With spoilers, we dig into 45 years of Alien movies to explore why its androids – sorry, artificial persons – are such fascinating characters.
The acid-blooded xenomorph may get the title role in most of the franchise’s movies, but the ongoing appeal of Alien is much deeper and more complex than its parasitic monsters. Weyland-Yutani, the corporation whose machinations dominate just about all of the Alien movies, is itself something of a character: although rarely seen directly, it constantly operates from the shadows, manipulating events and characters.
Among the walking, talking (and running, screaming…) cast, meanwhile, it’s often the androids who emerge as the most engaging and strikingly human. It goes without saying that the original four films, released between 1979 and 1997, are dominated by Sigourney Weaver’s heroine, and that the actors surrounding her have been roundly brilliant. But the synthetics in the Alien franchise have also driven the films’ plots – .and also given the actors who’ve played the chance to deliver some career-best performances.
Amid a roundly impeccable cast of stage and screen actors, Ian Holm’s performance as science officer Ash is one of Alien’s most fascinating. Closed-off and seemingly uncomfortable around his peers, Ash is filled with little quirks and tics: the way he runs on the spot to keep himself warm after he wakes up from hypersleep; his vaguely feline expression as he watches Kane (John Hurt) enjoy his final meal aboard the Nostromo.
Then there’s Ash’s strangely combative, passive-aggressive relationship with Ripley, which builds to his bizarre murder attempt involving a rolled-up pornographic magazine. It all implies that Ash is something more than a sterile machine – and that something resembling the darker side of human desire had somehow emerged in his programming.
Ridley Scott said as much when he spoke to this writer a few years ago. “Ash was asexual, except for some reason or another, the violence provoked a sexual urge,” he said. “It’s a bit like, at what moment when you feed into a computer enough data and information, do you cross the line of emotion? Is it a combination of elements that would include confusion, anger – that’s emotion. So when you’ve got so much data and the computer’s on overload, the box is already getting stressed. That’s emotion. Right there, that box can start to hate you for putting too much information into it.”
Perhaps this is why Ash ultimately sides with the alien itself. Quietly resentful of the humans around him, he relishes the prospect of them perishing at the teeth of a creature even more alien than he is. In an otherwise terse film, Alien’s writers also give Ash one of its few speeches – one laced with a note of triumph and even smugness.
“I can’t lie to you about your chances, but you have my sympathies…”
As played by Lance Henriksen in 1986’s Aliens, Bishop is a wonderful contrast to Ash’s uptight Britishness. Gentle and good-natured, he embodies a markedly different kind of masculinity from the aggressive, gung-ho Colonial Marines he’s teamed with. Ripley is understandably wary of going on another mission with an android following the whole Ash situation on the Nostromo, and writer-director James Cameron plays with the audience’s own suspicions. When Bishop is shown probing at a dead facehugger (“Magnificent, isn’t it…?”), it’s intentionally designed to recall Ash probing at another dead parasite in Alien.
Bishop’s almost childlike fascination with the critter can, it turns out, be taken at face value; the true turncoat in Aliens isn’t the artificial human but rather Paul Reiser’s yuppie, Burke. It’s a perfectly modulated performance from Henriksen, with just the right balance of mystery and warmth; in the exhaustive documentary Aliens Expanded, the actor revealed that he leaned on his memories of being a “street kid from New York” for his performance, which might be key to the whole thing: Bishop has the compassion and eagerness to please of a working class youngster who just wants to fit in.
The androids in the Alien franchise have therefore given writers and actors the freedom to explore the best and worst traits of humanity, with Alien: Resurrection’s Analee Call (played by Winona Ryder) and Alien: Covenant’s Walter (Michael Fassbender) both falling on the gentler, more altruistic side of the personality spectrum.
They’re contrasted by David (Fassbender again), a synthetic whose hatred for his human creators far outstrip even Ash’s resentment of his fellow crew members. Introduced in 2012’s Prometheus as a Weyland Industries underling who models himself after Peter O’Toole in Lawrence Of Arabia, David soon emerges as an anti-hero in Ridley Scott’s prequels.
Amid the bickering crew, who roundly seem to be on their mission to the planet LV-223 for reasons of self-interest (“I’m not your friend – I’m here to make money”), David emerges as one of the most watchable, even relatable characters. If we were stuck on the Prometheus with this neurotic lot, we’d probably get pretty fed up, too. Fassbender’s performance hints at an artificial being that isn’t meant to outwardly show emotion, but whose contempt for the petty, irrational people around him is impossible to entirely tamp down.
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By the time we get to 2017’s Alien: Covenant, David’s feeling of superiority over his creators sees him grow into a figure akin to Lucifer from Paradise Lost. In his candlelit lair on a lonely planet, David has spent an unspecified amount of time experimenting with mutagens and human DNA – and, seemingly, gradually going out of his mind.
The notion of renegade androids creating armies of monsters had, by the late 2010s, bewitched Ridley Scott to such an extent that he only begrudgingly put the xenomorph into Alien: Covenant after the muted response to Prometheus. It’s clear from the finished film that Scott is far more interested in David’s antics than the franchise’s traditional franchise underpinnings, and he likely would have explored this avenue for at least one or perhaps more further movies had Covenant’s disappointing box office (and Disney’s acquisition of 20th Century Fox) not intervened.
All of this brings us to 2024’s Alien: Romulus, which, although set between Alien and Aliens, in some respects is a kind of continuation of Scott’s prequels by stealth. At the very least, it keeps alive some of the lore established by Prometheus and Alien: Covenant – namely the black goo/mutagen – while a mutant Engineer even shows up for a guest appearance in the final reel.
The surprise appearance of a synthetic named Rook – played by British actor Daniel Betts, but made to look and sound like the late Ian Holm using audiovisual trickery – further strengthens the connection between the original Alien and the prequels. The mutagen, Rook explains, was recovered from the xenomorph’s DNA and was being experimented on in order to turn human beings into ‘the perfect organism’.
“Mankind was never truly suited for space colonisation,” Rook says; “they’re simply too fragile.” (Really, all of this talk of mutagens and “Prometheus fire” almost suggests that Rook should have resembled David rather than Ash.)
Read more: Alien: Romulus | With spoilers, an exploration of its twists and shocks
Alien: Romulus is therefore something of a compendium of franchise elements – something embodied by Andy, the synthetic whose personality reflects both the benevolent and ruthless aspects of androids in previous films.
Rescued from a scrapheap and programmed to be a protector for protagonist Rain (Cailee Spaeny) by her dying father, Andy is initially depicted as a vulnerable character whose naivety echoes Bishop’s. It’s a spectacular performance by British actor David Jonsson, whose work does so much to sell the idea that an android’s personality can change by plugging a chip into his computer system. Alien: Romulus therefore gives us two Andys for the price of one – the glitchy, defenceless soul who likes to tell bad jokes, and the more urbane, calculating one who talks like a corporate executive.
Like Ash and David, Andy has his own reasons to resent humanity – or in his case, Rain. Although they’re meant to be brother and sister, Andy is under no illusion that they’re equals; he exists to serve Rain’s interests, and his own safety is secondary at best. Some of that resentment is voiced when Andy’s in his cold, Weyland-Yutani mode, and only defused later when Rain changes her brother’s directive – he’s given the freedom to do what’s right for himself as well as his sister. It’s a touch of warmth in an otherwise aggressive movie that moves to quickly to dwell on character arcs.
For 45 years now, the Alien franchise’s synthetics have reflected humanity in all its contradictions: its generosity and its ruthlessness, its kindness and cruelty, its intelligence and hubris. Next year will see the release of showrunner Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth TV series, which he has said will be the “story of humanity trapped between its primordial, parasitic past and its AI future, and they’re both trying to kill us.”
Those artificial humans, it seems, will keep inspiring new stories about the light and dark side of human nature for many more years to come.
Alien: Romulus is in cinemas now.
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