When make a Extraterrestrial movie three things are essential. First up, the Facehuggers. Without them you can’t have the other two. Second, a Chestburster. This is just a smaller version of the third but it remains absolutely crucial. Then, third, a full-fledged Xenomorph. These acid-blooded killers who love murdering entire crews of spaceships.
Extraterrestrial: Romulusdirected by Fede Alvarez, has all of this and more. A first teaser released at the start of the year started to hint at it, but two extended scenes screened at CinemaCon 2024 revealed just how intense and violent things will get in August with all of these must-have elements.
The first scene begins with some characters entering a Weyland-Yutani ship. Do they work for the company? Are they just investigating? It’s more like the latter but it’s not clear. Apparently some of their crew got stuck behind a door that can’t be unlocked, so now a few others are trying to figure out how to open it. Cailee Spaeny’s character, who is outside the room, takes a piece of technology from an old synthetic robot and passes it into the locked room to be placed on her own synthetic, hoping that it will solve the problem. Meanwhile, someone flips a switch and several modules begin to move.
For the team’s synthetic to integrate the new part, it has to be restarted, so everyone starts waiting. A woman finds a very cool “X-ray torch” that basically lets you see your body just by waving a wand at it. Meanwhile, more and more pods begin to move…and grow…and eventually hatch.
The locked room has about a foot or two of water in it and we get a POV shot of something swimming in the water and brushing past one of the people. It freaks them out. Then another comes back to someone else. Eventually, a full Facehugger jumps out of the water and attempts to establish itself. One person is capable of fighting another. Another does it too, but not without a close-up of the creature trying to insert itself into his mouth. It’s very disgusting, but very awesome.
The people in the locked room continue to struggle against the growing number of Facehuggers as they continue to hatch. Then, just as one of them is about to jump on an unconscious human’s face, the synthetic wakes up and stops him by grabbing him by the tail as he jumps towards the body.
The door is open and everyone can escape, but now there are probably two dozen Facehuggers chasing him. They go through one door, then another, and just as the humans are about to run away, we see a Facehugger wrap itself around a woman’s face. Cut in black.
Sometime after this scene, we see the woman who had the Facehugger on her feeling very ill. She enters a room with Isabela Merced’s character who asks her if she is okay. The woman holds her stomach, takes the x-ray light from the previous scene and scans her chest. It reveals something big, moving inside her and breaking her ribs to get out. Uh oh.
Merced grabs her friend who is now scared, in pain and convulsing. As she trembles, she mistakenly presses a button freeing the part of the ship they were in from the rest of the structure. Now they’re floating in space with this thing crashing into his chest and everyone’s freaking out.
That’s when the big moment comes. The creature inside her finally progresses and passes through the woman’s chest. However, compared to previous Extraterrestrial films, it somehow seemed a little more brutal. The closest thing I can compare this to is: Imagine you had a hammer and you were trying to punch a hole in the wall. As you broke it, the wall began to fall apart into pieces, getting bigger and bigger as you continued to hit it. This is what chest bursting looked like.
Eventually, the alien appears and starts screaming from its squeaky little head. Meanwhile, the cabin in which the two women, one of whom recently died, are floating, reaches a huge fuel reserve, and boom! A big explosion occurs. This then leads into a montage of shots later in the film, including several full-length Xenomorphs.
We still don’t know exactly what Extraterrestrial: Romulus but what was very clear from the CinemaCon footage is how Alvarez wants this to be even more brutal and impactful. Extraterrestrial movie to be. We’ll see more on August 16.
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