Last Saturday, we saw that a group of desperate miners traveled to an abandoned space station looking for cryopods. They found the pods easily enough, but they didn’t have enough fuel for the nine-year journey to the nearest planet. So, three of the miners, Andy, Tyler, and Bjorn, searched the rest of the station for the fuel.

When they tried to remove the containers holding the fuel they found, they triggered an emergency system. The three men ended up locked inside a room that was keeping countless sacks frozen. Just as whatever was inside these sacks began to move around, Rain, our hero, found a way to free her crew members by removing a chip from a damaged android they’d found on the station.

Old “friends” return

Rain hands the chip to Tyler, who puts it inside Andy, the crew’s android. But as Andy is rebooting, whatever is inside the sacks breaks free, and creepy squid-like creatures begin swimming through the water.

When the creatures attack, what we suspected is confirmed: the notorious facehuggers are back. They begin jumping around, trying to plant eggs inside Tyler and Bjorn. But when Andy wakes up, he frees them from the room.

The crew almost succeeds in escaping the station, but at the last moment, a facehugger manages to latch itself onto Navarro. It begins choking her, and the crew struggles to figure out how to remove it until Andy explains what the facehugger is. It’s clear the chip has done something to the robot’s hardware, and he’s putting out some seriously sinister vibes. Still, they’re able to free Navarro using the information Andy provides.

However, the damaged android wakes up and begins speaking to Andy. It turns out that the android is Ash from the original film, Alien (1979) and he has an odd effect on the robot. Andy begins marching toward Navarro, intending to kill her. Navarro panics and flees to the crew’s ship. Bjorn manages to keep up with her, but Rain and Tyler stay behind because they’re baffled by recent events.

Loved this and hated that…

There are things I really loved and things I really hated about this sequence. One point in the movie’s favor is that the writers chose to bring back Ash. Not only was it nice to see him again but his return connected the film to the original. However, what doesn’t make sense was how Ash would still be motivated by his previous mission if the chip stored in his brain had been given to Andy.

In theory, Andy should’ve been confused by the conflict between the orders provided to Ash and his original orders to protect Rain. Instead, Ash must prompt Andy to remove his original orders before he begins to follow the Weyland Corporation’s objectives.

It’s hard to know what to make of this plot hole because, on the one hand, the story would’ve moved faster if Andy just began following Weyland’s orders. But the audience wouldn’t know what was going on, and Andy would later have to explain his new objective. He does so later in the film. However, the advantage of Ash redirecting Andy’s programming earlier in the story is that the audience understands the stakes sooner — which increases the tension in the film.

Plot holes — deep or shallow?

When I’m trying to measure the significance of a plot hole, the question I like to ask is: How does the hole ultimately affect the story? For example, last Saturday, I mentioned that the locked door to the cooling room hadn’t fully closed. This enabled Rain to give Ash’s chip to Tyler through the gap. The gap didn’t make any sense because the door should’ve shut completely. But this hole was ultimately inconsequential because if the gap hadn’t been there, Rain just would’ve had to break the door’s glass to put the story in the same place.

However, in Prometheus for example, the writers paid absolutely no attention to the number of crewmembers present. There was even a scene where some of the crewmembers drive off the ship in a large vehicle and are never seen or thought of again. If those crewmembers were still on the moon by the climax of the film, that would’ve drastically changed Dr. Shaw’s situation. But it’s as if the writers had just forgotten about them. That’s what makes the plot hole a big one. Correcting it would alter the entire story.

In Ash’s case, it’s a wash. It makes no sense from a narrative standpoint that Ash would still have his orders without the chip, but it does provide clarity for the audience. And if Ash hadn’t still had his orders, the only thing that would’ve changed was that the exposition and the betrayals would’ve been done by Andy instead. Rain’s ultimate objective in the movie, to save her now disturbed robot, wouldn’t have changed either, and neither would the climax of the film.

A bigger hole

Anyway, when Navarro and Bjorn return to the ship, Navarro tries to strand Rain, Tyler, and Andy on the station. However, the embryo planted by the facehugger begins to burst from her chest. This is unfortunately a much larger plot hole.

The gestation period of the embryos has always been a problem for this franchise (although Alien Covenant did try to correct at least one aspect of the issue). In every other movie, it has taken hours, sometimes days, for the embryos to hatch. However, Navarro’s embryo kills her almost right away, in a matter of minutes if not seconds.

The reason this plot hole is devastating to the story is that, if the process had taken longer, then Navarro would’ve made it back to the mining planet. The alien would’ve then killed all the miners. Or she would’ve returned to the station, and the alien would’ve woken up while the others were in cryosleep.

Once Navarro dies, the writing takes another clumsy turn. Somehow, the ship crashes inside the station’s hangar. This was contrived, to say the least. Really, the ship should’ve either slammed into the station itself, destroying both, or it should’ve crashed into the mining planet’s rings, but the plot needs to happen, so the ship is safe and mostly undamaged inside the hangar. This is by far the weakest part of the movie. But after this turning point between the first and second acts, the story does improve, and we’ll cover that next Saturday!

Here’s my review from last Saturday: Alien: Romulus (2024) — Wait! This movie is actually good? A new character, Rain, tries to escape the Weyland Corporation mine in which her parents were killed but the xenomorphs have infiltrated the space station the escapees must board… Romulus is likely harmed at the box office by the fact that the previous two films in the series were terrible. It meets the minimum standard for a quality film.