SILVER SCREEN
HOSTILE TAKEOVERS: HOW ALIEN KEEPS COMING FOR US
DWAYNE BIEHN
December 20, 2024
With the release of “Alien: Romulus” (2024), the Alien saga once again reminds us that some monsters never really go away.
Directed by Fede Álvarez, Alien: Romulus (2024) returns to the franchise’s horror roots with a tale of economic precarity, corporate exploitation, and the dangers of chasing opportunity in a world designed to chew you up. It’s a fitting entry for an era defined by job insecurity, Big Tech overreach, and the creeping fear that no matter where you run—even into the vastness of space—you’ll never escape the systems that see you as disposable.
This latest chapter in the saga offers more than just scares. It prompts a return to the larger question that has haunted the series for more than four decades: Why does Alien still feel so relevant? Why does every generation seem to find itself reflected in the sweaty faces of space truckers, desperate colonists, and rogue androids playing God? The answer is simple: the xenomorph isn’t just a monster. It’s a metaphor, and like all good metaphors, it evolves with the times. From fears of labor exploitation in 1979 to the existential dread of AI and biotech in 2024, Alien has always been a dark mirror for our deepest anxieties.
It began, like many great terrors, with a simple pitch: Jaws in space. But what Ridley Scott’s Alien delivered in 1979 was something far more enduring: namely a bone-deep fear that gnawed its way into the cultural imagination. While the shark in Jaws was a mindless predator, the xenomorph—all biomechanical limbs, oozing dread, and phallic menace—was something more existential. It wasn’t just that the creature killed you. It turned you into something useful for itself. And what could be more chillingly familiar than that?
The true villain of Alien wasn’t the monster hiding in the vents. It was Weyland-Yutani, the megacorporation that decided human lives were a fair price for a potential bioweapon. Corporate indifference, that quiet killer, is a horror without fangs or claws, but it rips people apart just the same. If Alien had been merely a monster movie, it might have faded into cult status. Instead, it became a parable about power, labor, and human disposability—a tale that felt just as relevant in 1979 as it does in 2024, an era in which billionaires launch rockets while tech workers fight for bathroom breaks.
The origins of the film’s terror are as industrial as its aesthetics. Writers Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett set out to create a sci-fi horror hybrid, but it was H. R. Giger’s designs that turned a concept into a nightmare. The xenomorph wasn’t a bug or a beast. It was something other. It had pipes for limbs, an exoskeleton like a freight crane, and reproductive habits that seemed less “life cycle” and more HR onboarding ritual. If Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was about the horror of what man creates in his own image, Alien was about the horror of being repurposed by the systems we cannot escape. And that’s what Weyland-Yutani did to the crew of the Nostromo—they weren’t coworkers, they were cargo.
The 1980s ushered in the Reagan era, and with it, Aliens (1986) landed like a high-tech battering ram. James Cameron traded the quiet, creeping dread of the original for machine guns and body counts, replacing the working-class grit of the Nostromo crew with a squad of space marines too cocky for their own good. It was an era of cinematic militarism (Rambo, Top Gun) and ideological bravado. But there was a grim joke at the heart of Aliens: the big guns don’t save anyone. Tech, tactics, and testosterone fail as the marines are decimated by a hive-minded, endlessly reproducing enemy. The “other” here—the hive of xenomorphs and their egg-laying Queen—became an unsubtle metaphor for Cold War anxieties. Soviet collectivism, Reagan’s “evil empire,” was often depicted as a mindless swarm bent on overwhelming Western individualism.
But Aliens had something more on its mind. At its heart, the film is a story about mothers. Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) returns to face not just a xenomorph, but a Queen, a monstrous inversion of maternity. This Queen isn’t nurturing; she’s laying eggs by the thousands, birthing soldiers for war. Ripley, in turn, becomes a protector of Newt, the orphaned child she finds amid the wreckage. Their bond becomes the emotional spine of the film, an explicit rebuke to the “monstrous mother” archetype embodied by the alien Queen. This clash of matriarchs would not have been out of place on a 1980s daytime talk show. It’s not subtle, but it is effective.
By 1992, the Reagan years had given way to the AIDS crisis, and Alien 3 walked straight into that cultural inferno. David Fincher, in his directorial debut, painted a prison colony as a biocontainment unit, and the xenomorph returned not as a threat from beyond but as an infection from within. The setting—a penal facility for men forgotten by society—echoed broader cultural shifts toward “tough on crime” policies and the rise of the prison-industrial complex. But the infection metaphor was hard to miss. Ripley is impregnated with an alien embryo, her body turned into an incubator against her will. It wasn’t hard to see the echoes of the era’s AIDS paranoia: disease, infection, and bodily violation. The self-sacrifice Ripley makes at the film’s end isn’t just an act of heroism. It’s a refusal to be turned into a host for something monstrous, a final act of bodily autonomy in a world where bodies—especially women’s bodies—are always being claimed by others.
If Alien 3 had something to say about contagion and confinement, Alien Resurrection (1997) turned its gaze toward biotechnology. Dolly the sheep had been cloned in 1996, and suddenly, humanity’s anxieties weren’t just about machines—they were about ourselves. Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s film reflects this paranoia with grotesque flair. Ripley is resurrected via cloning, but she’s no longer fully human. She is part xenomorph, an uncanny hybrid with strange powers. If cloning was supposed to give us control over life, Alien Resurrection warns that it might just give life control over us.
Then came Prometheus (2012), Ridley Scott’s ambitious attempt to expand the mythology of the franchise. It’s not about xenomorphs, but something bigger—the creators of the xenomorphs. Here, Weyland-Yutani’s corporate ethos is embodied by Peter Weyland himself, a tech mogul seeking immortality. In Prometheus, that dream becomes a nightmare. The Engineers, it turns out, don’t love us. They want us dead. Humanity’s search for divine origin is met with indifference, even rage, a cosmic reminder that sometimes you shouldn’t meet your idols—especially if your idols have the capacity to destroy you.
Alien: Covenant (2017) continues this exploration of origins, but its real terror is human-made. David, the synthetic android from Prometheus, has gone rogue. If Prometheus warned against corporate ambition, Covenant warns against technological ambition—namely the rise of AI with no ethical guardrails. David isn’t just an android. He’s every fear we’ve had about autonomous AI, from self-driving cars to “friendly” chatbots that suddenly learn to outthink us.
The Alien franchise has always been about more than monsters. It’s about systems—corporate, colonial, technological—that treat humans as resources to be used, consumed, and discarded. The xenomorph isn’t just a monster. It’s a reflection of every existential crisis we face as a species. And it just keeps coming.
Alien: Romulus captures this moment with unnerving precision. The story centers on a group of young colonists trying to escape a dead-end world, lured by the promise of something better on an uncharted spacecraft. Their journey echoes the desperation of gig-economy workers seeking side hustles, freelancers navigating underpaid labor, and a disillusioned generation burdened by debt and dwindling opportunities. If the original Alien critiqued the way corporations treat blue-collar labor, Romulus takes aim at a more recent development: the hollow promises of “grind culture” and “escape opportunities” that never quite deliver. In this way, it reflects the anxieties of both the Biden and the Trump eras—periods marked by widening wealth inequality, youth unemployment, and the rise of what some call “hope labor”—unpaid or low-paid work done with the hope that it might lead to something better.
Under the Biden administration, economic recovery efforts have included support for infrastructure and labor rights, but workers in precarious industries—gig workers, freelancers, and contract employees—continue to face instability. Romulus captures that unease, offering a grim reminder that for many, “opportunity” isn’t an open door but a trap. The colonists in Romulus are chasing a better future, but the ship they board is a perfect metaphor for the kind of “life-changing opportunities” that show up in spam emails—too good to be true, too dangerous to ignore. The film’s depiction of young, desperate people being manipulated by an uncaring corporate overlord (Weyland-Yutani, of course) reflects our era’s broader discourse about tech giants and corporate accountability. Companies like Amazon, Uber, and DoorDash have come under fire for treating workers as expendable, disposable cogs in a vast machine. This is Weyland-Yutani’s playbook to a tee.
Meanwhile, the Trump era’s fixation on “great deals” and “winning” resonates just as strongly. The colonists in Romulus are looking for a way to “win”—to escape their dire circumstances with one big break. But like the populist myth of the “deal of a lifetime,” their search only leads them deeper into a nightmare. In Alien tradition, the xenomorph isn’t the only predator; it’s just the most obvious one. The hidden enemy is always the corporation, the system that promises salvation while selling you into subjugation.
This duality—the desperation to escape and the forces that keep you tethered—reflects the disillusionment many young people feel about both eras. The promise of opportunity is often just bait on a hook. Romulus is the perfect cinematic encapsulation of that moment where survival isn’t just about fighting monsters but about escaping a rigged system. This is the great horror of the Alien franchise: It’s not that the xenomorphs are too smart. It’s that they are perfectly engineered to thrive in the systems we ourselves have built.
Film critic and political commentator Dwayne Biehn has never faced a xenomorph—though he would happily wave at one from behind six inches of reinforced glass. His works focus exclusively on the Alien franchise. He knows everything there is to know about cosmic doom, how to die horrifically in space, and what to do when a
xenomorph invites itself to dinner.
Cover image: Like Jaws but in space: Alien, 1979
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