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In life, it is certainly seen that all things evolve from natural simplicity to incomprehensible complexity, and so it is in Tinsel Town, where, as time marches on into infinity, simplified, crystalline ideas become more and more complex.
This is most evident in the “Alien” film series, where once upon a time all we had to remember was a nest of leathery eggs filled with spider-like facehuggers, a baby chestburster, and a single, crazy biomechanical monster preying on space truckers on a deep space merchant ship. Then came “Aliens,” with drones, fighters, and a nasty Queen to further round out the cast of deadly extraterrestrials hellbent on ruining our day.
After two sequels and two prequels (not counting the crossover with Predator), we’ve been treated to a multitude of variations and iterations of these deadly beasts, including the uniquely grotesque “Newborn,” cobra-like hammerheads, tentacled Trilobites, the proto-xenomorph known as “The Deacon,” graceful humanoid neomorphs, and now the newest version, “The Offspring,” in Fede Alvarez’s “Alien: Romulus.”
So what exactly is this hideous new hybrid being that appears in the final act of “Romulus,” and what are the different components of its evolutionary structure? Let’s examine this lean, tall beast from head to toe and find out how he was brought to life by a mega-tall Romanian basketball player named Robert Bobroczkyi.
Contains spoilers for ‘Alien: Romulus’
How Was “The Offspring” Originally Conceived?
As seen in the chaotic aftermath of “Romulus,” a very pregnant Kay (Isabela Merced) is captured and cocooned by a xenomorph before being rescued by Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and the android Andy (David Jonsson). Hoping to protect her injured and unborn child, Kay makes the decision to inject herself with the dangerous “Compound Z-01.” It is a genetic accelerator serum extracted from the DNA of a rescued xenomorph and designed to advance humanity beyond its fragile state and provide Weyland-Yutani with a durable workforce for its hostile offworld colonies.
However, this refined version of the famous “black goo” pathogen would be used as a catalyst to create the final organism; however, it caused reckless mutation when ingested or injected into any host body and was too radical a non-Newtonian to predict any positive reproductive outcome.
The same malevolent substance was a key plot device in the 2012 film “Prometheus,” when the Engineers stored large amounts of “black slime” source material in their weapons depot on LV-223, and it is the very rain of black death that David (Michael Fassbender) uses as a biological agent on the Fourth Planet in the 2017 film “Alien: Covenant.”
To keep Kay safe for the return journey to Jackson’s Star Mining Colony, Rain sedates her in a cryochamber, but a horrific trauma ensues when the dangerous fluid completes its destructive process and Kay gives birth to a hideous, ovular baby that quickly mutates into a human-engineer-xenomorph hybrid.
Who Played ‘The Offspring’ in ‘Alien: Romulus’?
Through the magic of Academy Award-winning Hollywood creature effects masters at Legacy Effects, “The Offspring” was brought to life using practical effects by Romanian basketball player Robert Bobroczkyi. Standing at seven feet seven inches tall, Bobroczkyi is one of the tallest college basketball players in history and most recently played for Rochester Christian University during the 2021-2022 season. Adding some prosthetic enhancements, minor animatronics, and a bit of CGI, the villain’s costume was completed.
“The way it’s described, you’re trying to visualize it in your head and you don’t know how the director is going to create this character,” visual effects supervisor Daniel Macarin told Variety. “Is it going to look like a xenomorph? Is it going to be something very unique? Is it going to be something we’ve never seen before?”
Appropriately named “The Offspring,” this nightmarish cross-species deformity is second only to the hideous creature called “The Newborn” from the 1997 film “Alien: Resurrection.” The creature is notable for its deep-set black eyes, soft body, and long, wriggling tongue that licks its mother, who is a resurrected Ellen Ripley clone.
“I saw the plates for the first time and it’s 7 feet [tall] “There was an actor there in costume. It was very scary,” Macarin says. “They did such a great job with the look and feel of the character that we knew anything we could bring to it would help.
“You don’t get a lot of screen time with this character, so you have to make sure the audience never reacts the wrong way. If they chuckle at it or something seems funny, then you’ve taken them out of that moment and we probably don’t have enough time to get them back into the action.”
What Does “The Offspring” Look Like?
Because the Prometheus Compound is a genetic cocktail that has yet to be fully perfected, what we see is a shocking combination of recognizable human features, the long-domed skull of a neomorph seen in “Alien: Covenant,” the spikes, tail and dorsal scutes of the basic xenomorph, and the face of a young Engineer, with pale translucent skin and piercing, soulless eyes. This strange, rapidly growing baby slaughters Kay and severely injures Andy before fighting Rain and dying in the cold void of space in ’86. But perhaps it survived?
Using our previous knowledge that xenomorphs can survive in space using a fossilized secretion, as seen in the opening of “Alien: Romulus,” it’s a pretty good bet that this strange hybrid species may not be doomed yet and could return in a future sequel as the “Alien” franchise continues to develop.
“It’s not something you want to tie directly into,” Macarin adds. “But if you hint that there’s a bigger story there, that there’s more mystery, and that maybe we’re just seeing the beginning of these ideas, that’s definitely something we wanted to explore.”
How Is “The Offspring” Connected to Engineers?
Since “The Offspring” bears striking similarities to the planet-seeding Engineers who first appeared in director Ridley Scott’s “Prometheus,” we can speculate that it’s a larger component of the overarching “Alien” mythology that will be explored further in subsequent films. One question that comes to mind is who created the Engineers and their mutagenic, life-altering “black goo” in the first place?
“I was hoping people would totally understand the Engineer part,” director Fede Alvarez explained to Variety. “The black goo is the root of everything that was introduced in ‘Prometheus.’ It’s the root of all life, but specifically the xenomorphs come from that stuff, which means it has to be inside them. It’s almost like the semen of the xenomorphs. So, if it’s affecting your DNA and the Engineers clearly came from the same root of life, it made sense to me. [the offspring of a human and a xenomorph] “It would look like this. It’s probably a new species, because this mixture has never happened before.”