Spoilers for “Alien: Romulus” follow.
Fede Álvarez, director of Alien: Romulus, has explained the film’s important connection to the previous reboot of the franchise, Prometheus.
Ridley Scott’s prequel (as well as Alien: Convenant) deals with the creation of the Xenomorphs and shows how they and other nasty beasts emerge from an ominous black slime. This slime returns to Romulus and is extracted from a Xenomorph on the orders of Weyland-Yutani, who plans to use it against humans.
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The injured Kay ingests the slime to survive her injuries, but this leads to a premature pregnancy and causes her to give birth to a human-alien hybrid.
In an interview with Variety, Álvarez explains that his son associated the hybrid with Alien: Resurrection, but he personally wanted to associate him more with Prometheus.
“I was hoping people understood the whole part about the Engineer,” he said. “The black goo is the root of the whole thing that was introduced in Prometheus. It’s the root of all life, but the Xenomorphs in particular come from this thing, which means it has to be in them.”
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“It’s almost the sperm of the Xenomorphs. So we thought if it affects your DNA and the Engineers obviously came from the same life root, it made perfect sense to me that (the offspring of a human and a Xenomorph) would look like this.
“It is probably a new species because this mixture has never existed before.”
Elsewhere, Álvarez went into detail about the how and why behind the surprise return of someone from the original film.
Alien: Romulus is now in theaters and is doing quite well. All previous films, including Prometheus, are available to stream by Disney+ subscribers.
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