Summary
Alien: Romuluswas widely considered a hit in theAlienfranchise, featuring a return to the claustrophobic environment and new twists on classic creatures. But it may have also done something that could hamstring any future sequels.
TheAlienfranchise has become iconic over the years, particularly for its introduction of one ofcinema’s scariest monsters, the Xenomorph. The fictional extraterrestrial is an endoparasitoid which is considered by many within theAlienmovies, particularly the Weyland-Yutani corporation, to be a “perfect specimen.” The creature goes through multiple stages of life, starting as an egg, before hatching and releasing a parasite known as a facehugger, which implants alien embryos into a host body. The embryo will then grow inside the host before forcibly breaking out and emerging in its new chestburster form. From there it will rapidly grow into a full-sized Xenomorph. The Xenomorph’s unsettling design, with its acid blood and ability to survive basically anything, has made it one of the scariest monsters in media, but perhaps they’re not scary enough forAlienmovies anymore.
Alien’s Hybrid History
Following the release ofAlienandAliens, other installments in the franchise went about looking for different ways to iterate on the xenomorph character.Aliensintroduced the Alien Queen,Alien 3gave audiences the xenomorph-dog hybrid, andAlien: Resurrectioncreated a horrifying creature combined with Ripley’s and the Alien Queen’s DNA.Prometheuscontinued iterating on the trend, introducing different species in the xenomorph family, including the Deacon, whichAlien: Covenantthen continued, adding the Neomorph to the list ofAlienvariants.
Alienas a franchise has always been fascinated with evolution and biology. After the initial couple of films, the franchise moved further away from its core premise of being a claustrophobic monster movie in space, and began introducing more complex lore and mythology around the xenomorph species. In many ways,Alien: Romuluswas a blend of both the old and newhalves of the franchise. It returned to many of the ideas that madeAliengreat, finding new ways to iterate on existing creatures, like a swarm of facehuggers, oran zero gravity xenomorph fight.Alien: Romuluscapitalized on the inherent unsettling and graphic nature of H.R. Giger’s design, pairing it with practical sets to great effect. But that didn’t stop the movie from also trying its hand at its own alien evolution.
1 hour 59 minutes
Genre
Horror, Sci-Fi
Alien: Romulushas all the staples of an alien film: face-huggers, chestbursters, and plenty of xenomorphs. It also explores what a human-xenomorph hybrid may look like. InAlien: Romulus, Kay (Isabela Merced) is revealed to be pregnant, and in her attempt to survive her wounds after the xenomorph’s attack, she injects herself with an experimental serum that is derived from both the xenomorph and human genome. It was a serumthe Renaissance space stationhad been working on in secret and was designed to enhance the human genome so the Weyland-Yutani company could augment its employees to work in hostile environments.
However, what the serum ends up doing is rapidly accelerating the growth of the fetus inside Kay, resulting in her birthing an unnatural human-alien hybrid, known inAlien: Romulusas “the offspring.” The offspring is a terrifying creation, blending the scariest parts of both the human and xenomorph bodies, with a look that is also a bitreminiscent ofPrometheus’Engineers. As is the best way to deal with these things, Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and Andy (David Jonsson) manage to eject the offspring out of the airlock, which means it’s probably still alive out there somewhere.
Alien Romulus Has a Monster Problem
Is the Xenomorph Not Scary Enough Anymore?
The offspring is perhaps second only to the Ripley-xenomorph hybrid inAlien: Resurrection, which also fused human and alien DNA into a freak creation. It’s an idea that’s now been explored twice in the franchise, which begs the question, where do the movies go afterAlien: Romulus? There have been many different combinations of the xenomorph’s DNA with other creatures, in hopes it will create something scarier than the last. But what can the upcomingAlien: Romulussequel do that could top the horror of the offspring? And does theAlienfranchise’s reliance on new hybrids mean it’s running out of ideas?
The original xenomorph was so iconic it’s become one of horror’s greatest monsters, but rarely has one of its hybrid creations outshone the original alien. Perhaps whatfutureAlienmovies need to look atis finding new ways to utilize the existing xenomorph.Alien: Romulusproved it could be done, with many of the scares in the first two-thirds of the movie relying on existing xenomorph life stages. Whether it can be done again, however, remains to be seen. Fede Àlvarez no doubt has plenty of ideas forhisAlien: Romulussequel, but there’s no telling whether the base xenomorph will satisfy his plans, or whether it will be enough for the audiences watching.
