Romulus’ place in the Alien timeline, explained

Key Takeaways

• Alien: Romulus takes place around 2142.
• Romulus returns to the franchise’s focus on working-class characters who are seduced by higher powers.
• The film aims to combine the space horror of Alien with the thrills of Aliens.

Some things, like androids, aliens, or being crushed by capitalism, are timeless. Or at least that seems to be part of the motivation behind the release of Alien: Romulus, the first new film in the Alien franchise in six years — the last film was Alien: Covenant, released in 2017 and directed by the franchise’s founder and longtime producer, Ridley. Scott. The new film, directed by Fede Alvarez, follows a group of young astronauts who break into a defunct space station called Romulus in order to strip it of its parts. Naturally, they encounter dangerous aliens in the process.

The Alien films cover everything from the planting of human life on Earth, to decidedly man-made disasters that occur hundreds of thousands of years later, but broadly, the story is told in six films, taking place between the 21st and 24th centuries. The first four films released follow a human engineer named Ellen Ripley (and technically, her hero), as played by Sigourney Weaver, and the two most recent entries follow David (Michael Fassbender), an antagonistic android created by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation who hires Ripley and his crew in the early films.

The main connecting tissue between Romulus throughout the franchise seems to be the Xenomorph.

Ripley is not in Alien: Romulus as the trailers have shown, and neither is David. Indeed, the main connective tissue between Romulus throughout the franchise seems to be the Xenomorph. So, when does the film take place, and how does it fit into the larger arcs of the Alien franchise? We have the answer and an educated guess.

When does Alien: Romulus happen?

Timeless themes, but certain ages in the Alien universe

According to a Variety interview with director Fede Alvarez, Alien: Romulus takes place 20 years after the first film in the series. That puts Alien: Romulus between Alien, which takes place in 2122, and Aliens, which takes place 57 years after the first film. If you want a specific date, then Alien: Romulus should take place somewhere around 2142.

Romulus seems to return to the Alien franchise’s focus on working-class characters who are tricked or harmed by the machinations of a force they don’t care about.

Even if we didn’t have an exact date, it makes sense that the film would take place earlier in the chronological series. Based on the trailer, it’s clearly trying to distance itself from the slick, futuristic aesthetic of Ridley Scott’s most recent Alien films and return audiences to the gritty, sequential look of the original.

And perhaps more importantly, Romulus seems to return to the Alien franchise’s focus on working-class characters who are deceived or harmed by the machinations of a force they don’t care about. I have to think that the young colonists in the movie weren’t supposed to find hundreds of baby relatives on that space station, yet they were there because some careless company left them there.

A timeline of the Alien franchise so far

Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017)

Prometheus follows a group of scientists in 2098, led by an archaeologist named Elizabeth Shaw, and sponsored by Peter Weyland, the CEO of the Weyland Corporation, who are looking for a race of aliens that may be the source of intelligent life on Earth. This search leads them to the planet LV-233, a desert planet that is home to an alien ship filled with black goo-filled pills and the corpse of the Engineer — the unknown precursor Shaw sought.

Things go wrong when one of the team members is exposed to the goo and an unknown “xenomorph” is born. Things take a real turn for the worse when it is revealed that David, the Weyland Corporation android who accompanies Prometheus, has ulterior motives. Prometheus makes the traditional “Alien” experience less about exploitation and more about the powerless relationship between creation and creator.

Alien: Covenant picks up the story 11 years later in 2104, following the crew of the colony ship Covenant, who are dragged down over a mysterious planet in search of a crashed alien ship. After a dangerous exposure to a pale alien “neomorph”, the crew meets David, who survived the events of Prometheus and Shaw, and shows the Covenant team what happened on this now abandoned planet.

As it turns out, there’s more than one alien, and David hasn’t been entirely forthcoming about how the planet was abandoned. Also, a neomorph looks different from a xenomorph for a reason — it’s done on purpose. Alien: Covenant offers Prometheus’ obsession with creation almost biblical. Engineers play god by creating humans and xenomorphs, humans play god by creating androids, and David decides he doesn’t want to play the same game anymore.

The Alien (1979)

Alien follows the Nostromo crew, a group of long-distance truck drivers who follow a distress signal to a desolate moon to investigate, you guessed it, a crashed alien ship. Inside, they find a large corpse of an alien sailor (the Engineer from Prometheus), and eggs.

The egg hatches into a crab-like “facehugger” that latches onto one of the Nostromo’s officers, successfully killing him by blasting him through the chest. Crew members begin dropping like flies as the alien child grows into an older xenomorph, until only Ellen Ripley and the ship’s android, Ash, are left.

When it turns out that Ash has been ordered to return the xenomorph to “the company” (Weyland-Yutani) at all costs, Ripley takes matters into her own hands. Aside from creating the iconic visuals that all of the films in the franchise reference, Alien also laid the thematic foundation for the series. Concern for creation (especially, childbirth) and awareness that employers don’t really care about their workers, just goods and the “value” they can get for themselves.

Alien: Romulus (2024)

Alien: Romulus follows a group of young space colonists in 2142 who decide to explore a defunct space station called Romulus and appear to loot it. Those plans are disrupted when they encounter huggers and, ultimately, their xenomorph threat. We’ll have to wait until Romulus comes out on August 16, 2024, to learn all the details of the film, but the trailers suggest that it will try to split the difference between the extraterrestrial horror of Alien and the thrills of Aliens. , by returning the focus to the people at the grassroots level of society.

Aliens (1986) / Alien 3 (1992)

After setting himself up for the end of Alien, James Cameron’s Aliens picks up Ripley’s story 57 years later in 2179, and he is rescued by the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Ripley tries to warn them about the alien eggs found by the Nostromo crew, only to learn that the alien’s moon (LV-426) has been turned into a mutant colony. Ripley goes with a representative of Weyland-Yutani and a group of space soldiers to the colony to find out why they lost contact with the organization and runs into xenomorphs, their great queen, and a child named Newt who somehow survived the collapse of the colony.

What is discovered next suggests that the colony was researching aliens just as they were terraforming and that the Weyland-Yutani corpo is willing to have everyone killed if they find other xenomorphs on the moon and enter the lab naturally. Aliens, in being so full of content, also makes the capitalist critique of the Alien franchise even clearer. Xenomorphs may be a threat to the life of the working joe, but they are an opportunity for a megacorporation.

Alien 3 begins immediately after the events of Aliens with Ripley, Newt, and the spaceship that survived the shipwreck in the penal colony. Ripley is the sole survivor of the crash, and when a facehugger mounted on his ship imprisons a dog alien, he is forced to deal with another xenomorph outbreak.

An alliance? Ripley was implanted with the embryo of an unknown queen in the previous film, and now he must worry about his ticking clock and the survival of the prisoners of the penal colony. Despite its heavy production, Alien 3 is best known for the bleak and brutal note that ends Ripley’s story — perhaps the death of the aliens or the company that pursues them is inevitable.

Alien Resurrection (1997)

Until Alien Resurrection, of course, set 200 years after Aliens 3 in 2379, restarts Ripley’s story. Only it’s not the Ripley of the first movie, it’s a clone called Ripley 8, who just happens to have xenomorph DNA. Ripley 8’s loyalty is questioned when lab-grown xenomorphs escape the military science vessel where it was created, and he is forced to team up with a group of soldiers to survive and stop the xenomorphs from reaching Earth.