SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses plot points, including the ending of Alien: Romulus”, is now in cinemas.
When Fede Álvarez decided to make Alien: Romulus, he knew from the start that he wanted to pay tribute not only to Alien and Aliens, the most popular and beloved films in the series, but to the entire mythology. “I thought, we have to include them all,” he says. diversity.
Still, he built a central part of the “Romulus” story around a character who died in the original film: Ash, the synthetic human played by the late Ian Holm with terrifying obedience to the franchise’s capitalist overlords, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. After “Alien 3” and “Alien vs. Predator” extended the life cycle of “Aliens” android Bishop (Lance Henriksen), and Michael Fassbender’s David headlined both prequels, Álvarez says Holm’s role (or at least his visage) deserved a resurrection.
“In a way, it was unfair,” he says. “I thought it was so unfair that Lance Henriksen and Michael Fassbender appeared a lot. And I thought it was crazy that Ian Holm was never there again.”
Álvarez’s emphasis on practical effects led to the creation of real animatronics that interact with his young actors as part of the story. The film is about a group of young colonists who embark on a scavenging mission aboard an abandoned space station. The need for an authority to explain how the ship was abandoned paved the way for discussions about an android from the same generation as Ash.
“When we talked to Ridley, we both came up with the idea that it would have the likeness of Ian Holm – which is different from being Ian Holm or even Ash,” Álvarez stresses. “We would never have dared to reproduce that because you can’t reproduce the talent of an actor with any technology. You can never capture the nuances of a person’s performance and decisions. So we designed a different character, but with the same likeness.”
Before getting too deeply involved with the idea, Álvarez tried to get the blessing of Holm’s heirs, he says. “Then the first thing I did was personally call his widow, his family and his children to make sure everyone was OK with this idea.” Since the filmmaker lost his own father in 2021, the same year as Holm, he knew they might not want to see him on screen. But he soon realized the idea had the potential to reconcile some feelings about the industry Holm held at the time of his death.
“His widow told me that for the last 10 years of his life, Ian felt like Hollywood had given him the cold shoulder and he hadn’t gotten many offers,” he says. “And she said he would have loved to be invited back to ‘Alien’ because he loved Ridley and that franchise.”
Although he says he enjoyed giving Holm’s likeness one more chance to appear on screen (via animatronics), Álvarez stresses that the logistics of making these sequences happen prevent similar ideas from being done often. “I remember someone saying, ‘That’s it, they’re going to replace us as actors.’ And I said, ‘Dude, if I hire you, it’s going to cost me one person’s money. To do that, you’d literally have to hire 45 people. And you still have to hire an actor to play the role!'”
Bringing back Ash or an Ash-like character seems like a no-brainer: The original Alien is not only a masterpiece, but frame-for-frame familiar to fans of the franchise. But a sequence during the film’s climax further ties the plot of Romulus to other, considerably less popular chapters.
In it, Kay (Isabela Merced) gives birth to an unholy hybrid of human and alien DNA. The creature – dubbed “the Offspring” by the filmmakers – not only resembles the Constructors, the alien race that gave birth to humanity, but also recalls the silhouette of the humanoid Xenomorph given birth to by a cloned version of Ripley in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1997 film Alien Resurrection.
Surprisingly, Álvarez says he hadn’t even thought about the latter connection until his son pointed it out to him at the film’s premiere. “He had recently watched all the ‘Alien’ movies with a buddy, and when the offspring came out, he was like, ‘It’s like ‘Resurrection.'” I hadn’t really processed it that way — but it’s true, it’s this hideousness that comes out,” the director says, explaining that he had actually focused more on the mythology of Scott’s prequels “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” which explore the genetic building blocks of humans and aliens. “I was hoping people would understand the whole Engineer part of it,” he says.
“The black goo is the root of the whole thing that was introduced in ‘Prometheus,'” Álvarez explains. “It’s the root of all life, but the Xenomorphs in particular come from this thing, which means it has to be in them. It’s basically the sperm of the Xenomorphs. So we thought if it affects your DNA and the Engineers clearly came from the same root of life, it made perfect sense to me that (the offspring of a human and a Xenomorph) would look like this.”
Far from reconciling the various storylines and chronologies, Álvarez admits that the resulting life form probably raises more questions than it answers. “It’s probably a new species, because this mixture has never existed before.”
