SPOILER ALERT: This article discusses plot points, including the ending of “Alien: Romulus,” now playing in theaters.
When Fede Álvarez decided to make “Alien: Romulus,” he knew from the outset that he wanted to honor not just “Alien” and Aliens,” the most acclaimed and popular films in the series, but its entire mythology. “I was like, ‘we have to embrace them all’,” he tells Variety.
Even so, he built a pivotal part of the “Romulus” story around a character who died in the original movie: Ash, the synthetic human played by the late Ian Holm with chilling obedience to the franchise’s capitalistic overlords, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. After “Alien 3” and “Alien vs. Predator” expanded the life cycle of “Aliens” android Bishop (Lance Henriksen), and Michael Fassbender’s David led both of the prequels, Álvarez says that Holm’s role (or at least his visage) was due for resurrection.
“It was out of fairness in a way,” he says. “I felt it was so unfair that Lance Henriksen made many appearances, and Michael Fassbender. And I felt it was crazy that Ian Holm was never back.”
Álvarez’ emphasis on practical effects preordained the creation of an actual animatronic to interact with his young cast as a part of the plot, which follows a group of young colonists who embark on a scavenger mission aboard a derelict space station. The need for an authority to explain how the vessel was abandoned paved the way for discussions about an android that’s from the same generation as Ash.
“Talking with Ridley, both of us came up with this idea that what if it has the likeness of Ian Holm — which is different from being Ian Holm or even being Ash,” Álvarez insists. “We would’ve never dared to reproduce that because you cannot reproduce with any technology, the talent of an actor. You can never capture the nuance of someone’s performance and their choices. So we designed a different character, but it shares the same likeness.”
Before he indulged the idea too deeply, Álvarez says that he reached out to obtain the blessing of Holm’s heirs. “Then the first thing I did was personally call his widow, family and kids to make sure everybody was on board with this idea.” Given that the filmmaker had lost his own father in 2021, the same year that Holm died, he recognized that they might not want to see him appear on screen. But he soon learned that the idea had the potential to reconcile some feelings about the industry Holm possessed at the time of his death.
“His widow told me that Ian felt, in the last 10 years of his life, Hollywood turned a cold shoulder to him and that he didn’t get many offers,” he shares. “And she said he would have loved to be invited back into ‘Alien,’ because he loved Ridley and he loved that franchise.”
Though he says he enjoyed giving Holm’s likeness one more opportunity to appear on screen (via animatronics), Álvarez stresses that the logistics of accomplishing those sequences prohibit similar ideas from happening with any frequency. “I remember someone saying, ‘This is it, they’re going to replace us as actors.’ And I said, ‘Dude, if I hire you, it costs me the money of one person. To make it this way, you have to hire literally 45 people. And you still have to hire an actor who does the performance!’”
Bringing back Ash, or an Ash-like character, feels like a bit of a no brainer: the original “Alien” is not only a masterpiece but known frame by frame by fans of the franchise. But a sequence during the film’s climax further connects the action of “Romulus” to other, notably less well-liked chapters.
In it, Kay (Isabela Merced) gives birth to an unholy hybrid of human and alien DNA; not only does the creature — branded “the offspring” by the filmmakers — resemble the Engineers, the alien race that conceived humankind, but it also echoes the silhouette of the humanoid xenomorph that a cloned version of Ripley births in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s 1997 film “Alien Resurrection.”
Surprisingly, Álvarez says he actually hadn’t thought of the latter connection until his son pointed it out at the film’s premiere. “He had recently watched with a buddy of his all of the ‘Alien’ movies, and when the offspring comes out, he goes, ‘It’s like in “Resurrection.”‘ I hadn’t really processed that that way — but it’s true, it’s this abomination that comes out,” the director says, explaining that he’d actually been more focused on the mythology of Scott’s prequels “Prometheus” and “Alien: Covenant,” which explore the genetic building blocks of humans and aliens both. “I was hoping that people picked up 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 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.”
Far from reconciling the various plot lines and chronologies, Álvarez admits that the resulting life form probably raises more questions than answers. “It’s probably a new species, because that mix never happened before.”
