Face-Hugging Aliens Invade ‘Romulus’ Hall H Panel – Comic-Con

“Do you want to see more footage?” Fede Alvarez asked halfway-through the Alien: Romulus Hall H panel at Comic-Con.

“Yeahhhhhh!” screamed the crowd, which for 20th Century Studios and Disney should be a sigh of relief in terms of the reception toward their millennial take on the Ridley Scott-born 45-year old franchise. Though it’s the nth installment of Alien, it’s first hatched under the Disney-Fox merger.

Those in Hall got an extended look of the film involving Cailee Spaeny and her astronaut posse going through a red-lit alien lab-incubator area. Baby aliens begin popping out of the wall and into the water in a scene that’s a semi-nod to the trash compactor monster from Star Wars.

But the second clip had Aileen Wu’s Laura getting her chest burst by a baby alien while a spaceship is clumsily taking off.

However, taking the same-old panel chat-and-clips formula up at notch here at Comic-Con, toward the end of the panel, big red-lit sirens sounded off around the auditorium as bunch of alien facehuggers crawled on stage. Then in an act of guerilla theater, an actor foaming at the mouth waddled onstage and then proceeded to have an alien burst out of his chest. All attendees in Hall H received alien facehugger masks to their delight.

This Alien takes place between Scott’s first 1979 movie and James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens, and Alvarez made that so for style purposes. It’s also another reboot in the 45-old franchise, the first in the new Disney-Fox merger.

“I wanted fresh faces, ones you didn’t associate with another character,” said the filmmaker on his choosing the actors for the cast. David Jonsson plays a synthetic aka a robot in the movie; a being similar to Michael Fassbender’s in the Ridley Scott directed prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant

“Nothing tells you in the first movie that Sigourney (Weaver) was going to survive, anyone can really die,” the director added. And that’s the same conceit here. “There’s a lot of death in this movie,” said the Don’t Breath actor.

Spaeny shared how she auditioned for Alvarez on another movie, and left the audition crying. “I think he remembered that,” the actress said about getting the call for the new Alien movie.

The director shot the movie chronologically.

“It’s a challenge when you have to make another movie in that world,” said Alvarez.

Scott, a producer on the sequel, beamed in by video and asked Alvarez what new themes would be in the new film. “It’s called Romulus because it’s a story of siblinghood. One of the things I wanted to explore not seen in the original movies are the real human connections among all the characters. This is the first time you have really close people that really love each other, so when sh*t like this happens, it makes it much more dramatic – being someone’s sibling – would you die for your brother or sister, or leave them behind?”

But also “the psychosexual” per the filmmaker from the original film.

Alien: Romulus opens on Aug. 16.