Alien: Romulus released in 2024 as the latest installment of the beloved Alien franchise. Directed by Fede Alvarez, the sci-fi horror movie centers on a group of young space miners who escape their planet, hoping to relocate to a faraway colony. In need of more fuel for their cryopods, Rain (Cailee Spaeny), her android brother Andy (David Jonsson), her ex-boyfriend Tyler (Archie Renaux), his sister Kay (Isabela Merced), the siblings’ cousin Bjorn (Spike Fearn), and his adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu) dock their ship at an abandoned space station, where an accident involving Xenomorphs has wiped out all the inhabitants. Predictably, a rogue facehugger triggers the birth of a new Xenomorph, and Rain’s crewmates are taken out one by one in terrifying ways.
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Alien: Romulus takes place 20 years after the Nostromo disaster in 1979’s Alien and around 37 years before the events of the 1986 sequel Aliens. Although the story of Alien: Romulus delivers plenty of thrills and horrifying imagery as the facehuggers and Xenomorphs hunt the main characters, the movie contains a number of plot holes that call some major narrative threads into question.
The following three plot holes still bother many fans, and they prevent Alien: Romulus from stacking up to the franchise’s best titles.
How Were Rain & Her Crew Members Able to Leave LV-410 So Easily?
Alien: Romulus establishes early on that the Jackson’s Star colony has strictly limited space travel to and from the planet LV-410. Desperately searching for a way to leave after learning that her work in the mines has been extended, Rain forms a plan with the others to sneak off-world. They board the hauler Corbelan IV, embarking on a nine-year flight to Yvaga III. Oddly, the crew doesn’t experience any obstacles while leaving. LV-410’s rigid travel regulations have no impact on Rain and Co.’s ability to take off in their vessel, leading viewers to question the point of divulging that information in the first place, if the characters’ escape was going to transpire so smoothly. Those familiar with Alien know that the real trouble only starts when a facehugger implants a Xenomorph into a human, but Alien: Romulus meaninglessly suggests that its main characters will have difficulty departing their planet. This plot hole fortunately doesn’t plague the rest of the film, but it’s still a real head-scratcher.
[RELATED: Alien Fans Are Still Confused by This Big Xenomorph Origin Question]
Why Was the Renaissance Space Station Abandoned for So Long?
When Rain, Andy, Tyler, Kay, Bjorn, and Navarro arrive at the Renaissance space station, they find it ravaged and abandoned due to Xenomorph-induced accident. A research hub run by the powerful corporation Weyland-Yutani, Renaissance held valuable materials and information that were still salvageable after the disaster. This makes one wonder why Wyland-Yutani never sent an exploration or recovery team to assess the damage and collect products of the team’s research – such as the vials of black goo, aka Z-01, the liquid compound created from Xenomorph DNA, intended to transform humans into perfect space-dwelling organisms. It’s possible that word of the massacre on the Renaissance space station had not reached Weyland-Yutani at the time Alien: Romulus takes place, but it’s certainly strange that the desolated structure would remain untouched for so long, especially while floating in LV-410’s orbit.
[MORE: Alien: Romulus Prequel Reveals What Happened on Renaissance Station]
How Did the Crew of the Renaissance Produce So Many Facehuggers?
Shortly after the Corbelan IV arrives at the station, they discover tons of facehuggers cryogenically preserved in one of the labs. Alien: Romulus later reveals that Renaissance‘s scientists found a way to reverse-bioengineer the Xenomorph that massacred the Nostromo‘s crew in the original Alien, but it’s never explained how that’s possible. As far as audiences know, the Weyland-Yutani researchers didn’t have access to a queen Xenomorph — which can lay the eggs that hatch into facehuggers — so exactly how they turned regular Xenomorph DNA into facehuggers remains a mystery.
Of course, for the plot of Alien: Romulus to function like every other Alien movie, it must include a facehugger and subsequent chestburster scene to kickstart the action, but this one requires some suspension of disbelief. The Alien franchise performs at its best when its stories meld horror with intelligent sci-fi, and Romulus didn’t quite pull this off.
All of the questionable developments in Alien: Romulus make for a wildly entertaining viewing experience, but it’s a far cry from the more detail-oriented approach of the IPs most successful titles.
Alien: Romulus is currently available to stream on Hulu.
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Image courtesy of Max
