What is Alien: Romulus about?
Alien: Romulus is about the difficulty in leaving the life you’ve known for something new. Whether that’s leaving a third world country or a small town or a job or relationship. The xenomorphs embody the physical and emotional hurdles you must overcome to make such a change.
Cast
- Rain – Cailee Spaeny
- Andy – David Jonsson
- Tyler – Archie Renaux
- Kay – Isabela Merced
- Bjorn – Spike Fearn
- Navarro – Aileen Wu
- Rook – Daniel Betts (Ian Holm)
- Xenomorph – Trevor Newlin
- Offspring – Robert Bobroczkyi
- Written by – Fede Álvarez | Rodo Sayagues
- Directed by – Fede Álvarez
How to understand Alien: Romulus
Compare the beginning to the ending
Comparing a film’s beginning to its ending is one of the core techniques for understanding movies. And, sure enough, it helps a lot with Alien: Romulus. Skip the prologue where they find the xenomorph from the Nostromo wreckage. Start with Rain’s first scene. She sits on a ridge, sun on her face, looking out over a magnificent landscape. We cut to her in bed. She wakes up. The light is dim, artificial. She’s in a contained space rather than the open air of that other world. Outside isn’t some beautiful vista but the gigantic facility of the mining company that runs this colony on a planet that’s perpetually dark.
What about the end? Back on the Corbelan, Rain has defeated the Offspring and survived the madness of the Romulus station. She places Andy in a stasis pod then gets into a pod herself. She goes into cryosleep. We hear the whole closing speech (such a franchise trope): they’ll head to Yvaga and see what happens next. The end.
It might seem like there isn’t much happening here. But there is! When comparing/contrasting beginning and end, one thing to be aware of is parallels. Things that are similar/repeat. So what’s the parallel here? Rain sleeping. At the beginning, we see her dream, then she wakes up. At the end, she falls asleep as we get the speech about Yvaga. The expectation set by the parallel is that we’ll go from falling asleep to her dream. But Romulus ends before we see the dream. So no parallel?
But that’s the thing—the dream at the beginning was of Yvaga; Rain tells her friends that she’s dreamt of the planet (which is what we saw in the opening). So the end of the movie is her dream potentially coming true.
Having established that the pursuit of this dream is Rain’s character arc, the next step is to look at what happens between the beginning and the ending, specifically related to “going to Yvaga”, as a test to see if this is what the movie is about. And, yup, there’s plenty of talk around Yvaga as a sort of salvation. The characters believe it will be a paradise relative to the life they’ve known. Cool. So that tells us, a bit more concretely, that the overall story, not just Rain’s arc, is about escape, about making a dream come true.
Which brings us to the next question: what’s preventing the dream from coming true?
The company interferes
The first 10 minutes of Alien: Romulus briefly introduces us to Rain’s life on the mining colony of Jackson’s Star. It’s not great. Having put in 12,032 hours of work, she’s met her quota and should be free to go. Except the company doubles the quota to 24,000. Some quick math: 12k total hours would take 300 weeks at 40 hours per week. That’s 5.76 years. So she has already worked nearly 6 years and is told she’ll have to work 6 more. Why? Because too many people have died in the mines. That feels wrong. The company hasn’t fairly contracted these employees, it’s enslaved them. And will keep them under bureaucratic nonsense so it can work them to death.
So right there, less than 9 minutes into Alien: Romulus, we have Rain thinking she’s about to head off to pursue her dream only for the company to say “Nope, not today.” We call this a micro-narrative, a little section within a movie that has a self-contained beginning, middle, and end. Beginning: going to get my travel papers. Middle: told I don’t actually qualify. End: 12k more hours added to my contract. Sad.
Most good films chain together micro-narratives as a series of cause-and-effect sequences. There’s another technique where a micro-narrative repeats but on a bigger scale. For example, here, Rain thinks she’ll just go get her travel papers then head off to Yvaga. The company tells her no. What happens a few minutes later? Tyler and his crew convince Rain to go to the abandoned station with them, get the stasis pods, then head off to Yvaga. Except more corporate nonsense prevents them from doing that. It’s the same thing but scaled up.
As far as I’m aware, there isn’t a specific term for this yet. A foundational micro-narrative? Core micro-narrative? Escalating micro-narrative? Waterfall narrative? But it’s relatively common. For example, in the movie The Natural, the first 15-ish minutes chains together a few micro-narratives to show Roy Hobbs having the potential to be one of the greatest baseball players of all-time. But then he chases after a woman who ends up being a serial killer targeting athletes. She shoots him and 16 years go by before he returns to baseball. The rest of the movie is him trying to, in his mid-30s, live up to what potential he has left. Lo and behold, he still has some juice and takes the world by storm. Except what happens? He starts chasing a woman who is actively trying to distract him from playing well. It’s the same story as the first 15 minutes but scaled up.
That’s not in the best interest of the company
To access the Romulus station’s authorized systems, Rain places the module from Rook into Andy. Andy explains that the advanced module improves his AI, meaning he’s stronger, faster, smarter, and more confident. But it also overwrites his primary directive. It’s no longer “Protect Rain” but “To do what’s in the best interest of the company.”
This creates a dichotomy between Andy who prioritizes a person, Rain, and Andy who prioritizes his corporate overlords, Weyland-Yutani. So you have Rain’s initial contract-release canceled by the company. Then Andy’s compromised by the company. And the xenomorphs and facehuggers are all there because the company prioritized research & development over what’s best for its employees. So we have this motif of corporate priorities constantly interfering in the health, happiness, and opportunities of associated individuals. All these people want to do is have a better life, but politics, bureaucracy, and capitalism prevent that from happening.
That ties back to the original Alien
While Alien: Romulus has many superficial callbacks to other films from the Alien franchise, the emphasis on corporations not caring about people is a nod to the original film. In Ridley Scott’s Alien, the thematic emphasis is on how the Weyland-Yutani Corporation exploits its workers. The MU/TH/ER computer that’s in charge of the Nostromo is a parental figure that’s supposed to care for the crew. But orders from the company override protecting the crew in favor of bringing back important cargo. The xenomorph becomes the new “child” and embodies the worst aspects of corporate capitalism. The fight between Ripley and the alien is the fight between humanization and dehumanization in the workplace. It’s pretty punk rock.
What does the context of the original Alien tell us?
Context from other movies in a franchise can provide insight to later movies in the franchise, from understanding references and inside jokes to appreciating thematic resonances and extensions. Especially a franchise like Alien that has been so theme-driven. So what can we learn here?
Fede Álvarez clearly understood the corporate aspect of the original movie and returned to it. Except there’s a bit of a twist. In the original, the crew was just trying to do their jobs. And the company makes that increasingly difficult, to the point of labeling the workers as expendable. In Alien: Romulus, the characters aren’t trying to do their job. They’re trying to escape from enslavement to a better life. So as much as the “company” is the villain, the journey is less about being an employee and more about immigration.
I know that might sound like a reach. But this is what Álvarez said in an interview on the show Crew Call.
Quote: I hope people connect with it because it’s such a third world story, in a way. That’s where I’m from [Uruguay]. If you’re born in the third world, that’s your reality: for good, for bad. Particularly when you grow up. When you’re in your twenties, it doesn’t matter how much people can tell you, “Hey, it’s a beautiful country, there’s a lot of blessings here.” You’re gonna go, “I want to go to New York! I want to go to London.” Everybody wants to go where the center of the world is, whatever feels like it’s the center of the world. The narrative of young people that are born in the place they feel is the wrong place, where things feel to be collapsing around them, and they just want to get out of there, and they look at their parents and [think] “I don’t want to end up like them.” That’s a very third world reality. It would be hard for an American writer who was born in New York to even have that feeling. It’s not something [they were] born with. But I was.
And the monster, usually, is everything that stops you from getting whatever you want to go, is the monster, the alien, all the things you’re gonna go through. That’s why one of my favorite shots in the movie is when [Rain] sees the sun for a second and she covers her face, and that’s what she wants, she wants to go to a place where at least the sun shines. And then the ship (the Romulus station) falls into frame and covers the sun. It’s like, “You wanna get there, you’re gonna have to go through this whole story before you can actually hope to get there.”
What Fede described is an example of how thoughtful many filmmakers are about shots. The idea that “the sun is on her face and then gets blocked by the station that represents everything keeping her from her dream” isn’t something critics/scholars make up to sound smart. Artists are aware of the potential in small details and purposefully structure and compose to make them meaningful. That’s what separates beginner level storytelling, from intermediary, from advanced.
A beginner would have the sun on Rain’s face then have someone go “Look” and everyone looks out another window and sees the Romulus and Remus outpost. It’s similar in concept—you go from sun to station—but lacks the finesse of having the station block out the sun. Actually, a beginner probably wouldn’t even have the sun have symbolic meaning in the first place. They’d have the characters talking about “We can’t wait to get to Yvaga” then have the outpost station appear. Intermediate level knows to make the sun symbolic for the dream. And the more advanced storyteller knows to have the station be the thing that blocks out the sun.
It’s similar to a shot in Prometheus, of storm clouds building in a blue sky, seemingly nothing more than B-roll, a transition. But Ridley Scott actually uses it to convey the main character’s loss of faith, the doubt and negativity gathering in her soul, having met her maker and finding it supremely disappointing. That’s the kind of representative, advanced stuff that happens when a storyteller understands the power of imbuing objects with meaning and how to use that on screen.
So as much as Alien: Romulus touches on themes of corporate dehumanization, it’s ultimately not about that so much as how bureaucracy and larger forces make escaping from somewhere difficult. You can’t just pick up and go from Uruguay to New York City. I mean, you can, but it’s not an easy thing to do. Especially when it comes to who you leave behind.
Left behind
When Andy is still his normal self, Bjorn spills the beans that Yvaga doesn’t allow synthetic people (because it’s not a Weyland-Yutani system). This is apparently something Rain knew but hadn’t mentioned. So despite her obvious love for Andy, she had been ready to leave him behind. Andy’s initial reaction to this is a demure “That’s okay. If that’s what’s best for Rain, it’s what’s best for me.”
Later, Andy doesn’t open a door to let Kay escape a room with a xenomorph. Both Tyler and Rain are upset. She asks, “How could you do that?” And Andy, in a softly bitter way, asks “What? Leave someone behind?”
Between these two events, Andry receives the module upgrade and becomes Corporate Andy. Is it surprising to know that the module upgrade comes just a few minutes after the revelation that he’ll be decommissioned and that Rain had lied to him? And how that revelation actually follows the backstory about why Bjorn is so mean to Andy? It turns out that a synthetic, like Andy, made the call to seal a portion of the mine due to a gas leak. The decision saved a dozen lives at the cost of three. One of the three was Bjorn’s mom.
Remember parallels. You have this story of someone sacrificing a few lives to save many more. And then a few minutes later we’re told Andy is on this trip as, essentially, a sacrifice to help the others escape Jackson’s Star. So if Bjorn was mad at what happened to his mom, imagine how Andy feels about what’s happening to him?
You can view the whole module-upgrade and switch to Corporate Andy as representing his anger about Rain’s betrayal. You see a more realistic version of this in the movie The Devil Wears Prada. The main character in that movie, Andy (no irony intended), gets a job at a high-end fashion magazine. Her boyfriend, Nate, is initially really supportive. But as Andy becomes more successful and fashionable, he grows more sarcastic, frustrated, and condescending, until he eventually starts a big fight with her and they break up. People defend Nate despite the movie presenting him as immature and very much in the wrong. Regardless, it’s an example of how people will, in real life, say one thing, feel another, then have their true feelings gradually become more and more obvious.
In genre movies like sci-fi and horror, real feelings get expressed in defamiliarized, often dramatic ways. For example, in Hereditary, a mother’s manic episode brought on by grief becomes a frantic seance that terrifies her husband and son. Or in Gravity, a parent’s depression over the loss of a child and their disconnect from the world becomes an astronaut in outer space who is actually disconnected from the ship and goes hurtling into the void; the journey back to the ship and back to Earth represents overcoming depression.
We can test this whole idea that “Andy’s corporate heel-turn is part of his anger over being abandoned” theory by looking at what causes Andy to revert back to normal. It happens in the basement, after Rain and Tyler save Kay from her cocoon. A xenomorph attack leaves Tyler deceased and Andy knocked over, seizing, in need of a reboot from Rain. When Rain looks to Andy, another xenomorph stands over him. So she and Kay get in the elevator that will take them back to the hangar and to the ship to escape.
In other words, we’ve reached a point where Rain is about to literally abandon Andy. It’s no longer something that might happen once they reach Yvaga. This is it. And it’s in her best interest to leave. If she had stayed, had tried to help, the xenomorphs would have had another snack. Except Rain decides she can’t abandon Andy. Not like this. And goes back for him. What’s her reward for doing the right thing? She can remove the module that turned Andy corporate. He reverts to the nice guy he had always been.
Zoom out and look at the arc. It starts right after Andy realizes he’ll be left behind (beginning). Corporate Andy then makes a pointed comment about being left behind (middle). And the corporate phase concludes once Rain proves her love for him by not abandoning him (end). So the arc is very much a dramatization and representation of Andy feeling hurt about being left behind. Once back to normal, they both apologize.
Eventually, near the end, Rain finally thinks to give Andy a new directive: do what’s best for both of us. That’s actually the most important moment because it explains the entire arc. When Andy’s directive was to do what’s best for Rain, it bonded them but emphasized who was the human and who was the android serving the human. Rain going to Yvaga at the expense of Andy only further dehumanizes him. So the corporate version of Andy represents him at his most robotic, his least human, everything Bjorn feared and hated, in the vein of the franchise’s other heartless synthetics like David and Ash. But once Rain treats him as an equal, as her brother who she would never leave behind, rather than her robo-protector who is expendable, he regains his humanity. And that humanity is ultimately affirmed when she tells him to “do what’s best for us.” That line confirms their equality.
The meaning of Romulus and Remus
The decommissioned outpost station has two halves: Romulus and Remus. We see, briefly, a plaque that says “Romulus and Remus, twin brothers born to the God of War a Vestal Virgin, whose unbreakable bond was forged in the fires of adversity…” The plaque depicts two infants suckling from a wolf. We then cut to a painting that depicts the aftermath of a battle and another image of another child feeding, but this time from a corpse.
Background
So Romulus and Remus. They’re part of Roman mythology. Before Rome existed, this guy Procas was the king of this legendary city called Alba Longa. He had two sons, Numitor and Amulius. Procas passed. Numitor was ready to ascend to the throne, but Amulius pulled a Scar and exiled his brother in order to become king himself. To assure his claim, he executed Numitor’s sons. But the daughter had two baby boys, Romulus and Remus, sired, so the story goes, by the god of war, Mars. The babies end up abandoned by a river. Divine fate means they survived, partially due to crazy happenings like suckling from a she-wolf. A shephard found and adopted them, they grew up, learned who they really were, then defeated Amulius and freed their father.
But then the thing happens. The brothers decided to build a city. But they disagreed on where. One wanted to start over here. The other wanted it over there. The disagreement became such a huge point of contention that they fought over it. To the death. Romulus survived, Remus nope. Romulus founded Rome and became its first king.
Application
The first thing that comes to mind is Rain calling Andy her brother. You do see some strife between them. But it’s not like they end up re-enacting the mythology. Part of me wants to say the reference to Romulus and Remus is nothing more than a nod to the mythological aspects of Prometheus and makes the movie seem like it has another additional mythology-driven layer…without actually having one.
You could maybe try applying it in a broader way, like Rain is a human, Andy is a synthetic. So the myth refers to the dynamic between humans and synthetics? But what we get in this movie doesn’t seem to live up to the Romulus and Remus myth. Rain and Andy aren’t going to Yvaga to build a new city. So does Yvaga represent the idea of Rome? That still feels very weak.
Okay. Let’s try again. The station halves are named Romulus and Remus. So maybe we should be thinking in terms of what Weyland-Yutani’s doing. Which would mean we’re applying the myth to the research and development of xenomorphs. Maybe there were two approaches? And ultimately one won—Rook with his compound, the Prometheus strain. So what happens to the strain? Kay injects herself with it. And that gives rise to the mutant human-xenomorph baby, the Offspring. This theory feels better, right? The way the Offspring leans over Kay then feeds on her recalls the image from the painting and plaque. The Offspring’s also the child of a human and a “god” if you consider the Prometheus compound this scientifically divine entity.
If you accept that premise, that the Offspring is the embodiment of the Romulus myth, then I guess the implication would be that if it wins it would go on to create a civilization of humanmorph hybrids?
Eh. I don’t know how much I like that. Maybe there’s something obvious that I’m missing. But, as of right now, I don’t think we should/need to put too much stock in the meaning/application of the Romulus and Remus myth. If something emerges later, I’ll update this. If you have some theories, leave them as a comment!
Update! The painting
u/Space-Wizard-V on Reddit came through with the source of the painting. It’s by Michael Serre and called Vue de l’Hôtel de Ville (de Marseille) pendant la peste de 1720. So View of the Town Hall of Marseille during the plague of 1720.
So it has nothing to do with Romulus and Remus.
What’s the backstory? The bubonic plague, aka the Black Death, had been an issue in Europe and Eurasia since the middle of the 1300s. So almost 400 years. The World Health Organization lists the official fatality total at over 50 million. At that point, cities like Marseille had quarantine systems in place. And they worked perfectly, because in 1720, a ship, the Grand-Saint-Antoine, arrived from Lebanon. An outbreak had occurred in the middle of the journey and a number of people had already perished. So Marseille followed the proper procedures and isolated the ship. Everything should have been good, right?
From an article on Statnews: The city’s primary municipal magistrate, Jean-Baptiste Estelle, owned part of the ship as well as a large portion of its lucrative cargo. He used his influence to arrange for the premature unloading of the cargo into the city’s warehouses so the goods could be sold soon thereafter at the trade fair. The number of infections and deaths began to climb within days, and the threat to the economy of this major commercial port became all too real. Instead of undertaking emergency measures to try to contain the infection, officials launched an elaborate campaign of misinformation, going as far as hiring doctors to diagnose the disease as only malignant fever instead of the plague.
You can google “Marseille plague 1720 art” and see painting after painting that show the bodies left in the streets and the struggle by the officials to properly clean them up. That’s what Romulus shows us.
So we go from the Romulus and Remus plaque to the painting of a plague-infested Marseilles. In a research facility that ends up producing a black gunk that Rook says is “life itself” but we know is actually death. That definitely seems to connect to what we thought about Romulus connecting to Rook’s research.
How to apply it, though? You could view the xenomorphs themselves as the plague. And how the company is acting like Jean-Baptiste Estelle and bringing this lucrative cargo off a contaminated ship even though it’s the irresponsible thing to do. That feels right to me. But I’m still not sure how that would tie back-to or in-with the myth of Romulus and Remus. Will continue to update if anything changes.
The end of Alien: Romulus explained
Rain has gone through hell to leave a third world situation and start a new life somewhere with more opportunities. Álvarez puts more emphasis on what it takes to make that journey than the aftermath of the journey. For example, if the story was about trying to start a new life, then a section of the film would have happened on Yvaga. And we’d get answers to questions like “Was the trip worth it? Is this place everything Rain had hoped? Can she actually have a life here?” But the film doesn’t ask those questions because the story isn’t about starting a new life but having the courage to pursue starting a new life and coming to terms with the cost of it all.
For Rain, she loses all of her friends, her ex-boyfriend, and, potentially, Andy. Andy isn’t just her brother but connects back to her parents who assigned him to her. He, in many ways, represents Rain’s whole history on Jackson’s Star.
We’ve talked about how genre movies often represent real experiences. What happens when someone leaves one country for a new one? Especially a younger person. Usually, they make the journey alone. Meaning they leave behind their friends, their family, everything they had known. And that’s hard. So what happens in Romulus is a dramatized version of Rain coming to terms with letting go in order to move on. And what cost escalates as the movie goes on. The first things she gives up are easy to give up. The job. The dumb planet. But what’s left is much more personal. Friends like Navarro and Bjorn. A potential love interest in Tyler. You can view Kay and her baby as representing another anchor—how hard it is to not be around when your friends and family have children. You’ll see them, sure, when you visit, but you won’t be a constant, normal part of their lives. That can be hard.
That brings us, once again, to the Offspring. Children almost always symbolize the future. And stories will often have the protagonist fight an evil version of themselves, or a representation of their fears/weaknesses/etc. With those two things in mind, I’d lean toward the Offspring embodying the future if Rain had stayed on Jackson’s Star. Especially since it’s a byproduct of the company. It’s the darkness and ugliness of the planet and mines; everything she hates about that place and everything she fears about staying there any longer; all the hesitations and doubts about moving on. When she defeats it, she’s finally free to leave. Not just physically, but emotionally.
You can even see the end as representing letting go of Andy, too. The Offspring does “kill” Andy after all. Meaning that Rain has to, finally, come to terms with the idea of actually losing him, leaving him. Which is, for her, the hardest thing she has to do. You could even make an argument that the xenomutantman is a parallel to Andy, in the sense that both are in the image of humans without actually being humans. That’s a bit more of a stretch. But applicable enough I feel I should mention it.
I’d argue that Andy, at the end, does embody Rain’s old life. Her childhood, her parents, her innocence. She brings those things with her, even if they may no longer be “operational”. It’s also not quite as deep as I’m making it, but I think the idea is there.
You may disagree with some of the specifics I cited here, and I get that. I’d say the specifics aren’t as important as the broader idea of relating Alien: Romulus’s ending to the difficulties of leaving somewhere old for somewhere new. Hopefully you at least agree with that.
There you go!
You should have a much better idea of how to understand Alien: Romulus. If there are any theories you have or aspects you want to discuss, leave a comment below! Otherwise, let’s dive into some broader questions and answers.
How does Romulus connect to Prometheus?
When Rain, Andy, and Tyler enter Rook’s research lab, Rook gives an exposition dump about discovering a non-Newtonian element that’s life itself. And even says this is what Peter Weyland had been searching for and that it was “Prometheus’s fire”. So we have a pretty direct callback to Prometheus. We even see one of those jars/canisters that the Engineers use to contain the liquid.
Rook found the secret of life by studying the facehuggers/xenomorphs. And we see via video recording that he actually used it to heal a lab rat. Except another shot shows the present-day remnants of the rat—the liquid had actually caused it to heal then continue to mutate until it eventually became monstrous and perished. That foreshadows what happens with Kay’s child. She takes the serum. It initially keeps her alive. But then mutates the baby into something monstrous. Maybe the Offspring wouldn’t have perished in the same way as the lab rat? But clearly Rook had not perfected his serum.
And while this does give us some continuation of Prometheus, it seems more like a plot device to explain the creation of the Offspring, as opposed to a meaningful elaboration of the lore related to Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
Is the mutant baby Offspring supposed to be similar to an Engineer?
It has some of the height and coloration of the Engineers. To the point where I’m sure fans will use the Offspring to speculate wildly about the origin of the Engineers. But there really isn’t enough information to know. The visual similarity might just be more of an easter egg than something that’s actually lore-relevant. Again, not info information to do anything more than speculate.
What was the rock the alien was in at the beginning? And why was it still so close to the Nostromo wreckage?
So this is weird. Rook seems to confirm that the rock acquired at the beginning contained the xenomorph from the original Alien. Which makes sense since we see the wreckage of the Nostromo. But it is a bit strange because like…Ripley escapes from the Nostromo. Then the ship self-destructs. She’s far enough from the explosion that it doesn’t affect her. She defeats the xenomorph on board by knocking it outside the escape vessel then blasting it away with the thrusters. So…why would it end up near the wreckage of the Nostromo? And why would it end up in a rock? And what caused it to come to rest in space? Typically, an object in motion in space has nothing to stop it from staying in motion. So the alien would have just kept flying in one direction until obliterated or crashing into a moon or burning up or something. Maybe there was a pocket of gravity?
And I guess the rock formed because…it can do that? Like it secreted a protective shell for itself? Rook says that it survived because it’s a perfect organism and didn’t need oxygen or even food. So maybe it was in a kind of biologically induced cryosleep?
I’m definitely overthinking it. The simplest answer is something like “It’s just a movie. The rock fossil is near the Nostromo because it’s just a way to signal to the viewer that this is the xenomorph from the original. You shouldn’t actually ask about the physics because that would be insane. Are you really that pedantic?”
To which I say: sure, that’s fair.
