New Alien: Romulus Footage Featured Hungry Face Huggers and Brutal Chest Bursters

When making an Alien movie three things are a must. First, Facehuggers. Without them, you can’t have the other two. Second, a Chestburster. This is just a smaller version of the third but still absolutely crucial. Then, third, a full-on Xenomorph. Those acid-blooded killers that like to murder entire crews of spaceships.

Alien: Romulus, directed by Fede Alvarez, has all that and more. A first teaser released earlier this year began to hint at it but two extended scenes shown at CinemaCon 2024 revealed just how intense and violent things will get this August with all of those must-have elements.

The first scene starts with a few characters entering a Weyland-Yutani ship. Do they work for the company? Are they just investigating? It seems more like the latter but it’s not made clear. Apparently, part 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 tech off an old synthetic robot and passes it into the locked room to be put on their own synthetic, hoping that can solve the problem. Meanwhile, someone pulls a switch and several pods begin to move.

For the team’s synthetic to integrate the new piece, he needs to be rebooted, so everyone starts waiting. One woman finds a very cool “X-Ray torch” which basically allows you to see into your body just by waving a wand over it. Meanwhile, more and more of the pods start 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 through the water and brushing up against one of the people. It freaks them out. Then another one brushes up on someone else. Finally, a full Facehugger jumps out of the water and tries to implant itself. One person is able to fight one off. Another does too, but not without a tight shot of the creature attempting to insert itself into their mouth. It’s very gross, but very great.

The people in the locked room continue to fight off the growing number of Facehuggers as they keep hatching. Then, just as one of them is about to jump on the face of an unconscious human, the synthetic wakes up and stops it by grabbing it by the tail as it jumps down towards the body.

The door is open and everyone is able to escape but now there are probably two dozen Facehuggers in pursuit. They break through one door, then another, and just when the humans are about to get away, we see one Facehugger wrap around a woman’s face. Cut to black.

Sometime after that scene, we see the woman who had the Facehugger on her feeling quite ill. She walks into a room with Isabela Merced’s character who asks if she’s okay. The woman is holding her stomach and takes the X-ray torch from the previous scene and scans her chest. It reveals something big, moving inside of her, and smashing at her ribs to come out. Uh oh.

Merced grabs her friend who is now scared, in pain, and convulsing. As she shakes she mistakenly hits a button releasing the part of the ship they were in from the rest of the structure. Now they’re floating around in space with this thing smashing against her chest and everyone is freaking out.

This is when the big moment happens. The creature inside her finally makes progress and cracks through the woman’s chest. However, compared to previous Alien movies, this somehow seemed a bit more brutal. The closest thing I can compare it to is: imagine you had a sledgehammer and were trying to smash a hole in the wall. As you smashed it, the wall would start to come apart in chunks, getting bigger and bigger as you kept hitting it. That’s what the chest burst looked like.

Finally, the alien pops out and starts screaming its little squeaky head off. Meanwhile, the cabin that the two women, one recently deceased, are floating in hits a massive fuel reserve, and boom! A big explosion happens. That then leads into a montage of shots from later in the movie including several of the full-on Xenomorph.

We still don’t know exactly what Alien: Romulus is about but what was very clear from its CinemaCon footage is just how much more brutal and impactful Alvarez wants this Alien movie to be. We’ll see more August 16.

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