The ninth entry in the tumultuous Alien franchise, with initial two slam dunks and later sequels and spin-offs of varying degrees of quality, is Fede Alvarez’s “Alien: Romulus,” which seems ready to bring the franchise back to its basics while simultaneously connecting all its disparate strands, especially with regards to its philosophical tinge but heavily mixed critically appraised prequels. The result is a strange mish-mash with enough signature Alien gore and monster madness to satisfy franchise fans.
Spoiler Alert
Alien: Romulus (2024) Plot Summary & Movie Synopsis:
What is Weyland Yutani looking for?
A Weyland-Yutani probe comes to life on February 9th, 2142, reaching a specific point in deep space. As its floodlights shine on the wreckage of the USCSS Nostromo (the ship where the events of the 1979 film “Alien” took place twenty years before in narrative continuity), the probe sucks in an asteroid-looking object floating in deep space. Figures in hazmat suits use lasers to sever what appears to be a cocoon housing, revealing a xenomorph in the process.
Why does Rain agree to Tyler’s plan?
An orphan, Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), works as a scientist at Jackson Star’s mining colony. She expects to be allowed to leave the colony for the planet Yviga, which is terraformed and, more importantly, has sunlight, a far cry from the mining colony. Rain expects to leave the colony with her adopted brother Andy (David Jonsson), an android later revealed to bear the mainframe name of N-D-255, but Rain’s late father has reprogrammed that and is currently operating on the directive of protecting Rain and listening to her commands while trying to entertain her and her friends with bad jokes. The reprogramming has also made Andy somewhat naive and not street-smart, a far cry from Rain, who, while she has never been to space, knows enough about scams to prevent Andy from falling into one.
Rain’s request to leave the colony is rejected by the Weyland-Yutani Office of Colony Affairs clerk, who extends her work contract to 24,000 hours (five more years). Later, Rain and Andy are summoned by her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux) to his camper, which houses him, his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), his contemptible irritating cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn’s capable tech-savvy girlfriend and pilot Navarro (Aileen Wu). Tyler outlines his plan: they have intercepted a message from a derelict space station drifting above the colony and are planning to steal nine functioning cryopods from the station.
The reason is that the trip to Yviga would take over nine years; thus, cryopods are essential if they want to escape. However, they would need Andy to execute this illegal enterprise because he is part of a decommissioned line of synthetics who can access and converse with the MOTHER (MU-TH-UR) mainframe, which can help the team access the ship’s controls. Rain is initially reticent, especially with Bjorn’s tactless remarks about Andy being a defective android. Still, Tyler reminds her that they will be stuck in this colony like their parents if they don’t take this opportunity. Rain reluctantly agrees, leading to the team embarking on the journey with the help of the mining hauler Corbelan IV.
How does Tyler free the face-huggers?
The journey to the space station consisted of Corbelan IV thrusting upwards through the acid-filled dense cloudy atmosphere of the star system, escaping that, and then flying through deep space to the space station. After docking with the space station, Andy manages to open the air-lock hatch, through which Tyler and Bjorn, adorned in their space suits, crawl through.
Once they enter the cavernous room where the cryopods are, Andy fixes the unstable gravity generator and the temperature controller, regulating the oxygen. However, Tyler realizes that the cryopods don’t have enough fuel to make the nine-year trip to Yvaga. The team locates a cryo-chamber that is running on the same fuel. Tyler hopes to use that fuel from the cryo depot inside the pods. Meanwhile, as planned, Navarro disconnects the Corbelan from the station and lines up with the cryopod ejection module, where she opens the hatch of the hauler to guide the cryopods safely inside.
Within the hauler, Rain learns two things: Bjorn’s hatred towards Andy stems from a synthetic shutting down of the mines due to a gas leak, with Bjorn’s mother still trapped inside; Kay is pregnant, and her brother Tyler is unaware of that. If you thought this wouldn’t come back horrifyingly towards the end, you haven’t seen the Alien films.
Meanwhile, back at the space station, the trio searches for the cryo-lab and learns through the automated announcing system that the space station is termed the Renaissance, part of Weyland-Yutani’s Center for Research and Development. It is divided into two modules, Romulus and Remus, named after the twin brothers born presumably to the God of War through a vestal virgin. While searching, an altercation occurs, with Bjorn inadvertently revealing that the Yvaga system is very anti-Weyland-Yutani, so synthetics developed by the corporation wouldn’t be allowed there.
Thus, their escape plans didn’t involve Andy beyond being instrumental in transporting cryopods, but after that, Andy would have to return to Jackson’s star to be scrapped. According to his programming, Andy accepts that because it is good for Rain. The laboratory they come across definitely feels abandoned rather than decommissioned, with a hole through the floors and a synthetic half destroyed, with only its torso intact. However, they soon locate the cryo-chamber and manage to scavenge its fuel.
Unbeknownst to them, the cryo-chamber had been housing frozen face huggers. The scavenging of its fuel induces an auto-lockdown and raises temperatures in the cryo-chamber. Andy is unable to override the lockdown because he doesn’t have access. To rescue them, Navarro and Rain rush from the Corbelan to the Renaissance, past the laboratory. Rain notices the broken-down synthetic and takes out his chip, which she gives to Tyler.
Tyler inserts the chip within Andy, leading to the android rebooting; the face huggers, meanwhile, have come alive and started swimming through the rapidly water-filling lab. As both Bjorn and Tyler try not to be attached to a face hugger, Andy’s reboot is completed, with him managing to rescue Tyler from being attacked, opening the door to the lab, and being granted all security controls. However, the addition of his chip has now updated his directives.
Who is Rook?
While the team manages to rush out of the cryo chamber, they are chased by face huggers. As the door to the laboratory closes, one of the facehuggers latches on to Navarro’s face and uses its tail to constrict her neck. The team tries to remove the face hugger, but Andy, now with an upgraded AI and repaired motor system, reveals that any movement or violent attack on the face hugger with an electric prod would flex the tail and break Navarro’s neck. Instead, he proposes to bring the half-destroyed synthetic Rook back on and ask for a solution.
Rook’s facial characteristics resemble those of Ash, the synthetic employee of Weyland-Yutani from the 1979 film “Alien” (because the visual effects utilize the reference to actor Ian Holm, while Daniel Betts voices Rook). That leads to the inference that Rook belongs to the same make and model as Ash (Hyperdyne Systems 120 A/2), which has “always been twitchy.” Rook, or his torso, is saddened to learn that his mission to protect the Z1 strain has failed. He reveals that the facehugger, or parasitoid, is planting a seed inside her that would absorb her DNA and permit a xenomorph to burst out of her before revealing the corpse of the same xenomorph that had afflicted and killed the majority of the crew of the Nostromo.
170 days ago, the body was finally located, but lack of oxygen and food hadn’t killed it off, and the Xenomorph had razed havoc until one of the soldiers of the Renaissance had shot it. The acidic blood that the Xenomorph bled out caused ruptures across the hull, killing everyone on board, until Rook managed to seal the station but ran out of power in the process. Now, the station has 36 hours before it collides with the asteroid belt covering the planet Jackson.
What happens to Navarro and the Corbolean?
Rain finally comes up with an idea, which Tyler executes: freezing the tail of the face hugger that would loosen the chokehold, helping them to remove the face hugger from Navarro. Navarro is freed, but as Rook and, consequently, Andy state, the creature’s work is done. Rook’s advice to Andy, to help “humans reach the cold, hard-calculated decisions,” doesn’t work because his plan to stop Navarro from going back to the Corbolean fails as Bjorn hits him with the prod, throwing Andy back and injuring him.
Navarro and Bjorn walk back to the Corbolean through the airlock, with Bjorn closing it behind him and Andy unable to stop him. The helpless Andy, Tyler, and Rain look on as Navarro tries to navigate the ship out of there, only for the xenomorph inside her to finally gestate and grow out, bursting through her chest, much to the horror of Kay and Bjorn.
The ship, out of control, crashes into the station and lands inside the Romulus hangar bay, while the crash pushes the station further into Jackson’s orbit, now decreasing the time taken to crash into the asteroid belt from 36 hours to 2. Rain and Tyler decide to go towards that hangar, but unbeknownst to them, Andy is called by Rook. He has checked the integrity of compound Z1 before requesting assistance from Andy to finish their mission, which Andy finds himself unable to refuse as his directive now rests on loyalty towards Weyland-Yutani.
What was Rook’s mission?
Tyler and Rain, assisted by Andy, walk through the laboratory, now infested by face-huggers. They ensure that the laboratory temperature is raised enough for their body temperature to be camouflaged and thus undetected by the face-huggers. However, their sneaking around is interrupted when Tyler receives a call from the injured Kay.
While they had been trying to sneak around, Kay had walked through the airlock only to find herself face-to-face with the just-born xenomorph, now cocooned and growing. Bjorn sneaks up behind her and uses his electric prod to kill it, but that only causes the cocoon to excrete acidic blood, which kills Bjorn after eating through his fingers and chest. Kay, horrified, rushes to the door connecting to the space station but cannot gain access, so she calls Tyler.
Tyler harrowed at listening to his sister, starts sweating, which leads to them being detected, and Andy finally signals them to run. Meanwhile, Kay had managed to open the hangar door bay and barely managed to jump out; the Xenomorph had fully grown and was slowly walking behind her. As Kay requests that they open the hangar bay doors, Andy refuses upon seeing the Xenomorph behind her, choosing to protect the three of them instead of letting the monster make mincemeat of them all. The troubling pragmatism forces the three of them to watch as the Xenomorph impales Kay with its long tail and drags her to the depths of the Renaissance.
Andy, unfazed, resumes his mission, with the dejected Tyler and Rain following. Only after Andy completes his mission will Rook permit the Corbolean to depart, after which both Tyler and Rain are free to go to Yviga, while Andy will go back to Jackson. At the laboratory within the Romulus module of the space station, Andy reveals that the Z1 fluid he is instructed to protect has been extracted from the face huggers, which had been built from the DNA of the exhumed xenomorphs.
This non-newtonian fluid, which Rook terms “The Prometheus Fire,” is Z1, the synthesized version of the parasitic organism that theoretically would perfect humankind and allow them to colonize the universe without their inherent fragility. The Z1 helps in the Xenomorph’s accelerated metabolism and growth; as Andy shows in one of the videos, it resurrected a dead rat. Rook plans to ensure that Z1 is returned to the colony. Once the Z1 is inside the Corbolean, he will take control of the autopilot and guide the ship to the colony. (What they don’t know is that the fluid would overpower and take over the rat, killing it and creating a xeno-morph hybrid of its own that eventually died in the lab.).
Does Rain manage to return to the Corbolean?
Rain and Andy arm themselves with two F44AA pulse rifles and begin the treacherous journey back to the Corbolean. They find the walkway almost transformed into a Xenomorph hive, where Tyler has identified Kay, who has still not been dissolved into the hive through the cocoon. Andy sensed that she hadn’t been implanted yet and urged Tyler to inject her with the Z1 liquid to stop her bleeding and save her.
Rain further expands on the plan, stating that they would put Kay in cryosleep until they reach the colony, where she would be treated. But as they reach the end of the walkway towards the elevator, the Xenomorph attacks Andy, damaging him heavily and killing Tyler. Barely managing to escape, Rain requests that Kay return with the Z1 to the Corbolean and start the ship. Rain would find a way to her, but she wouldn’t leave Andy. As Rain climbs down the ladder at the elevator shaft, Kay decides to inject herself with Z1, causing herself to heal.
Meanwhile, Rain manages to locate Andy and remove the chip from his brain, restoring him to normal. However, the two of them are unable to convince Rook to open the door and help them escape the walkway, as that would “endanger the substance.” As Rain and Andy wait for their inevitable demise, one of Andy’s jokes about zero gravity springs an idea in Rain. She shuts the artificial gravity generator down, causing gravity to resort to its default unstable state, and every 10 seconds, it reverts to normal.
That pushes both them and the Xenomorphs without a literal ground to stand on, and Rain fires off her plasma rifle at them, killing them. She and Andy use zero gravity to dodge the spouted acid blood and float toward the elevator shaft. As they try to glide upward, Rain shoots one of the xenomorphs, but the recoil pushes her upward, making her ascent uncontrollable. The gravity returned before Andy could catch her, and she fell, along with the elevator over her. Andy manages to stop the elevator while she is caught, with the tail almost impaling her by the xenomorph.
As she finds herself face-to-face with a xenomorph and a face hugger, she is rescued by Andy, who shoots the plasma rifle and shoots both the face hugger and the xenomorph dead, voicing Ripley’s iconic line from Aliens (1986): “Get away from her, you bitch.”. Andy and Rain return to the Corbolean as the station crosses the asteroid belt. Rook takes over the hauler via remote control and guides it away from the exploding innards of the Renaissance. Rain puts the exhausted Kay inside one of the cryopods while shutting down the remote control, denying access to the ship’s controls to Rook and allowing the ship to restore its controls to autopilot—toward the planet Yvaga.
Alien: Romulus (2024) Movie Ending Explained:
How does the offspring connect this film to the rest of the franchise?
Rain leaves Andy to charge while emphatically stating that she is coming with him and including within him a new directive: to search for solutions beneficial not just to Rain but to both of them. As Rain prepares the cryopods, she hears the pod containing Kay signal that Kay is in critical condition. She opens the pod only to find Kay giving birth to a cocoon-shaped figure similar to the eggs containing the face huggers. Rain barely manages to break the umbilical cord and carry it towards the cargo bay before her hands are suddenly struck by acid, and the cocoon falls through the floor into the cargo bay, stopping its descent due to the sand inside.
The damage to the ship’s hull forces the ship to go to manual, waking Andy up, who walks out to the cargo bay of the hauler where the cryopods are kept, only to find an injured Kay having barely slithered out of her pod. While Rain had gone to investigate, unbeknownst to her, the offspring had managed to escape above, and Andy finally found himself face-to-face with it. Its rapid metabolism forces the organism to grow almost seven feet tall. While its legs and arms are spindly like those of the xenomorphs, its white skin and gigantic physique resemble the anatomy of the Engineers, the gigantic humanoid creatures who created the Xenomorphs.
According to director Fede Alvarez, the black goo, or, for this film, Z1, is equivalent to the semen of the Xenomorphs that had been extracted from the face-huggers. David’s experimentation with Xenomorphs and human tissues harvested from Shaw and, presumably, Daniels in Alien: Covenant led to the formation of the Xenomorphs, and a version of this hybrid would have finally been shown, presumably, in Scott’s third film in his prequel trilogy.
However, as a missing link, the offspring resembles a terrifying hybrid of humans, engineers, and Xenomorphs. The story also references the events that would happen almost two centuries later in the “Alien Resurrection,” dealing with a similar human xenomorph hybrid that the clone of Ripley would be able to destroy by depressurizing the vessel she had been trapped in.
The hybrid kills Kay and grievously injures Andy. Rain manages to lower the temperature of the cargo bay to slow the creature down and lock him for a minute. She wears a protective suit before trying to open the cargo door that would allow her to jettison the cargo bed. As the ship incurs damages while flying way too close to the asteroid belt, Rain waits for the hybrid to come near, and she begins to close the doors connecting the cargo bed to the ship, except the top hatch.
As the offspring enters the cargo bed and deflects the bullets with ease, Rain sees the cocoon from which the offspring had crawled out, filled with acidic blood. She kicks open the cocoon, releasing the acid blood to react with the cargo bed floor, causing depressurization and causing the offspring, as well as her, to jettison off. She barely manages to hang on due to the rope connecting her to the latch, which would cause the cargo bed to jettison altogether. As she climbs up, the offspring, still not dead, tries to break through her helmet, but she pulls the rope, jettisoning the cargo bed and the offspring along with it, killing it (presumably) for good.
The final scene finds Rain dragging an injured Andy within a cryo pod, promising that nothing will happen to him before she enters stasis herself. She leaves behind a final log, reflecting on what she would find on Yviga when she wakes up nine years later, but she still has hope.
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