'Alien: Romulus' movie spoilers! Explosive ending sets up franchise's next steps
Spoiler alert! We're discussing important plot points and the ending of “Alien: Romulus” (in theaters now), so beware if you haven’t seen it yet.
For decades, the Xenomorph has been the No. 1 big bad of the “Alien” movie universe. But have you met the Offspring?
A new creature enters the franchise canon with director Fede Alvarez’s “Alien: Romulus,” a back-to-basics entry set 20 years after Ridley Scott’s original 1979 “Alien” and 37 years before James Cameron’s 1986 sequel “Aliens” – and it pays homage to those and other installments. (Miss that black goo from “Prometheus”? It’s back!)
In “Romulus,” Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), her android “brother” Andy (David Jonsson) and friends plan to escape their cosmic mining colony run by Weyland-Yutani – still the worst corporation ever – and venture to a new planetary home. A mission to steal travel-ready cryo pods from the abandoned space station Renaissance goes awry when they run afoul of an army of Facehuggers and a hive of Xenomorphs. (And it's not so much empty as everybody on the thing was gruesomely murdered.) A fight to survive ensues, and not everyone makes it out alive.
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Let’s talk about the wild finale, a familiar returning face and the human/alien hybrid Offspring that’ll likely spawn a ton of online “Alien” chatter:
What happens at the end of ‘Alien: Romulus’?
In addition to discovering a bunch of nasty beasts on board, the young explorers learn that the Renaissance had a lab researching how alien genomes can help mankind and even evolve us into higher life forms. Rain and David end up the final two of their group still alive after defeating the Offspring (more on him in a minute) and shooting him into the destructive rings of their colony planet. Rain is also not a big fan of Weyland-Yutani (who is, really?) so rather than return all the alien research to them, she and David head out on their nine-year journey to a new world. Rain gets a happyish ending a la Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley in the original “Alien,” though David needs some serious repair work.
Are there any ‘Alien’ cameos in ‘Romulus’?
“Romulus” not only borrows the claustrophobic vibe of the first “Alien’ movie but also one of its stars. Ian Holm, who played android crew member Ash and died in 2020, appears via animatronics and Hollywood wizardry as Rook, a synthetic lookalike found aboard the abandoned Renaissance with only the top half of his body intact.
The youngsters plundering the Renaissance get Rook up and running, but like Ash, he’s not working for the good guys. His primary mission is to get the alien research to Weyland-Yutani scientists and wants Rain to let him take control of her ship to do so, but she denies him, leaving Rook to perish as the Renaissance is destroyed.
It's part of "Alien" canon that Weyland-Yutani has "a limited amount of faces" for these androids, Alvarez tells Paste BN, and "I felt like it was almost unfair that Ian Holm didn't get to reappear ever." Scott, a "Romulus" producer, "was really good friends with Ian and loved to see him again," says Alvarez, who got approval from Holm's family. "His widow thought that Ian Holm was given kind of the cold shoulder by Hollywood in the last 10 years of his career, and that he would've loved to get the call to be involved in this movie."
What’s up with this Offspring thing?
“Alien: Resurrection” in 1997 introduced the Newborn, a human/alien hybrid and Xenomorph-like creature with humanoid features and a skull head. The Offspring in “Romulus” looks much, much cooler and appears via bonkers circumstances: When Rain’s pregnant friend Kay (Isabela Merced) is mortally wounded, she injects herself with an alien genome in a desperate attempt for survival, but instead alters the bun in her oven in the most disturbing way possible. She rapidly goes into labor and gives birth to a gaunt and terrifying monster who shares facial similarities with the ancient Engineers (see: “Prometheus”) and has a super-creepy maw in his mouth a la the Xenomorphs.
For the Offspring, "we didn't want do a full CG creature at all, that would've betrayed the spirit of these movies," Alvarez says. The director instead was inspired by Scott, who cast 6-foot-10 Nigerian unknown Bolaji Badejo to play the original film's Xenomorph, to "find someone really tall and skinny that can pull this off."
Enter Robert Bobroczkyi, a 7-foot-7 former Romanian basketball player. "He did an amazing performance for someone that has never done that before," Alvarez says. "Being tall is one thing – next to Cailee who is 5 feet tall, that's magic. But he really brought a talent that blew us all away. He goes toe-to-toe with Isabela in a face-to-face (encounter) and he's fantastic."
The Offspring kills his mom and is defeated, though we don’t see his dead body after he apparently falls to his doom. Maybe he’ll be back for a sequel? Speaking of …
Does ‘Alien: Romulus’ have a post-credits scene?
Nope! But there are certainly avenues to go if Alvarez or someone else wants to continue to dig into the time period between the first two “Alien” movies. The next movie (or two, if we’re thinking trilogy) could continue Rain and David’s journey, perhaps running into the Offspring again or other beasties. Or a film more directly leading up to the events of “Aliens” – since there are nearly four decades of untapped storytelling there. And heck, what “Alien” fan wouldn’t want to watch a movie specifically about the various shenanigans at Weyland-Yutani, because there’s got to be some whistleblowers around that place.
What is next in the franchise pipeline, however, is “Alien: Earth,” a Hulu prequel series out next year created by Noah Hawley (“Fargo”) set 30 years before the original “Alien.”