Alien: Romulus director explains connection viewers miss to Prometheus film

Fede Álvarez had been ‘hoping that people picked up the whole Engineer part of it’

*The following story contains light spoilers for Alien: Romulus*

Alien: Romulus director Fede Álvarez has shed light on an overlooked link to Ridley Scott’s 2012 film Prometheus hidden within the new movie.

Romulus follows a small crew led by Rain (played by Civil War’s Cailee Spaeny), who come face-to-face with a terrifying life-form while scavenging a derelict space station.

Released on Friday (16 August), the film is the seventh entry in the 45-year-old Alien franchise, which began in 1979 with Ridley Scott’s sci-fi classic.

Towards the end of Romulus, the pregnant Kay (played by Isabela Merced) uses liquid extracted from a Xenomorph (the main species of antagonist in the franchise) to heal her injuries, but the move ends up accelerating the birth of her baby, a human-alien hybrid. Scott’s prequels also featured the ominous black substance, from which other species are formed in both Prometheus and its 2017 follow-up Alien: Covenant.

Álvarez explained that his son had connected the mixed-species offspring to the 1997 sequel Alien: Resurrection – as did other viewers on social media – but that he had intended to connect it the 2012 film.

“I was hoping that people picked up the whole Engineer part of it,” he told Variety. “The black goo is the root of the whole thing that was introduced in Prometheus. It’s the root of all life, but also particularly the Xenomorphs come out of that thing, which means it has to be inside them.

“It’s the Xenomorphs’ semen, almost. So we thought, if it affects your DNA, and the Engineers clearly came out of the same root of life, it made complete sense to me that [the offspring of a human and a Xenomorph] was going to look like that.

“It’s probably a new species, because that mix never happened before.”

The black goo, also known as the “black liquid” is scientifically known as chemical A0-3959X.91–15, and was created by the ancient alien race featured in Prometheus, called the Engineers. The substance has the ability to create, transform, and destroy life.

An Engineer is seen ingesting the life-giving black liquid (20th Century Studio/Prometheus)

Alien: Romulus has received mostly positive reviews from fans and critics, with its score on the review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes currently sitting at a favourable 86 per cent based on over 2,500 reviews.

In a more mixed, three-star review of the film, The Independent’s film critic Clarisse Loughrey wrote: “There is so much greatness here that it becomes all the more frustrating when this franchise reboot becomes a vehicle for illogical plotting and pointless nostalgia.”