Alien: Romulus Ending Explained: Xeno Phobia

This article contains major spoilers for “Alien: Romulus.”

In 1979, John Frankenheimer’s film “Prophecy” was advertised with a tagline that read “The Monster Movie.” That marketing team was likely trying to steal some thunder from a film that had opened a few weeks earlier, one that 45 years later, easily lays claim to that definitive tagline: Ridley Scott’s “Alien.” Throughout three direct sequels, two crossover films, and two prequels, the “Alien” franchise has continued to earn that moniker in a variety of surprising ways. Like the Xenomorph itself, the series has proven remarkably resilient, mutating from sci-fi horror to action to schlock to Biblical epic to Gothic horror, all the while never losing its monster movie DNA.

After the one-two misanthropic punch of Scott’s prequels “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” the future of the franchise was up in the air. With Scott moving on to a host of other projects, the prospect of continuing any of several dangling story threads in the sequels seemed daunting. The answer, as it turns out, was a sidequel. Director Fede Alvarez, along with his “Evil Dead” and “Don’t Breathe” co-writer Rodo Sayagues, have cooked up “Alien: Romulus,” which takes place about 20 years after the first “Alien” and some 37 years before Ripley wakes up in James Cameron’s “Aliens.”

On paper, that may make “Romulus” sound like another type of prequel; the “Rogue One” of the “Alien” series, if you will. However, in execution, “Romulus” is a “Greatest Hits” sidequel, presenting as many classic elements of the series while making sure not to mess with the established canon, it nonetheless carves its own intriguing new path, providing what could be an exciting and possibility-filled way forward for the franchise.

“Alien: Romulus” begins as a Weyland-Yutani corporation probe finally reaches the wreckage of the commercial towing vehicle Nostromo, which has been floating in space ever since Warrant Officer Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver in “Alien”) set the ship to self-destruct in an attempt to destroy the Xenomorph that had gotten on board. Unfortunately, the Xenomorph, allowed to grow to maturation in the Nostromo thanks to the Company’s special order directive given to the ship’s secret synthetic, Ash (Ian Holm), got on board Ripley’s escape shuttle, leading to her blasting it out into space with a harpoon in its chest.

The Company’s probe finds its cargo: a fossilized asteroid, which it secures and then brings back to a space station, where a dozen scientists and soldiers eagerly await its unveiling. As various machines cut open the rock and pull out what was inside it, we see the indentation of the Xenomorph which had laid inside the rock ever since Ripley flung it into space. Turns out that Alien wasn’t quite gone after all.

Almost a year later, Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny), a colonist and miner for Weyland-Yutani, is sick of living in the Jackson’s Star colony where the dark planet is being endlessly terraformed and the sun literally never shines. She dreams of basking in the sunlight of a completely terraformed planet called Yvaga. She and her adopted brother, an artificial person named Andy (David Jonsson), have recently earned enough work hours to be given a travel pass from the Company to what they hope will be their new home, after the demise of their parents due to complications from working in the mines. Unfortunately, the scourge of capitalism strikes again; Rain is coldly informed that work quotas have been recently raised and that it’ll be another six years of mining work before she can leave the planet.

Andy is not in the best shape; an old android model, his servos and other systems are in disrepair, and his only directive (“to do what’s best for Rain,” programmed by Rain’s late father), leaves him helpful more in spirit than function, as he constantly makes silly dad jokes. His helplessness is pronounced when some anti-synthetic bullies commit a hate crime on him in the street, causing Rain to use her access key to help calm him down.

Rain is pretty amenable to a proposition for escape that some of her fellow miners make to her. Her ex-boyfriend, Tyler (Archie Renaux), his sister, Kay (Isabela Merced), his cousin, Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and Bjorn’s partner, Navarro (Aileen Wu) have stumbled upon the signature of a decommissioned and abandoned Company ship drifting over the planet. Their plan is to use the Corbelan (one of the ships they have access to) and dock with the decommissioned craft to procure the cryosleep pods on board, making it possible to travel nine lightyears to Yvaga. The catch is that they’ll need Andy, as his status as a Company product will allow them to bypass security. Rain hesitates, but is soon convinced that this may be her only ticket out.

Upon docking with the station, the crew of the Corbelan discovers that the station is broken up into two halves: the Remus, which they’re currently on, and the Romulus. Both halves had been dedicated to some form of research project. Before they can dwell on what that might have been, they discover that the cryopods are in good shape but are lacking enough fuel to make the journey to Yvaga. As the pods are transferred to the Corbelan, Tyler, Bjorn, and Andy use a motion tracking device to locate cryo storage on the Remus.

On the Corbelan, Rain discovers that Kay is pregnant. She’s unconcerned with the father but is excited for her baby to be born on a planet with sun. Rain monitors the progress of the guys on the Remus, and is heartbroken when Bjorn, who lost his mother to a mining accident whereupon a synthetic refused to allow her to be saved, informs Andy that Yvaga is a non-Company world, meaning synthetics aren’t allowed there. Rain regretfully admits that she couldn’t find a way to tell Andy earlier, and even though Andy’s programming directive means he seems perfectly happy to help do what’s best for Rain, there’s a tinge of sadness in his absorbing the news.

Upon discovering the cryo storage room, Tyler and Bjorn dislodge some tanks, which suddenly sets off a failsafe system, locking the exit to the room and raising its temperature. Rain and Navarro rush to their aid once it’s discovered that Andy does not have security clearance to leave the room, but a dormant and half-melted synthetic in a nearby lab might.

Rain ejects a programming module from the busted synthetic and brings it to Tyler to put into Andy, who then freezes as his system reboots. Meanwhile, the experiments once frozen in storage have woken up: facehuggers. Tyler, Bjorn, and an upgraded Andy fight them off and escape the room, but not before one slips past them and attaches itself to Navarro. While Andy’s upgrade did not come with any data on the Xenomorph, he suggests that the dormant synthetic may have answers.

That dormant synthetic turns out to be Rook (Ian Holm and Daniel Betts), another model of the same type as Ash, the synthetic who betrayed the crew of the Nostromo. He was the science officer of the Romulus and Remus who helped supervise the Company’s dissection, study, and eventual breeding of the Xenomorph that Ripley thought she’d killed, and while that Xeno is now dead, killed by a security team which caused it to nearly burn a hole through the entire station, there seems to be at least a dozen or more facehuggers on board. Although Rook advises the group to kill Navarro, Rain comes up with the idea to freeze the facehugger’s tail in order to pull it off.

The freezing works and Navarro is freed, but Rook, who is slowly updating Andy with more of his personality and directives, informs Andy that he must help the humans against their better natures. Andy, partially out of regret for being too much of “a child” around Rain, insists that Navarro not be let back onboard the Corbelan, but Bjorn and Navarro elude him long enough to do just that, leaving Rain, Tyler, and Andy trapped on the Remus.

Unsurprisingly, Navarro horribly gives birth to a chestbursting Xeno, blood splattering over a traumatized Kay. In her death throes, Navarro’s leg kicks the Corbelan’s controls, sending the ship careening around the station, knocking out a fuel pod, and crash-landing in the docking bay of the Romulus side. The incident forces the space station even faster toward its doom amongst the rings of the nearby planet; giving the humans 47 minutes to make it out alive instead of the anticipated 36 hours.

Rain, Tyler, and Andy realize they have to pass through a connecting hall that is now filled with facehuggers to get to the other side of the station. Raising the temperature of the hall to 98.6 degrees so that the ‘huggers can’t sense them, they tiptoe through the area, trying not to make noise or overheat from fear. Meanwhile, Kay and Bjorn discover a cocoon that the Xenomorph has made for itself after shedding its chestburster skin. Bjorn attempts to kill the Xeno while in its cocoon with a cattle prod, unknowingly causing it to bleed acid all over him, melting him to death. The Xeno emerges fully grown from its cocoon, and a frantic Kay contacts Tyler through their communication device, causing him and Rain to book it past the leaping facehuggers the rest of the way.

The trio finally catches up with Kay, who’s eluded the Xeno long enough to make it to a door where her brother and friends are. Yet Andy, realizing the Xeno is trying to bait them into opening the door for Kay, refuses, leaving her to a presumably grisly fate. Tyler and Rain are distraught, the latter especially so as she learns Andy’s new directive is to do what’s best for the company, even as he reveals that some semblance of his former self is still in there, reminding Rain that she was going to leave him behind in a similar manner.

The trio makes their way to the Romulus’ main laboratory, within which is the major experiment that Rook wishes Andy to take with them for preservation. It seems that Rook was able to highlight and extract from the Xenomorph the primordial black goo that makes up most of its genetic structure. The goo (last seen in “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant”) can be used as either life in its rawest form or a deadly pathogen, and Rook promises that he’s synthesized a strain of it that should help make humanity “the perfect organism.” This is all to help the company with its colonization of space, an effort which so far has been woefully doomed due to mining accidents, novel diseases, etc.

Taking several vials of the goo for preservation, Andy also arms Tyler and Rain with some pulse rifles found on board (essentially an earlier model of the gun the Colonial Marines use in “Aliens”), in the hopes that merely aiming the guns at the Aliens will keep them at bay. Realizing that the Xeno that grabbed Kay is now guarding the main path back to the Corbelan, the trio take an alternate route, which unfortunately leads them straight into a Xenomorph hive built in one section of the Romulus. Hearing Kay call for help, the group finds and rescues her, discovering that she hasn’t been facehugged yet due to a massive loss of blood.

Before Tyler can take Andy’s advice of helping Kay out by injecting her with a vial of black goo, Rain stops him, believing they can make it back to the Corbelan to put Kay in a cryo pod and fix her back at the colony. During their attempt to make it out of the hive, Tyler is impaled Bishop-style by an alien, Andy is knocked down hard enough to make his systems short, but Rain and Kay make it to an elevator just before a slew of drones and facehuggers show up.

Realizing that Andy is her family and she’s no longer going to leave him behind, Rain sends Kay up the rest of the way in the elevator, instructing her to head to the cryo pods and noting she’ll find her way back. Kay makes it back to the Corbelan, where the coldly logical Rook insists that Rain and Andy are a loss and that Kay should enable the remote autopilot so he and the MU-TH-UR computer can send the ship back to the colony with the goo. Kay refuses but, in pain and worried about her baby, she injects herself with a vial of goo.

Meanwhile, Rain successfully rescues Andy, removing the corrupting Rook module from his system and returning him back to normal. At first, it seems the two are doomed and trapped inside the hive, with Rook refusing to assist because it could compromise the survival of the experiment. Rain then realizes (thanks to one of Andy’s jokes) that she could turn the artificial gravity off and shoot the Aliens without fear of their acid blood making a hole in the station. She does just that, taking out the Xenos before she and Andy precariously float their way through hovering swathes of acid.

Halfway through floating up an elevator shaft, however, the gravity comes back on, sending Rain falling to her death before she’s caught by a Xeno. Thankfully, Andy is able to overcome his meek nature and rescues Rain, blowing the alien away even as all the Xeno blood causes a huge hole to be torn in the station. Rain and Andy make it back to the Corbelan, taking off from the station just as it starts to hit the planet’s rings. Rain makes a point of leaving the autopilot off, refusing to go back to Jackson’s star and intending to venture on to Yvaga with the cryo fuel. A helpless Rook realizes his mission is a failure before he’s destroyed by the exploding station.

Like every “Alien” movie, however (and like Alvarez’s own “Evil Dead”), there is a fourth act. After putting Kay inside a cryo pod and plugging Andy into the ship’s systems (after giving him a new directive: “Do what’s best for both of us”), Rain is about to climb into a pod herself when alerts start going off for Kay’s pod. Upon opening it, Rain discovers a now heavily pregnant Kay, who gives violent, bloody birth to some type of egg/pod hybrid. While attempting to remove it from the ship, the egg becomes acidic as it begins to hatch, revealing a humanoid creature inside before it sinks into the Corbelan’s cargo hold.

Rain grabs some cryo tubes and chases the creature into the hold, but it’s now hatched and grown rapidly into some human/Xeno/Engineer (the alien species from “Prometheus” who were responsible for humanity) hybrid known as the Offspring (Robert Bobroczkyi). The Offspring attempts to suckle from its mother, Kay, who is now lactating black goo of her own. Slashing Andy’s neck when confronted, the Offspring feels rejected by Kay and consumes her instead before Rain can stop it. After a tussle in which cryo smoke fills the ship and nearly freezes Rain to death, she’s able to put on a spacesuit to finish unhooking the cargo hold and eject the Offspring into space. Eventually, she’s successful, sending the unholy creature and the cargo onto the rocks below, where the Romulus and Remus is also still slowly exploding.

Rain and Andy are two against the universe once more, as Rain puts Andy into a cryo pod, tearfully promising her currently non-operational synthetic brother that she’ll find a way to fix him once they reach Yvaga. Similar to Ripley’s lonely final sign-off after the events of “Alien,” Rain records her own voice log for her cryo pod, explaining that she’ll try to reach Yvaga even though there’s a chance they may not make it. Alvarez ends his film the way it began, with a spacecraft venturing into the blackness of the infinite.

Throughout “Alien: Romulus” there is a dual theme of sacrifice and parasitism. As the title and the space station suggest, sacrifice can be a force for positive change, and in some cases even a noble thing; Rome being founded through Romulus killing Remus is clearly how Rook and the Company view the goo being used to force humanity through a necessary evolution. Yet, as exemplified in the film’s subtext, this is not a true noble sacrifice like the ones made by Andy and Rain. “Romulus” is a movie about the distinction between one’s own beliefs and those forced upon them, with the latter being as insidious and destructive as the Xenomorph itself.

Who knows what the future holds for “Alien”; will we see Rain and Andy again? Or perhaps David, or even Ripley? Whatever happens, the “Alien” series will surely continue to explore small spots of sunlight in a perpetually cold and dark universe, a place where the monsters could emerge from the shadows at any time.