“What Is Your Prime Directive?” The Murky Motivations Behind Sci-Fi’s Most Evil Corporation
What does Weyland-Yutani want? And when does the company want it?
With evil robots David, Ash, and Rook, and a central AI called Mother, the Alien franchise’s greatest theme is, perhaps, that in long-game between synthetic lifeforms and bloodthirsty aliens, the loser is always humanity. Beginning in 1979 with Alien, the darkest revelation of the movie wasn’t just that the chest-bursting parasitical xenomorphs existed, but that “the Company” (later defined in the franchise as Weyland-Yutani) actually wanted to obtain a specimen and didn’t care if it murdered a bunch of people in the process.
In Alien: Romulus, the idea that Weyland-Yutani and its various AIs have creepy ulterior motives is central to pretty much everything that happens in the movie. But in adding new twists in the Alien chronology, Romulus has accidentally posed an uncomfortable question: From Prometheus to Alien: Resurrection, what does the Company actually want?
Spoilers ahead for Alien: Romulus.
Weyland-Yutani: Building Horrible Worlds
Rain and Andy are victims of the system. But what system is this?
Alien: Romulus begins at the Jackson mining colony, a squalid world devoid of sunlight, and a place Rain (Cailee Spaeny) is desperate to escape from. The colony is a company town where every decision has to be approved by the corporate red-tape of Weyland-Yutani. When Rain says she’s worked enough hours to go off-world, we watch as the Company retroactively decides more mandatory work hours are required. Between Jackson and Hadley's Hope (the research and mining colony in Aliens), Wey-Yu’s slogan of “Building Better Worlds” has never been more inaccurate.
The history and purpose of Alien’s wicked corporate overlords is as murky as it is contradictory. The company began as two separate entities — Weyland Corp and Yutani Corporation — that merged to form a mega-corporation. Notably, in Prometheus, which takes place in the year 2091, the ship is sponsored solely by Weyland. The two companies don’t join forces until 2099, which is still several decades before the events of Alien.
Guy Pearce as Peter Weyland in Prometheus.
Alien vs. Predator depicted Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) as the founder of Weyland Industries, though the film Prometheus, and at least one in-universe featurette, established the Peter Weyland (Guy Pearce) was a major power behind the earliest days of the Company. In AvP: Requiem and The Predator, a brief appearance from a mysterious Ms. Yutuani (Françoise Yip) was thought to be one of the early founders of the other side of the company, though the upcoming Alien TV series, which will deal with the early days of Weyland-Yutani might contradict all of that.
In-universe, the Company is mostly a tech supplier, which manufactures everything from spaceships to gas masks to sentient robots, usually called, Synthetics. But there’s also an aggressive research and development side to Weyland-Yutani, and it's in that branch of the Company where the biggest questions arise: What does Weyland-Yutani really want with the xenomorphs?
Why does Weyland-Yutani want the Aliens?
David (Michael Fassbender) leads humanity into a chest-bursting future.
In Prometheus (2012), the action of the film is set at the end of the 21st century in the year 2093. Here’s we learn that Peter Weyland essentially wants to find the origin of all life, having determined that human beings did not naturally evolve on Earth but were, in fact, seeded by advanced “Engineers” from a distant world. So, in 2093, the Company basically wanted any samples or proof that that terrestrial life came from space. However, within the plot of Prometheus, the synthetic named David (Michael Fassbender) performs his own experiments with various compounds, which, by the end of the movie, gives life to at least two new terrifying creatures. (It’s also revealed that David is acting here in the interests of an elderly Peter Weyland, who secretly joins the mission in the hopes that the Engineers can grant him eternal life.)
By the year 2103, in the film Alien: Covenant, we learn David has continued his freakish hybrid experiments, which resulted in a few creatures that look very much like the familiar xenomorphs. Crucially, in Covenant, it seems David is not acting in anyone's interests but his own and possesses a kind of amoral hatred of humanity. So, conflating what David wants — to create lots of scary hybrid creatures — and what the Company wants, would be if not outright false, conjecture at best.
By 2122, you’ve got Alien (1979), and Weyland-Yutani employees mostly get their orders from an AI called “Mother.” It is in this film that we learn that Weyland-Yutani is seeking the xenomorphs, presumably to figure out a way to weaponize these apex hunters for military use. In 2179, in the film Aliens (1986), Carter Burke (Paul Reiser) is a human working for Weyland-Yutani who also seems to want to obtain specimens partly just so Weyland-Yutani can control everything — especially the asset they wanted way back in Alien.
But, here’s where the Romulus wrinkle arrives: Did the humans working for Weyland-Yutani really want a bunch of disgusting alien hybrids that would destroy humanity?
The Alien: Romulus Conundrum
Would anyone want the monster baby Kay had? Even an evil corporation?
One scene in Alien: Romulus seems to unify all the Weyland-Yutani canon: Rook (Ian Holm) explains that the Z-01 compound, found within the DNA of a xenomorph, was the same substance Weyland found in its purest form in Prometheus. A bit of the Prometheus score is heard in this scene as Rook explains that the Z-01 compound can have medical applications.
This seems to all make sense. Weyland-Yutani wants to create expensive pharmaceuticals based on research derived from the Xenomorphs. It doesn’t care who gets in the way of obtaining these miracle drugs, because its knows they’ll make a fortune.
But Romulus quickly reveals that Rook was lying. The compound hasn’t been converted into a wonder drug. Instead, it just creates new gross hybrids, which results in a massive and horrifying human/alien hybrid at the end of the film. Here’s the problem: There’s no way this outcome is what all the greedy humans at Weyland-Yutani actually want. Instead of trying to weaponize the xenomorphs or control them, Rook, like David in Prometheus, seems to just want to sow chaos by creating new offshoots of horrific creatures.
Ian Holm in Alien.
The contrast is strange. In Covenant, David had clearly gone insane and was creating his spliced creatures on his own as a kind of derranged hobby. Rook on the other hand, had an entire lab of people working for him to achieve... what?
Romulus never really comes right out and explains why Rook would want any of this to happen, nor how a massive and nearly unkillable alien that converts human babies to other aliens would be remotely desirable or useful, even to the most corrupt corporation. Instead, Rook behaves more like David, which could imply that Mother — the AI that gives the robots their orders — has a bit of David’s sadistic hatred of humanity in its programming.
In other words, the motivations of Weyland-Yutani in Romulus are unclear. Either Rook is acting in secret against the humans working for the Company, or, the Company is now being run by David. Either way, in 2142, right in between Alien and Aliens, Weyland-Yutani is either just now hitting its stride of intended evil or has been totally hijacked by its megalomaniac robots.
