While Alien: Romulus told an entirely new story nestled in between two classic films — Alien (1979) and Aliens (1986) — it still managed to reference quite a bit of lore and detail from the entire franchise. While the existence of the Xenomorphs themselves hardly counts as Easter eggs, the return of Ian Holm’s visage, this time as a new android named Rook, certainly helped to cement Romulus as a vibrant part of the Alien chronology, even if Rain and Andy’s adventure is, on some level, a side quest.
But, it turns out there’s a much deeper, and more interesting Easter egg hidden in plain sight in Romulus — Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is technically in this movie! But because Ripley is in hypersleep for several decades between Alien and Aliens, how does this work?
Back in August, Romulus VFX supervisor Daniel Macarin told CinemaBlend that Ripley’s shuttle from Alien was a background Easter egg on the titular Romulus station. On November 23, Screenrant pointed out that this was literally the only way for Sigourney Weaver to exist in the movie without breaking continuity, and was preferable to a full-on cameo. Here’s how Macarin described the Romulus approach to classic Alien Easter eggs.
“I don't want to put something in there that the audience is going to go, ‘Oh look, there it is.’ And then people start guessing about that,” Macarin said. “So with [Ripley’s] ship, if you put it in really small, it's fine. And you get the people who have gone two or three times and they start noticing those extra details, they might see it and it's fine.”
And yet, having Ripley’s shuttle onboard the Romulus station does, in a way, do the opposite of what Macarin says: It makes us start guessing about it! At the end of Alien, Ripley escapes in this small shuttle, fights off the Xenomorph, ejects it into space, and then sleeps for 57 years until the events of Aliens. The present tense of Romulus happens about 20 years after Alien, so it is pretty much smack dab in the middle of that gap. And, for some reason, during this time, Weyland-Yutani retrieved Ripley’s escape shuttle, stored it on the Romulus station, and then jettisoned it again.
Other than this being a cool Easter egg, the question of why is pretty much unanswerable. If Rook and the other Romulus people wanted more info about the Xenomorphs from Ripley, why not wake her up from hypersleep? Were they worried she had a Xenomorph sleeping in there with her, next to her cat?
Essentially, there’s no good answer to this, other than the fact that we know Weyland-Yutani to both be unreliable and secretive. So, until some other midquel story surfaces that connects Romulus to Aliens, the true reason why Ripley’s spacecraft was hanging around in a top-secret research lab will remain a mystery. Until then, we can only guess about Ripley’s dreams during this time. Based on what happens in Romulus, she’s lucky to have slept through it all.
