How Alien: Romulus Fits Into the Alien Universe

Warning: This post contains spoilers for Alien: Romulus.

The question of whether life exists elsewhere in the universe is a big one for humanity. But if the discovery of Xenomorphs ever turns out to be the thing that answers that question, we'll almost certainly wish we'd never asked it.

Of course, in the universe of the Alien movies, that damage has already been done. Beginning in 1979 with Ridley Scott's iconic sci-fi thriller Alien, the franchise has been instilling a deep-seated fear in viewers of predatory endoparasitoid extraterrestrials that go bump in space. Now, a seventh entry in the film series, Alien: Romulus, has arrived in theaters and opened a new chapter in the long-running horror saga.

Directed by Fede Álvarez (Evil Dead, Don't Breathe) and produced by Scott, Romulus follows 25-year-old Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) and her adoptive android brother Andy (David Jonsson) as they join forces with a group of fellow young space colonists desperate for a means to escape the dystopian Jackson's Star mining settlement and, by extension, the clutches of evil mega-corporation Weyland-Yutani. To do this, they decide to infiltrate what they believe to be a decommissioned space station that has drifted into their ringed planetoid's orbit in the hopes it contains the technology they need to journey to a better world. However, what they find onboard is more horrifying—and deadly—than they ever could have imagined.

While the main plot of Romulus is largely a standalone story, the movie also serves as an homage to its predecessors—and directly connects to both the original Alien and its Scott-directed prequels, 2012's Prometheus and 2017's Alien: Covenant.

"We went to crazy extents to make sure that things were in canon and we were not contradicting or messing [with], I would say, any of [the movies]," Álvarez told IGN. "It's just something very special when you love certain movies and then a movie comes in and makes nods to them and you feel you're the only person in the theater who must be getting this reference. That's what it feels like. It's really tailor-made for you."

How Alien: Romulus connects to Alien

Set roughly 20 years after Alien, which takes place in the year 2122, and about 37 years before James Cameron's 1986 Aliens, set in 2179, Romulus reveals that the legendary Big Chap Xenomorph from Alien actually survived being blown out of the airlock of the Nostromo ship's shuttle Narcissus by Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). It was later recovered from space—while it was still believed to be dead—and brought to Weyland-Yutani's Romulus research station for experimentation.

After Rain, Andy, and their friends board the drifting Romulus, they end up reconnecting an incapacitated Hyperdyne Systems 120-A2 synthetic named Rook—a doppelgänger of the late Ian Holm's android Ash from Alien—to try to find out what's going on. Holm's likeness was digitally resurrected for the movie, a controversial practice that Disney has previously employed to bring back Carrie Fisher's Leia Organa and Peter Cushing's Grand Moff Tarkin in the Star Wars franchise.

What about Prometheus and Covenant?

Rook explains to the group that the scientists onboard the Romulus had extracted the mysterious black goo material from Big Chap that Prometheus and Covenant introduced into the series' lore. The exact nature of this substance has never been fully explained, but it basically functions as an incredibly aggressive mutagen that holds the power to create and destroy life forms. In Covenant, we learned the android David (Michael Fassbender) was using the black goo to reverse engineer the DNA of the Xenomorphs.

According to Rook, the Romulus scientists were attempting to turn the black goo into a miracle cure of sorts that could "upgrade" humans and, naturally, create better workers for Weyland-Yutani. However, things went horribly wrong when Big Chap turned out to still be alive, massacred the crew, laid Facehugger eggs in the ship, and created a hive of Xenomorphs.

The so-called cure also doesn't work as it was supposedly intended to, as is evidenced by the grotesque Xenomorph-human hybrid that emerges from Rain's pregnant friend Kay (Isabela Merced) after she injects herself with the black goo specimen to try to heal her Xenomorph injuries.

Whether or not we get a sequel to Romulus that finally explains why the black goo does what it does, in any case, it's pretty clear at this point that humans shouldn't be messing with it!