Warning: This piece contains full spoilers for Alien: Romulus.
Hold your pulse rifle and motion tracker ready, because Alien: Romulus is now in theaters. The newest entry in the long-running sci-fi horror franchise comes from director Fede Álvarez, best known for 2013’s Evil Dead remake and the original horror film Don’t Breathe. The acclaimed director takes the Alien series back to its roots by calling back to the 1979 original with another nail-biting, blood-soaked, haunted house in space. However, the new movie also left us with some serious questions, which we’ll try our best to answer here.
Whether you’re a Weyland-Yutani veteran or if this is your first time in zero gravity, we have the questions (and answers?) you’ve been waiting for. And be sure to also check out our review of Alien: Romulus as well!
What Happened to the Xenomorph From Alien 1979?
The opening of Alien: Romulus shows a science team from the nefarious Weyland-Yutani corporation finding the wreckage of the Nostromo, the ship all the action happened on in Ridley Scott’s original film. They come across what appears to be a xenomorph fossilized in some sort of mineral, and cut the specimen out of it. Later on, a familiar face from that film (we’ll get to that in a bit) says that the company found and recovered the xenomorph Ellen Ripley ejected into space after escaping the Nostromo’s self-destruct sequence. So, are these two different creatures? How did a fossilized xenomorph get onto the Nostromo? That movie never showed the crew picking up any rocks from LV-426, the planet where Kane was infected by a facehugger. Or if they’re supposed to be one and the same, then how did that xenomorph go from being spaced to getting trapped in mineral ore?
Whatever the case may be, the events of the ‘79 original lead into this film’s story, with the xenomorph specimen providing the Weyland-Yutani team on the Renaissance space station (which has modules called Romulus and Remus) with the material they need to craft a whole new house of horrors for our new cast to get caught up in.
Why Do the Heroes Have a Spaceship if They’re Not Allowed to Leave the Planet?
Speaking of the new cast, our leads this time around are Cailee Spaeny as Rain Carradine and David Jonsson as her android sibling/companion Andy. They, along with some colleagues/friends of Rain’s, are indentured servants trapped on Jackson’s Star, a colony where they’re forced to work for years on end for Weyland-Yutani, who will clearly never honor the agreement to eventually let them go. The entire crew’s motivation is to find a way to escape this planet, but if that’s the case, why do they have access to a spaceship? The very spaceship they use to travel to the Romulus station, where they want to salvage cryo pods for an interstellar journey? It would be one thing if this was a work vessel that they had to steal under the company’s noses, but it appears to be something they just have unfettered access to in their off-hours.
Perhaps the case could be made that the company knows no one could ever escape without access to cryo pods and they limit access to those. But even then, just letting your employees who you want to keep trapped fly off into space whenever they like seems like a serious oversight on the company’s part.
Why Did No One Else Notice the Derelict Space Station?
Here’s another oversight: the Romulus station itself. The main group we follow say they want to get to Romulus before “anyone else does,” but why are a bunch of lowly workers the first to notice the derelict station? Certainly the company must have better scanning technology and would have found it first. Perhaps if Romulus had just gone down, this would make sense. But going by the state of it, and how close the station is to crashing into the planet’s rings, it seems like Romulus has been abandoned for some time. Especially because the movie later reveals just how important the project they were developing on Romulus was to Weyland-Yutani, it makes us wonder why they never sent a team of their own to recover their research.
The arrival of a company team or a rival salvage crew could have been an interesting wrinkle to put even more pressure on our leads, but as far as we can tell, they’re the only ones who notice Romulus in time. Maybe whoever at the company that was supposed to keep track of Romulus’ whereabouts was on vacation?
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Why Is There No Alien Queen on Romulus?
As established in Aliens, the eggs containing the facehuggers that begin the xenomorph’s life cycle are typically laid by an Alien Queen. Yet although there are many xenomorphs on the Romulus station, we never see a Queen in this film. The creature that Weyland-Yutani recovers from the first movie was just a basic xenomorph, and we haven’t seen any indication in other films that they can generate facehuggers on their own. Granted, it’s possible that there are aspects to the xenomorph life cycle we don’t yet know, perhaps related to the cocooning process that was briefly shown in a famous deleted scene from the first film. Or maybe there were fossilized facehuggers in the mineral ore that the scientists used to clone more of them.
We also have to admit that between the original series, the Alien vs. Predator films, and the prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, how exactly the xenomorph life cycle works has not been the most consistent. So perhaps Álvarez just went with what he thought was best and skipped the Queen entirely to make room for the new surprise monster at the end of the film.
Why Didn’t the Xenomorphs Attack En Masse Until the Third Act?
When the main characters arrive on Romulus, it isn’t immediately clear if there are adult xenomorphs still on the station. Aileen Wu’s Navarro, one of Rain’s group, is attacked by a facehugger and subsequently killed by a chestburster, creating one xenomorph. But later on, we see at least a dozen others on board, even though no one else was implanted. These xenomorphs had to have been created from the station’s crew before Rain and her group arrived. So why didn’t they attack earlier when a bunch of humans entered Romulus, which has since become their lair? It’s not like the humans are subtle; they’re running around, screaming, messing with the ship’s systems, and generally causing a ruckus. Are the xenomorphs just really deep sleepers? It may also be that the big boy Xenos are restricted to the Romulus module.
The practical answer to this is that the movie needs to escalate over time, so the reveal of many xenomorphs is held back until later. Still, it’s odd that the aliens don’t seem to care about a group of humans poking around their home until the script says they do.
What’s the Deal With Ian Holm’s Character, Rook?
All Alien fans know that the late Ian Holm played Ash, the evil android, in the original Alien film. The veteran actor sadly passed away in 2020, but Alien: Romulus uses his likeness anyway, recreated via computer-generated imagery atop a different actor. According to the studio’s press notes, Daniel Betts provided “facial and vocal performance” for the character, while Ian Holm is credited for “facial and vocal reference.” This character isn’t Ash, since that android was vaporized on the Nostromo, but instead a new villainous company man named Rook. This is clearly a reference to Bishop, the good guy android played by Lance Henriksen in Aliens. We guess Weyland-Yutani has a bunch of different androids named after various chess pieces. Yet what Rook’s purpose is in the story isn’t completely clear. Yes, he gives some vital exposition about what happened on the station before the main characters arrive, but why is it an extended reference to Ash? Especially since making him resemble Ash means we know not to trust him?
On top of that, there’s the ethical dubiousness of the choice. Digitally resurrecting deceased actors for cheap nostalgia plays has become more common in blockbusters, and it’s a worrying trend. Would it not have been easier to simply cast another actor as the new evil android? We don’t know what the filmmakers were thinking, but hopefully this doesn’t happen again.
Why Did Andy Start Glitching in the Blue Light Room?
On the subject of androids, Andy slowly turns to the dark side when he’s “upgraded” with a module from Rook that increases his capabilities but also changes his prime directive from protecting Rain to serving the company. But he gets redeemed in sort of a weird way. In the third act, Andy and Rain pass through a room with blue lights over the floor, which is a clear reference to the room in the Space Jockey’s ship where Kane finds the eggs in the ‘79 film. Andy starts glitching out in this room, falling over as if he’s had a seizure, and this allows Rain to access the chip behind his ear and take out the upgrade module. It’s an important moment for the plot so that Andy can help Rain in the finale, but why it happens is a mystery.
Did we miss something? Please let us know, because aside from Andy running his fingers through the blue light, we’re not sure what triggered Andy’s glitch. Perhaps this is something that was elaborated on in a deleted scene, but whatever the answer, it should’ve been in the final cut.
How Fast Does the Prometheus Mutagen Work?
One of the film’s later twists is that Romulus station was being used to research a mutagen, Compound Z-01, extracted from the xenomorphs that is related to the Engineers in Prometheus. The mutagen appears to cause rapid evolutions in its host, transforming them into new creatures, while also boasting remarkable healing properties. We see this in lab footage of a dead rat that is resurrected by a mutagen injection and then transforms into a bloated alien creature. Isabela Merced’s pregnant character Kay injects herself with the mutagen to save her own life, but it transforms her fetus into an Engineer-like monster that she gives birth to soon afterwards. The timeline of this is rather confusing; not only is the alien gestation time in this movie way faster than in previous films, but this mutagen apparently causes massive transformations in its hosts and makes the Engineer creature grow to full size in what amounts to mere minutes.
We know we’re talking about minutes here because the second half of the movie essentially takes place in real time, with a countdown from 40 minutes to zero sounding over the speakers as the station heads down a collision course with the planet’s rings. Even by sci-fi logic, the mutagen causing such profound transformations in such a short time frame feels incredibly convenient. That said, in Prometheus Elizabeth Shaw was impregnated with a massive squid monster that had to be cut out of her belly in a short time frame too, so maybe that’s just how it works in space.
How Many Black Liquid Mutagens Are There in This Universe and How Do They Connect to Prometheus’ Engineers?
What makes the mutagen business weirder is that it raises some serious questions about the connection this movie has to Prometheus. To recap, Prometheus reveals that humans were created by the Engineers, and our DNA matches theirs. One of the Engineers uses a black liquid to seed life on Earth, kickstarting the slow evolutionary process that leads to humanity. Then there’s another black liquid later on in that film that turns humans into zombie-like monsters. Are these the same? They don’t seem to have the same effects. And now we have yet another black liquid in Romulus that makes evolution happen at a lightning fast rate. It obviously has a connection to Engineer DNA because it creates a similar creature out of Kay’s fetus. But Kay injected the mutagen directly into herself, so why doesn’t she mutate? Once again, this liquid doesn’t seem to have the exact same effects as previous mutagens. Does this mean there are three different black liquid mutagens?
Basically, there are a ton of questions about how the various mutagens that may or may not be related work in this series, and Alien: Romulus doesn’t give us a whole lot of answers. Perhaps this is something the filmmakers want to explore in a sequel, but right now, we’re just left scratching our heads.
Why Didn’t Weyland-Yutani Get More of the Mutagen From LV-426?
Now here’s a real conundrum. Alien: Romulus takes place between Alien and Aliens, 20 years after Alien in the series timeline. Rook makes clear how important the mutagen research is to Weyland-Yutani, and we know the mutagen came from the xenomorphs. Okay, fine. But if that’s the case, then why did the company never go back to the Space Jockey’s ship on LV-426 and get more mutagen? At the beginning of Aliens, Ripley wakes up 57 years after the first film and is told by the company that LV-426 has been a colony world for “20 years.” We also know that the company knew about the xenomorphs because they gave Ash the order to bring the creature back for study at the expense of the Nostromo’s crew. So if they were working with xenomorphs between those two points in the timeline, they would have to know that they could just go to LV-426 (where they will have a colony soon enough, remember) and grab some more xenomorphs to make more of the mutagen. Yet there’s no indication that they did so.
The answer to this is a bit dull: It’s because Romulus was made after Aliens, and this is a retcon that doesn’t fit all that cleanly into the established chronology. Again, perhaps a direct sequel to Romulus could shed some more light on this front. Hopefully we don’t have to wait the full nine years of Rain and Andy’s journey to another star system to get some answers.
Carlos Morales writes novels, articles and Mass Effect essays. You can follow his fixations on Twitter.
