A new featurette for Alien: Romulus shows the blue mist from 1979’s Alien making a return. So will a 45 year mystery finally be explained…?
It appeared briefly in the second trailer for Alien: Romulus, released in early June, and shows up again in a new featurette: a mysterious blue mist, seemingly created by a laser.
This latest blue mist appearance, coming mere weeks before writer-director Fede Álvarez’s sci-fi horror sequel emerges in August, has got us wondering whether the film will finally answer a small yet fascinating question that has lingered in the background for 45 years now.
In Ridley Scott’s Alien, we see Kane (John Hurt) descend into the bowels of a derelict spacecraft, where he discovers a chamber filled with eggs. Those eggs sit beneath a “layer of mist that reacts when broken,” Kane notes, just before he clumsily falls off a walkway. A few seconds later, of course, Kane inspects one of the eggs and… well, the rest is so much sci-fi horror history.
Exactly what function that layer of mist served has never been satisfactorily answered, at least not within the Alien universe itself. Until now, no other Alien movie has included it, making its reappearance in Alien: Romulus something of a surprise.
The trailers show synthetic human Andy (David Jonsson) prowling around a shadowy part of the space station in which the film takes place. Details in the background suggest he’s stumbled on a xenomorph nest like the one seen in Aliens, or at least the beginnings of one – the railings of a walkway are laced in some distinctly biological-looking matter.
Andy then reaches down and pushes his hand through a blue, laser-like mist that is unmistakably modelled on the one seen in Alien. Is it just an easter egg for fans (no pun intended) or will Álvarez explain what it is? If the mist “reacts when broken”, what sort of reaction will Andy get?
“It’s full of leathery objects – like eggs or something”
Interestingly, the blue mist didn’t become part of Alien lore until well into the 1979 film’s production. As envisioned by Ridley Scott and his collaborators, the plot would have originally seen Kane descend into a suggestive-looking shaft towards the egg silo, then discover a thin, fleshy membrane which he then sliced through in order to enter the chamber beneath.
Requiring some complicated and time-consuming practical effects, the idea was eventually dropped for budgetary reasons, but Scott was still keen to include the concept that the eggs were covered by some sort of protective membrane. It was at this point that art director Roger Christian spoke to his friend, the production designer Anton Furst.
As well as working in movies, Furst had been tinkering with lasers and smoke for British rock band The Who; by pure coincidence, the band was rehearsing on a soundstage at Shepperton – the same studio where Alien was being filmed. Furst showed Christian the blue laser, and it quickly became clear to Christian that it could be used in the egg chamber sequence.
Read more: Alien | The birth and curious death of HR Giger’s Space Jockey
“I said, ‘We gotta get Ridley in here,'” Christian recalled in a 2020 interview with Entertainment Weekly. “We needed a ‘membrane’ over the top [of the eggs], but no one knew how to do it. They thought maybe we could animate it afterwards…. So this was sheer luck, that I’d gone up to see The Who.”
Scott and Christian have both confirmed in interviews that the blue mist covering the eggs is intended to be protective in some way, or serve as a kind of alarm system. Speaking to the VHS Podcast (via AlienExplorations), Christian said, “It’s protection [for] the eggs… and when that barrier was broken, then the eggs knew to open so there was someone they could attach to and go off to another planet or spread.”
“I wanted something to replace the membrane,” Scott told Cinefex magazine in 1980, “which I saw as a kind of a biological alarm which triggered a response in the eggs – they all come awake and sit waiting to be touched, basically. We finally settled on a laser which was mounted so it would scan just above the eggs and give us this sheet of blue light. We could have done a lot more with it, but we didn’t have the time.”
“If you don’t stay quiet, we all die”
If the mist is intended as an alarm, it begs the question: was that alarm somehow created by the xenomorphs, or the pilot of the derelict ship, later dubbed an Engineer in the Alien prequel, Prometheus? It’s a question that remains unanswered, as proven by an entry over on Xenopedia, a comprehensive archive of alien lore. A section titled ‘Reactive mist’ reads, “It is not clear whether this mist was put in place artificially by the Engineers, or whether it was generated by the eggs themselves.”
Ridley Scott’s Alien prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, heavily implied that the xenomorph was created in large part by the Engineers, a race of advanced beings that had a cultural tradition of creating life on other planets using a gooey mutagen. Assuming that the ‘reactive mist’ is Engineer technology – which would make more sense, at least to this writer – that would imply the Engineers used it to either set a trap for unwary visitors. Or perhaps it’s the opposite: the mist is some kind of suppressive field that keeps eggs dormant unless someone’s clumsy enough to break through it.
Read more: Alien: Romulus | Combing the first trailer for nerdy clues
The mist’s presence in Alien: Romulus could imply that the Engineers and their handiwork will figure in its plot in some form. Look again at the shot of Andy touching the blue light, and we can see he’s carrying a container with phials inside. Could these contain samples of the Engineers’ mutagen? For now, we can only speculate, though it’s worth noting that Álvarez has said in at least one interview that, although his film’s inspired by Alien and Aliens, he considers all of them canon, including Prometheus.
The trailers have already revealed that the Weyland Yutani corporation had been experimenting on xenomorphs on the space station introduced in Alien: Romulus. We’ve seen images of facehuggers leaping out of artificial containers rather than leathery eggs, while a teasing shot on Instagram also implied that the corporation had somehow retrieved a fully-grown xenomorph, or at least the remains of one.
The presence of the blue mist could imply that Weyland Yutani has been tinkering with other bits of Engineer technology, too. Or maybe Álvarez will leave the mist’s origins to our collective imagination – a nod to the franchise’s 1970s roots, but one whose function remains obscure. As the Alien prequels unwittingly proved, there’s certainly nothing wrong with leaving certain corners of its horror universe tantalisingly unexplained.
Alien: Romulus is in cinemas from the 16th August.
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