From Ripley to Rain: New “Alien: Romulus” Teaser Connects Cailee Spaeny & Sigourney Weaver’s Heroines

August 6, 2024

“What was so great about what Sigourney did, it was incredible; it holds such an iconic space in cinematic history,” Cailee Spaeny says at the top of a new look at director Fede Alvarez’s upcoming Alien: Romulus. Spaeny stars as Rain Carradine, a young woman who makes a really, really bad decision when she tries to change up her life by joining a crew of space colonizers who go to scavenge a decommissioned space station to find the technology they need to finally leave their doomed planet. Unfortunately for Rain, the decommissioned space station is not abandoned; there is life aboard, but it’s obviously not human. The horrors to come connect Spaney’s Rain to the original alien slayer, Sigourney Weaver’s iconic Ripley, who first appeared in Ridley Scott’s game-changing 1979 original Alien.

Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is an interquel that bridges the gap between Scott’s 1979 masterpiece and James Cameron’s fantastic 1986 sequel Aliens. In order to make sure he had his mythology right, Alvarez met early on in the writing process with Cameron himself, and based his idea off a deleted scene from Aliens in which children were running among the workers in the space colony. “I remember thinking about what it would be like for teenagers to grow up in a colony so small and what would happen to them when they reached their early 20s,” Alvarez said in the press notes.

Director Fede Álvarez on the set of 20th Century Studios’ ALIEN: ROMULUS. Photo by Murray Close. © 2024 20th Century Studios. All Rights Reserved.

Alvarez’s film has the distinction of having been approved by Cameron and Scott. This new look at Romulus is centered on Spaeny’s Rain, who is proudly in the mold of Weaver’s Ripley, albeit she’s a different kind of survivor. In Alien, Weaver’s indomitable Ellen Ripley battled and eventually vanquished a Xenomorph after a grueling duel aboard the USCSS Nostromo. Then Cameron picked up the story seven years later and followed a battle-hardened Ripley, who was now part of a military mission to a space colony to investigate a fresh xenomorph attack. Romulus is set roughly 20 years after Scott’s Alien and 37 years before Cameron’s Aliens, with Spaeny’s Rain and her fellow would-be colonizers finding themselves face-to-face-hugger with the most terrifying species in the universe.

In the new look, Alvarez makes clear that Spaeny was always his first choice. Spaeny’s Rain is desperate to get beyond Jackson’s Star, the mining colony where she lives. Her parents have died, and she’ll do anything for a fresh start. Instead, she finds herself in an unimaginable nightmare.

Check out the trailer below. Alien: Romulus hits theaters on August 16.