Warning: This article contains major spoilers for Alien: Romulus (2024).
In its franchise’s typical fashion, Alien: Romulus puts its heroine, Rain (Civil War star Cailee Spaeny), through the wringer for much of its 119-minute runtime. After using one of the Romulus Space Station’s pulse rifles and its anti-gravity surges to survive endless attacks from both Xenomorphs and Facehuggers, it looks for a moment like Rain may have finally reached a well-deserved happy ending.
As she promises her android “brother,” Andy (Rye Lane star David Jonsson), that she’ll find a way for the two of them to stay together, and puts her pregnant, sole-surviving human friend, Kay (The Last of Us season 2 star Isabela Merced), into cryosleep, though, experienced Alien viewers will likely start to get the sense that the rug is about to be pulled out from under her one last time.
The calm before the storm
Sure enough, that’s exactly what happens because, unbeknownst to Rain, a desperate Kay chose to inject herself with the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s supposedly life-saving, Xenomorph-based compound to try to save her and her baby’s lives during Alien: Romulus‘ nerve-shredding third act. Rain discovers this when Kay’s vitals suddenly enter critical condition in her cryo pod. She opens her suddenly very pregnant friend’s cryo chamber just in time to witness her give birth to an alien shell containing a terrifying Xenomorph-human hybrid. It isn’t then long before she, Kay, and Andy have all found themselves face to face with a tall, tailed monstrosity that looks — likely deliberately — like a cross between a Xenomorph and one of the Engineers featured in Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels, 2012’s Prometheus and 2017’s Alien: Covenant.
What follows is a showdown between Rain and Kay’s hybrid baby that, thanks to the former’s attempts to blast it into space, also seems reminiscent of Ellen Ripley’s (Sigourney Weaver) final battle against her Xenomorph foe at the end of Alien. Rain’s fight ends in slightly more explosive fashion when she uses both the acid from the hybrid’s Xenomorph-like birth shell, as well as her ship’s unloading levers, to trap Romulus‘ final monster in a container that is promptly torn to shreds by the nearby asteroid belt that has lurked like a cosmic Chekhov’s Gun throughout the entirety of the film’s story. Rain manages to survive the encounter by the skin of her teeth, but the same can’t be said for Kay, who is tragically killed by her own creation after she (understandably) rejects its baby-like bid for some motherly affection.
Rain subsequently puts a wounded, badly drained Andy to sleep in a cryo chamber of his own. Alien: Romulus then ends with Rain, like both Ripley and Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) before her, recording an audio log identifying herself as the last survivor of her ship’s human voyage and expressing both hope and uncertainty about what lies in her future. Having taken control of her ship again and set a course for the seemingly pleasant planet of Yvaga, Rain has a reason to be, at least, somewhat optimistic about what may come next. Then again, should Romulus ever get its own sequel, it seems more likely than not that her and Andy’s journey to Yvaga will get interrupted once again.
Alien: Romulus‘ ending is, in other words, a bit of an amalgamation of moments and tropes from its franchise’s past entries that have been remixed just enough to make it feel both familiar and new. The same is mostly true for the film itself, which relies a few times on references to Alien and Aliens that are too ham-fisted to actually work and doesn’t do anything particularly new so much as it does what it does with a whole lot of entertaining style and flash. Even Romulus‘ last-minute introduction of a human-Xenomorph hybrid owes a huge debt to the climax of 1997’s Alien Resurrection, which ends with Ripley coming face to face with a monstrous creature that just so happens to be the result of cross-contamination experimentations between her and a Xenomorph Queen’s genes. That fact doesn’t make Alien: Romulus‘ fourth act any less thrilling or jaw-dropping, though. On the contrary, it sends the film out on an appropriately horrifying high that lets director Fede Álvarez fully flex his body-horror muscles.
How does Alien: Romulus end?
Alien: Romulus‘ final battle marks the moment when the film finds its most ingenious way to bridge the gaps between it and the other Alien movies. The nature and outcome of Rain’s climactic confrontation with Kay’s hybrid baby creates a clear parallel between Romulus and Alien, while the crossing of Kay’s human genes with those of a Xenomorph even manages to make something out of Alien Resurrection, a film that most fans had previously chosen to forget even existed. The creature’s humanoid face and black eyes, meanwhile, visually call to mind similar characters from Ridley Scott’s unfortunately abandoned Alien prequels. If one wanted to be extremely generous to Romulus, they could also say that the film’s most biting bit of thematic messaging exists in the introduction and destruction of its human-Xenomorph abomination.
The compound that creates Kay’s hybrid baby is, after all, the result of Weyland-Yutani’s efforts to give human beings an “upgrade” that makes it easier for them to comply with the demands and lethal challenges of their colonial space work. It’s a bit of deranged corporate malfeasance that, in a time when so many real-life tech executives and pundits are right now touting how much “more efficient” AI will make every company, hits with stomach-churning force. The fact that it’s the Weyland-Yutani compound that then results in the creation of, perhaps, the Alien franchise’s most terrifying monster to date may in turn be telling when it comes to how Álvarez and his Romulus co-writer, Rodo Sayagues, feel about some of our modern era’s more concerning, growing technological trends.
That may arguably be too deep of an interpretation of a film that, for most of its runtime, doesn’t feel like it has much more going on beneath its surface than its superficial, undeniably pleasing genre thrills. The fact that such a reading is there, however, is a testament to how well Alien: Romulus is able to frequently walk in the footsteps of its classic predecessors — even if you may also leave it wishing that it did a better job of carving out a new path for itself.
Alien: Romulus is now playing in theaters.
