Alien Romulus Explains Why Corporate Solutions Often Lack Sense

Image; 20th Century Studios

Fede Álvarez’s latest outing, Alien Romulus (2024), falls somewhere between a prequel and a sequel. Set in between Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986), it tells the story of indentured servant Rain Carradine (Cailee Spaeny) who goes on an off-book scavenging mission with some peers to get the parts necessary to flee her corporate colony (and effective prison).

On the titular Romulus station, she runs across the alien we have all come to know and love (from afar) — the shiny, black-tailed alien sometimes referred to as a xenomorph. It starts picking off Rain’s crew one by one as she enters a race for survival against a creature her captor, Weyland-Yutani, will do anything to acquire.

There has been a lot of discussion about this movie, particularly its usage of AI, animatronics, and a reference performance to recreate the dead actor Ian Holm, which some critics believed was exploitative.

We will sidestep that conversation and instead focus on what this text says about corporate solutions — mainly that they would rather risk tearing everything down than threatening the status quo.

Hell is made in a corporate boardroom

Life on Jackson’s Star, the Weyland-Yutani corporate colony our protagonist Rain has been stranded on since childhood, is hell. The sky is perpetually dark, crime appears rampant, and all the workers are surrounded by heavy industry with no apparent attempts to mitigate it. We see our lead walk past noxious fumes being burned up in some industrial process, and no one bats an eye.

Rain, we learn, is never leaving this planet “legitimately.” Early on, she attempts to buy a ticket off-world as she has met her corporate-assigned quota — one that took her years to fulfill — and should be free to go now, but the Weyland-Yutani bureaucracy has no interest in letting that happen.

We see a chilling scene where the administrative assistant at the travel office extends the number of days she owes to the company by years. “Unfortunately,” the assistant says with faux concern, “the quotas have been raised to 24,000 hours, so you will be released from contract in another five to six years.”

I understand why Rain goes on a deadly scavenging mission to escape Jackson’s Star — I probably would, too.

The logic I have trouble understanding, or more like stomaching, is that of this corporation’s solution. Weyland-Yutani also understands that life in its colonies is suboptimal, if only for the reduced lifespan of its workers. As the android Andy (David Jonsson), whose primary directive at this time is to aid the company, laments to his companions:

“Our colonies are dying: Unbearable temperatures, Novel diseases every cycle, and toxic mine fumes. It’s all one unforeseen tragedy after another.”

This framing, though, is a lie. It’s not all one “unforeseen” tragedy after another. Weyland-Yutani placed inhabitants, through coercion and force, into those terrible conditions. It enslaved people and then did not provide them with the resources they needed to survive long-term, only a marginal amount capable of yielding a profit.

Weyland-Yutani’s negligence is the reason why its workers are dying in the first place.

The company’s solution is not to improve its worker’s environments — environments it has built and therefore is responsible for— but to use the “perfect” DNA of the Xenomorph to make humans more “adaptable.” As the Android Rook (Daniel Betts) — the character that is the source of the Ian Holms controversy — monologues:

“Mankind was never truly suited for space colonization. They are simply too fragile. They are too weak. The work of this station aimed to change that. The perfect organism — that’s how we should refer to human beings…So I took [the xenomorphs] gift…This is a much needed and overdue upgrade for humanity.”

The only problem with implementing this plan is that the creepy crawling Xenomorph is “just so darn” destructive. It has destroyed every facility it’s been studied in, including the abandoned facilities of Romulus and Remes, where our protagonist Rain just so happens to be scavenging in.

There is no doubt what it would do if it ever were able to land on a more populated area (see Aliens), and early trials of a xenomorph-human hybrid are terrifying. Late into the movie, the viewer is shown an example of one — a flesh-pink-shaped xenomorph with a disturbing face that peaks into the uncanny valley. It’s so far removed from its humanity that it drains its mother dry.

This is a bad plan — and the movie does not pretend otherwise (Weyland-Yutani’s android Rook is a secondary antagonist) — but it is one rooted in economic incentives, we understand. If the company can get this plan to work — and that’s a big if — Weyland-Yutani can solve its problems by sacrificing none of its power.

And that doesn’t feel very far removed from the economic incentives of our present reality at all.

A metaphor for our climate

There is something oddly prescient about this movie’s critique of a corporation engaging in a self-destructive solution rather than letting go of control.

I am going to go on a bit of a tangent, but I promise it will connect back to the movie Alien: Romulus. You can argue that this movie is making a rather direct metaphor about our current environmental crisis. We likewise exist at a time when economic incentives have degraded our environment, and it’s not something that just happened but is the result of negligence from corporate and governmental actors.

Similar to Weyland-Yutani’s gene-editing plan, the answers constantly marketed to us to solve the climate crisis are either a continuation of the problem (see “natural gas,” i.e., methane) or are so far removed from reality that they could be catastrophic if ever actually implemented en masse.

Perhaps the most alarming example of the latter is geoengineering or the large-scale manipulation of Earth’s environment. Geoengineering is controversial, to say the least, and it’s hardly a thought exercise. It’s in many ways something we as a species already have a lot of experience with, as we are currently running a giant, catastrophic geoengineering experiment that we informally call climate change.

For some, this ubiquity makes it the desired solution to fight climate change — to fight fire with fire. Experiments are being run, and companies are being founded based on the premise that we will soon be able to “hack” the Earth into compliance. The start-up Make Sunsets, for example, has raised millions to release balloons with aerosols into the atmosphere to alter the climate.

The ball on this is very much rolling.

If you can’t tell, I am firmly in the “anti-geoengineering Earth to fight climate change” camp — though not against researching it on a small scale.

If the climate crisis has taught us anything, it’s that our planet’s climate is such a complicated system that we cannot possibly model it with certainty. We must assume that any significant change will have unintended knock-on effects that can spiral out of control. As Renée Cho summarizes the standard objections to Stratospheric aerosol injection (SAI), a subset of solar geoengineering, in an article in Columbia’s Climate School magazine:

“Those against advancing SAI research are worried about its potential and uncertain impacts on the climate and ecosystems that modeling has revealed. Studies show that SAI could weaken the stratospheric ozone layer, alter precipitation patterns and affect agriculture, ecosystem services, marine life and air quality. Moreover, the impacts and risks would vary by how and where it is deployed, the climate, ecosystems and the population. Apart from deployment variations, small changes in other variables, such as the size of the aerosol droplets, their chemical reactivity and the speed of their reactions with ozone can also produce different results.”

While there are many different types of geoengineering, not just SAI — e.g., Marine cloud brightening, Cirrus cloud thinning, Sunshades, etc. — the fundamental problem is the same: there are a lot of variables that are difficult to account for at such a large scale when the more straightforward (and less risky answer) would be to implement the technology and social tools we do have now to reduce our emissions.

To me, geoengineering has the same ideological roots as Weyland-Yutani’s Xenomorph gene-editing solution to space colonization. They are both solutions that do not attempt to solve systemic problems — i.e., the financial incentives that allow companies to degrade the environment (and hurt the people) around them.

Instead, they are ultimately rooted in a type of wish fulfillment, the idea that everything can continue more or less the same with one or two tweaks.

A horrifying conclusion

Alien: Romulus recontextualizes why Weyland-Yutani wants the Xenomorph so badly in a way that resonates with many modern-day viewers. It’s not merely seen as a weapon anymore — we are past the Cold War metaphors of the 70s and 80s — but also as a cost-saving measure.

A method for Weyland-Yutani to “solve” its environmental problems while not deviating from corporate imagination.

That is a sound critique of modern-day corporate America — a series of institutions that would rather a plan be projected to turn a profit than for it actually to work. For people to propose solutions that do not ask capitalists to reduce profits (or lose power) and, hopefully, cut those pesky labor costs.

Whether on Earth or in the void of space, it’s a logic that currently seems inescapable — and I am glad to see it scrutinized on the Silver Screen.