Musings on the New Alien Movie

I recently watched Alien: Romulus in theaters. I won’t spoil the movie here, but I will say that I enjoyed it much more than the more recent entries in the franchise like Prometheus and Alien: Covenant. The original Alien and its sequel Aliens were among my favorite movies growing up – and Romulus is very successful at capturing the spirit and feel of those films. But the movie also made me wonder about something – why is Hollywood so bad at writing stories about corporations that are believably evil?

The story of Alien: Romulus centers around the efforts of the Weyland-Yutani corporation to capture and somehow “harness” the xenomorphs for criminally under-specified reasons. (No, this is not a spoiler – this is the plot of basically every movie in the Alien franchise.) The first Alien vs Predator movie is set in the modern day, whereas the original movies are set hundreds of years in the future. This means that Weyland-Yutani has spent literally centuries attempting this task with a 100% failure rate. The xenomorph is an incredibly dangerous creature that unstoppably murders everyone in the vicinity and reproduces by harvesting humans as hosts, killing them in the process. Every time the company has attempted this project, the end result is “basically everyone dies and pretty much everything gets destroyed.” The company has endured massive costs in lost personnel and lost equipment while getting nothing valuable in exchange, but they never stop attempting the same thing over and over again.

Nor is this movie series unique. RoboCop was also among my childhood favorite movies, and this movie series also centers their plots around the actions of evil, greedy corporations. Indeed, the first RoboCop movie in particular has often been hailed as a brilliant form of social commentary on corporate greed. But just like the fictional Weyland-Yutani from the Alien franchise, the evil corporation of the RoboCop movies, Omni Consumer Products, is depicted as doing nothing but making a string of catastrophically stupid, highly expensive decisions that make no business sense at all, and are virtually guaranteed to cost massive amounts of money and resources while providing the company with nothing valuable. In the second RoboCop movie, OCP decides to make another RoboCop, but instead of using a recently deceased, highly dedicated law enforcement professional as in the first movie, they decide it’s a good idea for their new RoboCop to be built around a highly dangerous drug lord, cult leader, and career criminal. In addition to making this person into a near-indestructible walking tank, they also decide it’s a good idea to have him operating on a supply of mind-altering drugs at the same time. Shockingly, this plan somehow backfires! But this seems less like something someone would be driven to do because it seems like a feasible money-making strategy, and more like something they’d do out of a sheer commitment to make the most cartoonishly evil decisions possible, profits be damned.

One more example – the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner. Again, I love this movie, but the “evil greedy corporation” angle of this movie just makes no sense at all. The Tyrell Corporation sells “replicants,” which are essentially vat-grown humans to be used for short term labor. Short term, because replicants are programmed with a four-year lifespan. And replicants also feel pain, emotion, and have independent wills, leading them to frequently go on the run. This happens so often that there is an entire segment of the police force, the titular Blade Runners, dedicated solely to tracking down runaway replicants. This is a terrible business model. If I offered you a chance to invest in a business of mine selling tractors, but I also told you every tractor I produced was guaranteed to break down in a few years, could actually feel pain and emotions (including resentment of the people operating them), were capable of running a way and frequently did so, and could blend in to society so well that it would take an entire department of highly trained specialists to find and identify them, I bet you’d turn down this investment opportunity. The greedier you are, the less likely you’d be to want to be part of such a fantastically terrible business strategy.

In all of these films, it seems like the only thing that prevents these companies from self-destructing due to their incompetent business choices is that The Screenwriter Wants to Make a Point, and these companies somehow remain profitable despite their ineptitude because The Screenwriter’s Point Requires It. I’m not opposed to using fiction to make points of real-world relevance, but if your point requires jettisoning even a smidgen of verisimilitude to be made, perhaps that’s a sign that your point isn’t as strong as you think it is.

Of course, not all of my childhood was spent watching hyper-violent movies primarily aimed at adults. I did also watch things that were actually aimed at kids, such as the show Captain Planet. I absolutely loved that show when I was in grade school. But looking back, again, the villains of that show just made no sense. Captain Planet depicts pollution not as an inevitable side-effect of the productive activity that both enables modern human civilization and greatly expands the length and quality of the human lifespan. Instead, in Captain Planet, pollution occurs because morally evil people with names like “Looten Plunder” or “Hoggishly Greedy” (or toxic radioactive sludge monsters like “Duke Nukem”) decide to take oil tankers and deliberately crash them into the beach for…the sheer joy of watching baby seals suffer, I guess?

It’s not as though writing characters with believable motivations is an impossible feat. For example, I once wrote about how the show House, M.D. featured a realistic depiction of Bryan Caplan’s model of rational irrationality. And part of what made it compelling was the believable motivations of the characters involved:

As with all good fiction, this is a totally believable bit of writing. Nobody who watches this episode will think “The way Foreman is acting is so unrealistic.” We all can see how that kind of behavior makes sense, and how we’d almost certainly do the same thing if we were in a similar position.

This is why I find it so curious that the films that are often held up as providing scathing critiques of corporate greed fail so badly at writing stories where greed is actually a believable basis for the actions the corporation takes. Instead, these corporations seem motivated by the directive “be as evil as possible, no matter how wasteful, expensive, and unprofitable it becomes.”

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