Last summer, Alien: Romulus came and knocked the socks off pretty much everyone. Director Fede Alvarez’s movie, some questionable digital resurrections aside, pulled the best from Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens. This is something others have tried and failed to do in this franchise. Romulus, taking place between the first two films, was a big success. And now a sequel seems inevitable. While talking to Empire Magazine, Alvarez shared some thoughts on where the next installment might go. Here’s what he had to say about the potential further adventures of Cailee Spaeny’s character Rain in another chapter of the Alien saga:
Rodo [Sayagues, co-writer] and I are working on that right now. We’re excited about where it can go. We’ve almost checked all of the boxes of things that I want to see [in Romulus], and brought back a lot of the things I hadn’t seen in a while. Wherever we go now, we can go into uncharted waters. I think it’ll be so exciting to go with characters you know from this movie, to a place in the Alien franchise that we’ve never been before, and to discover things that you’ve never seen before.
So what could this all mean? Well, if Rain is our new Ripley, then the previous films in the series give us an idea. The Sigourney Weaver films each ended with Ripley going into cryostasis, then waking up in a new environment and era. Or, in the case of Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, dying and being reborn in a new time period. That means that Rain (and her android companion Andy, played by David Jonsson) will likely emerge from cryostasis in a totally new environment, and not the destination they were headed toward. In Aliens, Ripley slept for 57 years. We think it would be amazing if Rain woke up well past where Alien: Resurrection left off in 2181. This opens up a whole new world of Xenomorph possibilities. That definitely falls under the definition of things we’ve never seen before, and “uncharted waters.” And we’re here for it.
