Do The ‘Alien’ Franchise’s Anti-Corporate Themes Still Work?

If there are two consistent villains in the history of cinema, they are the Nazis and evil corporations. From the Umbrella Corporation (“Resident Evil”) to Omni Consumer Products (“RoboCop”), Cyberdyne Systems (“Terminator”), Buy N Large (“Wall-E”), the Tyrell Corporation (“Blade Runner”), Silver Shamrock (“Halloween III”), and LexCorp (“Superman”), there is nothing more evil in the eyes of many filmmakers than the corporate bottom line. 

Among these evil corporations, none is so evil as the “Alien” franchise’s Weyland-Yutani Corporation. Over the course of nine films, the company has sent its employees to be killed by parasitic alien monsters, cloned those same employees, and repeatedly attempted to weaponize the most dangerous beings in the universe for profit. In “Prometheus,” the company’s founder even gets the Earth nearly destroyed by an interstellar biological weapon after asking an alien demigod to give him eternal life. 

“Alien: Romulus,” the newest film in the franchise, is no exception to this, but in its more salient moments, it expands upon the personal realities of these evils. As we discover, our lead characters are enslaved on a mining colony that continually extends their contracts and debts to the company against their will. These characters sold their souls to the company in exchange for a brighter future that will never come due to alleged “worker shortages.” 

When our heroes discover a space station infected by Xenomorphs, the needs of the corporation constantly interfere with their ability to survive. Throughout the film, it becomes clear that the company is prepared to kill most of them if “it’s good for the company.” Weyland-Yutani is once again in over its head and has forged ahead with horrific research that would carelessly result in hundreds or thousands of deaths if fully realized. 

Corporations certainly have a strange place in American politics, let alone in Hollywood. The Republican Party has historically been far more aligned with the interests of major corporations, with Democrats long wailing about pollution, Big Pharma, monopolies, and the detrimental effects of Walmart on the small business economy. That’s certainly changed in recent years, with Disney, BlackRock, and Pfizer becoming leftist darlings. It is much easier now to be a conservative and to hate corporations, if only because it’s clear corporations are happily working against conservative values.

Science fiction’s deep hatred of corporations isn’t difficult to understand. The genre has a futuristic and progressive bend going back to its foundations. Corporations are easy fodder for stories about mankind’s follies and our species’ future (or lack thereof). It is easy to imagine corporations choosing profits over human life in a story because it’s clear that there are corporations in real life that do so. 

From Foxconn’s suicides to Vietnamese sweatshop labor and DuPont’s history of Teflon poisoning, the trope does speak to an observable carelessness among global mega corporations — one rural and middle-class Americans have endured amid globalization as their financial lives have been quietly destroyed.

What makes “Alien: Romulus” fascinating is how little has changed in the genre in the past 45 years. Ridley Scott’s 1979 “Alien” told a story in which all of the events are manipulated by Weyland-Yutani, pressuring a crew of space truckers to put themselves in danger for the company’s good. Working-class people have their contracts threatened by their unwillingness to risk their lives, leading to five brutal deaths at the hands of a horrific alien monster. James Cameron’s “Aliens” further shows the company putting hundreds of colonist families in danger to access the Xenomorphs, lying to its protagonist as a means of using her body to traffic an alien embryo back to Earth. 

The critical reaction to “Alien: Romulus” has largely focused on its nostalgia and fan service, with the film paying tribute to all of the previous films in the franchise — to its detriment. It’s schlocky and violent and tries to gloss over its lack of originality with heavy-handed callbacks and practical special effects. This isn’t to say the film is bad, as it is occasionally clever and engaging, but the result is that it transports the same concepts and ideas from a 45-year-old horror film into a modern context without much unpacking. 

Weyland-Yutani is a cartoonishly evil corporation in a genre that has produced many examples of this trope. Karl Marx wrote heavily about the ways industry alienates people from their authentic selves, but these stories go further yet by suggesting that corporations will always choose profit over human life. They are unrealistic in this sense, as few examples of the genre give corporate characters the humanity to understand their poor choices, but they do capture how alien and ugly the output of greed can be. 

In an age of “woke capitalism,” and in the wake of the Tea Party, the gig economy, the Covid pandemic, quiet quitting, mass tech layoffs, automation, and the rise of artificial intelligence, an evil corporation means something very different now than before. It’s never been easier to be skeptical of faceless corporations and their goals. 

Tyler Hummel is a Nashville-based freelance journalist, a College Fix Fellow, and a member of the Music City Film Critics Association. He has contributed to The Dispatch, The New York Sun, Hollywood in Toto, The Pamphleteer, Law and Liberty, Main Street Nashville, North American Anglican, Living Church, and Geeks Under Grace.