concede that its most direct nods to past Alien movies are the biggest marks against it. A stilted “get away from her, you bitch” is merely cringe, but it’s tough to look past Romulus’ greatest sin, a synthetic named Rook with the deepfake face of Ian Holm, who died in 2020.
To its credit, the sheer entertainment value of Romulus is enough to paper over most of its weaknesses. It’s hard to argue with sequences like a thrilling Facehugger chase, or Rain zero-gravity floating through acidic Xenomorph blood suspended in the air. And though Romulus’ nods to past films may wear thin for some, its ending drives home how effective homage can be. The new alien-human hybrid is a singular creation, but it carries extra weight for those who have watched and loved the Alien series up to this point. As this era of IP shows no sign of abating, this feels like a best-case scenario: a filmmaker finding genuine joy and inspiration playing in a franchise sandbox, and digging up something truly unsettling in the process.
