A line of dialogue in Alien: Romulus has split opinion for months now. Here’s why it might be slightly less incongruous than it first sounds.
NB: The following contains a spoiler or two for Alien: Romulus.
Director Fede Álvarez’s unabashed affection for the Alien franchise is evident in every frame of Alien: Romulus, first released in August. About a group of scruffy youngsters prowling an abandoned Weyland Yutani station and finding something particularly monstrous in the process, it was filled to the brim with story connections, stylistic cues and call-backs to the series’ first two movies.
One line of dialogue in particular appeared to split opinion somewhat, however. You probably know the one we’re talking about already: David Jonsson’s synthetic, Andy, dramatically takes out a xenomorph with a blast of a pulse rifle and utters the immortal line, “Get away from her… you bitch.”
It is, of course, a reprisal of Sigourney Weaver’s now iconic catchphrase from the final reel of James Cameron’s Aliens. In the Alien: Romulus screening this writer attended, the audience reaction was largely ecstatic – a mixture of whoops and claps. Among the applause, though, there were one or two people who grumbled or slid down in their seat a little.
In a featurette put together for Alien: Romulus's home release – it’s on the 4K Ultra HD Blu-ray, for example, out now – Álvarez explains that the line wasn’t originally in the script he co-wrote with Rodo Sayagues. As Álvarez and his team were shooting the scene, the director suddenly had the idea of having Andy recite the old line from Aliens, and leaned over to David Jonsson to whisper the suggestion in his ear.
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One person who attended an early test screening of Alien: Romulus stated that the “get away from her…” line wasn’t in the cut he was shown. This is borne out by Álvarez himself, who said that he wasn’t sure whether to include it in the final cut until he showed off a version of the film with it added in. Sure enough, the audience response to the line was so enthusiastic that Álvarez says he felt “vindicated” and decided to keep it.
For those who dislike the line’s inclusion (this writer being among them), its presence feels more distracting than anything else. The words made perfect sense in Aliens' context, because it was uttered by one mother to another (Weaver’s Ripley, protecting her daughter figure Newt from the xenomorph queen). How did it even make sense coming out of Andy’s mouth? Why would a synthetic even think of a gendered insult like ‘bitch’?
The answer can potentially be found in some earlier lines of dialogue. For much of Alien: Romulus's first half, the cocky, loud-mouthed Bjorn (Spike Fearn) serves as Andy’s nemesis. Having had a traumatic experience with synthetics in the past (his mother was killed in a mining incident due to an android’s split-second decision), Bjorn uses Andy as the target of all his anger, regularly belittling, insulting and occasionally threatening him.
Interestingly, Bjorn says the word ‘bitch’ to Andy twice – once as they’re taking off in the Corbelan IV on their mission, and later when Andy tries to prevent Bjorn from taking his adopted sister Navarro (Aileen Wu) back to the ship. (The accents in Alien: Romulus are so thick, and the dialogue uttered so quickly, that the words are easy to miss on first viewing; it only became apparent when I viewed the Blu-ray with subtitles turned on.)
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‘Bitch’ is therefore a word Andy has heard coming from a person who’s relentlessly bullied him, not just during the film’s events, but presumably for some months before it.
When we get to the third act, and Andy sees his own surrogate sister Rain (Cailee Spaeny) menaced by a xenomorph, it’s possible to imagine that he’s connecting the dots between the two and the insult surfaces in his brain. This could certainly explain why we hear him take a pause between “get away from her…” and “…you bitch.”
In his head, the xenomorph’s just another bully, like Bjorn. Uttering the word ‘bitch’ becomes a way of claiming the insult back for himself.
Álvarez hasn’t confirmed any of this in interviews, it should be pointed out, and it’s possible the use of the insult earlier in the film is a coincidence rather than a set-up for Andy’s later pay-off. Certainly, the fact that Álvarez threw in Andy’s call-back line as a last-minute idea suggests that he didn’t think too deeply about it – though those earlier scenes were shot later in production, then Bjorn’s dialogue could have been rewritten to create the justification laid out above.
Even if the connection between Bjorn, the word ‘bitch’, and Andy’s borrowed catchphrase is unintentional, it might at least help to make a previously distracting line sit in the film’s fictional world a little more easily. Maybe?
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