The ending of Alien: Romulus, and some comments by its director, suggest that the franchise’s lore has made a subtle yet dark change…
NB: The following contains inevitable spoilers for Alien: Romulus. Proceed with caution if you haven’t seen it yet.
Most would have gone into Alien: Romulus assuming that it’d be full of gore and Freudian horrors. It’s unlikely anyone outside its production could have predicted that it would conclude with Isabella Merced giving birth to a seven-foot-tall basketball player.
Even setting aside that gonzo final reel – which, as director Fede Alvarez himself predicted, appears to have divided audiences – the film’s second half has one or two intriguing and quite dark implications for the Alien franchise. Implications that only become more apparent when they’re combined with some of the interviews Alvarez has given since the film’s release.
As covered in our earlier spoiler-filled post, Alien: Romulus maintains continuity with the prequels Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. We learned that scientists aboard the Renaissance space station not only managed to recover the (now cocooned) xenomorph dispatched by Ripley in the original Alien, but also retrieved samples of a black, DNA-altering substance from its body before it woke up and ran around killing every person it could find.
That substance was, of course, the same black goo that played such a role in Prometheus and Alien: Covenant – a mutagen capable of creating lifeforms and also horribly transforming them. In Prometheus, it was suggested that a race of giant, humanoid beings called Engineers used this substance to create life on Earth – including humans.
The start of that 2012 film began with an Engineer drinking a sample of goo and essentially sacrificing its body to create life on some Earth-like planet. Millennia later, archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) said these beings “engineered us” and then left invitations scrawled on caves and stone tablets so humans could later pay them a visit.
Alien: Romulus doesn’t contradict this idea, but it does add something else to it: what if both humans and Engineers are somehow descended from the xenomorph itself?
Alvarez hinted at this in an interview with Variety, designed to explain some of his thinking behind Alien: Romulus’s climax. In it, Alvarez also said something revealing about that goo, designated Z-01 by Weyland-Yutani scientists.
“The black goo is the root of the whole thing that was introduced in Prometheus,” Álvarez said. “It’s the root of all life, but also particularly the xenomorphs come out of that thing, which means it has to be inside them. It’s the xenomorphs’ semen, almost.”
Put all this together, and a dark possibility emerges: the xenomorph is, in essence, the oldest lifeform in the galaxy – an almost indestructible organism from which everything else (human, Engineer and perhaps more besides) eventually descended. Again, Alvarez alluded to this in his interview with Variety, saying, “if it [the black goo] affects your DNA, and the Engineers clearly came out of the same root of life, it made complete sense to me that [the basketball player monster] was going to look like that.”
Interestingly, this slightly contradicts what Ridley Scott appeared to be going for in Alien: Covenant, which implied that the xenomorph was created not over the course of millions of years of natural evolution, but by the tinkering or renegade android, David (Michael Fassbender). Artist Dane Hallet – who created those drawings all over David’s lair in that film – recently confirmed that David was intended to be the xenomorph’s creator. But even he wondered aloud whether “Ridley was flying by the seat of his pants” when coming up with that plot point, and there are signs that it may have since been set aside.
For one thing, there’s a comment by Noah Hawley, the showrunner of the upcoming Alien: Earth series, who had spoken to Ridley Scott about his concept for that show and was blunt about his distaste for the xenomorph being a relatively recent (in franchise lore) creation.
Said Hawley in January 2024, “For me, and for a lot of people, this ‘perfect life form’ – as it was described in [Alien] – is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space. The idea that, on some level, it was a bioweapon created half an hour ago, that’s just inherently less useful to me.”
Add this to Alvarez’s “root of all life” comments, and it’s beginning to sound as though he, Hawley and Scott (who’s the executive producer on both Alien: Romulus and Alien: Earth) have come to some sort of agreement over what is now Alien lore and what isn’t.
Besides, the ‘ancient xenomorph’ version of history helps make far more sense of a key scene in Prometheus. You may recall the moment when the crew of the title ship, poking around in a deserted structure on the planetoid LV-223, discovered a sealed entrance. Working his android magic, David managed to force a door open, revealing a chamber in which a giant sculpture of a humanoid head is surrounded by dozens of urns. Those urns turned out to be filled with black goo, and David quietly took one of them back to the ship for further study.
Meanwhile, archaeologist Elizabeth Shaw (Noomi Rapace) points out a couple of murals – one of which looks like a crucified xenomorph suspended above an altar. In the book The Art Of Prometheus, published in the wake of the film itself, production designer Arthur Max conceded that this was indeed meant to represent the xenomorph as it was in 1979’s Alien; it’s “the DNA homage to the Alien Giger creature.”
Like a lot of things in the film, the purpose of this chamber and its murals was never fully explained. There was some assumption at the time that it was some sort of monument to the Engineer who invented the black goo, or perhaps used the black goo to create the first xenomorph, which the beings subsequently used as a sort of bio-weapon. (Hence the derelict Engineer ship with all the xenomorph eggs in its silo in Alien.)
Alvarez’s version of Alien lore, meanwhile, could point to something slightly different. The xenomorph vastly pre-dates the Engineers, and the Engineers even worship it as a kind of messianic figure. The Engineers encountered the species once, and like Weyland-Yutani’s scientists years later, managed to retrieve the black goo from it.
The chamber is therefore a monument to both the Engineer that discovered (and perhaps synthesised) the black goo, and also to the xenomorph itself, which is revered as the proto-lifeform from which all other creatures in the cosmos have emerged.
That the mural in the trailer features a xenomorph in a Christ-like pose fits into the subtly blasphemous elements tucked away elsewhere in Prometheus. Elizabeth Shaw is depicted as devoutly religious and also unable to bear children; ship’s captain Janek (Idris Elba) is also shown decorating a Christmas tree. The squid-like abomination Shaw later gives birth to was quite possibly born on Christmas day, then – much like Jesus. A festive miracle.
Elsewhere, it’s also said that the Engineers had intended to dispatch a ship to Earth in order to wipe out humanity, but something went disastrously wrong and the Engineers on LV-223 were killed instead. When did this incident take place? Carbon dating suggests 2,000 years ago. Ridley Scott subsequently admitted that the motivation for the Engineers killing humans – having originally created them in the first place – was some form of retribution for crucifying Jesus. This was because Jesus was himself an Engineer.
“…if you look at it as an “our children are misbehaving down there” scenario, there are moments where it looks like we’ve gone out of control, running around with armour and skirts, which of course would be the Roman Empire,” Scott said in a widely-shared quote published by the now defunct Movies.com. “And they were given a long run. A thousand years before their disintegration actually started to happen. And you can say, ‘Let’s send down one more of our emissaries to see if he can stop it.’ Guess what? They crucified him.”
Scott and his collaborators didn’t spell any of this out in the finished film – “we thought it was a little too on the nose” the director said – but echoes of the idea still remain.
Put all these fragments together, and a particularly bleak view of existence emerges. Our species can trace its ancestry back to one of the toughest, most terrifying lifeforms in the universe. Humans weren’t created by a benevolent god, but rather by a race of bald, capricious giants who are hardly less flawed and murderous than we are. Our original sin, it seems, wasn’t eating the forbidden fruit, but being distantly related to an acid-spitting, parasitic monster.
It remains to be seen whether Hawley will explore these ideas further in his TV series Alien: Earth, or whether the success of Alien: Romulus will tempt Alvarez back to make a follow-up to that film, thus giving us more details about the black goo.
Whatever happens, the implication seems to be that there’s a little bit of the alien in all of us.
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