Alien: Romulus News Flash: Ripley Didn’t Kill Her First Alien
We learn that the aliens usually don’t intend to eat their prey but to use them to incubate facehugger embryos.
Last time, we saw that Navarro was killed by an alien and the miners’ ship crashed into the hangar of a Weyland space station. Rain and Tyler know they need to reach their ship because the station itself is set to crash into their planet’s rings. But they still have no idea what’s going on.
So, the two miners, along with their robot Andy, return to talk to Ash, the station’s android. The movie calls him Rook, but it’s clearly Ash from the first movie, so I’m calling him Ash.
What happened at the doomed station
Ash explains that his crew’s mission was to recover the xenomorph that Ripley killed in the first film. They experimented on the xenomorph, but at some point it woke up and the crew had to kill it. The rest of the crew was wiped out later.
Of course, Ash doesn’t reveal everything, but he gives the two miners a basic understanding of the situation, so Rain and Tyler rush to the hangar to try and reboard their ship.
Meanwhile Kay — who has remained on the ship this entire time — and Bjorn are trying to reach the hangar as well. But they encounter the xenomorph, which is, of course, blocking their exit. Here, the writers make an interesting choice.
I’ve always been annoyed about how quickly the xenomorph grows. The movie addresses this problem by showing it wrapped in a cocoon.
I didn’t necessarily buy this explanation because the xenomorph has yet to eat anything. But it was nice to see an attempt to explain this plot hole.
Bjorn tries to kill the xenomorph by tasing it inside the cocoon; however, this does not work. A tail springs from the cocoon and wounds Bjorn, who falls under it, and unfortunately, the cocoon is filled with acid, which pours out of the opening, killing him. Kay manages to escape the ship, and she meets Rain and Tyler on the other side of a locked door.
Rain and Tyler try to make Andy open the door, but he won’t because he sees the xenomorph in the hangar and concludes that the alien is waiting for them to try to rescue Kay so it can attack everyone.
Rain and Tyler watch as the xenomorph slowly makes its way to Kay and stabs her. Earlier in the film, the audience learned that Kay is pregnant, but Tyler does not discover this fact until just before she’s attacked, which makes him beg for Andy’s help all the more; however, Andy does nothing.
By now, the remaining crew are beginning to wonder about Andy
Rain and Tyler begin demanding answers from the robot — and he tells them that he has a new mission. They’ll return to the ship once they’ve picked up another item found by the Weyland station. Rain concludes that she needs to remove the Weyland chip inside Andy’s head at the soonest opportunity.
Andy takes them to a lab, where the audience becomes reacquainted with the black goo from the previous two films. Ash is convinced that it can be used to perfect humanity, so he wants Andy to take the goo to the Weyland corporation. As much as I hated the previous films, I did appreciate this movie’s efforts to tie the alien anthology together. Continuity is seriously neglected in this modern age of “cinema.”
They take the goo, but before they leave the lab, they realize the xenomorph is hunting them, so Tyler grabs two rifles and teaches Rain how to shoot.
However, Andy insists they can’t fire their guns because of the xenomorph’s acidic blood. Still, the two miners keep their rifles because Andy thinks there is a chance the xenomorph will recognize it as a weapon.
We come to understand the aliens better (they are still horrible though)
The remaining crew makes its way back to the station’s hangar to board the ship, but along the way, they come across an alien hive. Inside this hive, Tyler hears Kay moaning and rushes off to rescue her. This was another point I appreciated about the movie. Without plainly stating the fact, it shows that the aliens usually don’t intend to eat their prey. Their goal is to grab the target and wrap it in a cocoon inside their hive, where the victim will be given an embryo by the facehuggers.
Of course, by the Alien franchise’s logic, this only happens when there is a hive present. So, that means there are more xenomorphs nearby, which explains what happened to the rest of the crew.
Sure enough, as the trio rushes into the hive, they see the corpses of the crew before they find Kay. They pull her out of her cocoon, but the alien has seriously wounded her, and it is unclear whether or not she can survive.
Someone suggests the goo might be able to heal her, but the trio ultimately decides not to risk it since they don’t know what the strange black substance actually does.
They make their way back to the ship, but before they can reach it, the xenomorph hive attacks. Tyler is killed, and Andy is seriously wounded. Only Rain and Kay are able to make it to an elevator that will take them to the crew’s ship. But Rain sees Andy wounded on the ground through a monitor and decides she can’t leave her robot behind. Since he’s unable to resist her, she realizes she can remove the Weyland chip. She tells Kay to put herself in a cryopod because at least Navarro and Bjorn were able to get the fuel and rushes back down to the lower floor to save Andy.
Saving Andy
Normally, I would complain about this, but the robot is a parting gift from her deceased father, so it does make sense. What doesn’t make sense is why, the very second that Rain leaves the elevator, Kay decides to use the goo on herself. It’s a stupid decision, but perhaps she made this poor choice because she was afraid to die. The movie doesn’t explain her reasoning.
Anyway, Rain reaches Andy, removes the chip, and resets the robot. Andy wakes up—back to normal—just in time for the xenomorphs to return. They try to reenter their ship, but surprise, surprise, Ash locks them out.
This is another plot hole. While it’s arguable that Ash could’ve autopiloted the ship to the nearest Weyland station, there’s no reason to think that the scientists would know what the goo is for, so the evil robot needs Andy. Ash doesn’t know that Rain removed the Weyland chip. I guess the evil robot did this because he’s evil, and evil robots just do bad things. He tries to make Kay turn on the autopilot, but she’s barely conscious at this point and doesn’t listen to him.
At any rate, Rain and Andy are trapped, and there’s a horde of xenomorphs staring at them. We’ll cover how Rain deals with the problem next time.
"Continuity is seriously neglected in this modern age of “cinema.”"
To be fair, this is only something that has been taken seriously recently in film and television. TV shows of the mid-20th century had continuity errors come up because they needed plenty of scripts in a hurry, and some of the writers unintentionally contradicted each other in terms of narrative, lore, characterization etc. The "writing room" method of the 21st century cuts down on this by having the writing concentrated on the select few who know everything about the concept, but it prevents the creation of the more experimental episodes freelance writers could sometimes come up with in the 20th century shows.