Actor Cailee Spaeny has confirmed that the events of Alien: Romulus will unfold between those of 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens.
When it was announced last year that Don’t Breathe director Fede Alvarez would be heading up a new movie in the Alien franchise, the line was that its story (co-written by Alvarez and Rodo Sayagues) would be unconnected to the previous films.
That’s likely still true, but we now at least know when the plot of Alien: Romulus will take place – between the events of 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens. Rumours of this timeline placement have been floating around for a few months now, but actor Cailee Spaeny, who has a currently undisclosed role in Romulus, recently confirmed this to Variety's Michaela Zee.
“It’s supposed to slot in between the first movie and the second movie,” Spaeny said. “They brought the same team from Aliens, the James Cameron film. The same people who built those xenomorphs actually came on and built ours. So getting to see the original design with the original people who have been working on these films for 45-plus years and has been so much of their life has been really incredible.”
The team Spaeny refers to there is Legacy Effects, a studio set up by former creatives who worked at the Stan Winston’s effects house before his sad passing in 2008. Winston was, of course, the effects artist who helped bring the iconic alien queen to life in James Cameron’s Aliens, not to mention her rank-and-file xenomorph drones. (HR Giger, the Swiss artist who designed the title monster in the original Alien, was busy making Poltergeist II when Aliens was in production.)
Another former Stan Winston protegee working on Alien: Romulus is Alec Gillis, who, among other things, worked on the creature effects in Alien 3 and The Predator.
From what Spaeny’s saying, it sounds as though the creatures in Alien: Romulus will closely resemble those in Aliens, rather than the various other flavours of xenomorph we saw in Ridley Scott’s prequels – or indeed the translucent Star Beast that Giger first conjured up in the 1970s.
Read more: Why Fede Alvarez’s Alien could give the series the clean break it needs
Thanks to Spaeny, we now know that Alien: Romulus takes place at some point between 2122 – when the crew of the Nostromo touched down on LV-426 and first discovered the crashed ship full of eggs – and 2179, when a re-awakened Ripley returned to LV-426 with a detachment of frankly doomed Colonial Marines.
That’s a wide gamut, in fairness, and gives Alvarez and Sayagues plenty of murky water to swim around in. We can only speculate as to why Romulus takes place between these two points in time.
Interestingly, Creative Assembly’s magnificent 2014 videogame Alien: Isolation also unfolded between the first two Alien films. It was set in the year 2137, telling the story of Ellen Ripley’s daughter Amanda and her own brush with the dreaded xenomorph. Not that there’s any suggestion that Alien: Romulus will have a connection to the events of that game at this stage, either.
One thing we do know, though, is that Ridley Scott has seen an early cut of the Alien sequel and says “It’s fucking great.”
Here’s hoping he’s right.
Alien: Romulus is out in UK cinemas on 16th August 2024.
