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Case in point: James Cameron’s Aliens took a sharp turn from Ridley Scott’s original film, changing the tone from a sci-fi/horror nightmare to an action-horror thrill ride. Cameron was clearly interested in expanding the lore that Scott (sort of) established – not just with the xenomorph creatures and their life cycle (Queens and eggs), but also with the megacorporations behind the dangerous expedition that doomed the crew of the USCSS Nostromo.
One pivotal early scene of Aliens occurs after Ellen Ripley has been awakened from cryostasis after nearly 60 years of drifting in space. Ripley is debriefed by executives from Weyland-Yutani, the megacorporation that employed her, and the interview doesn’t go well.
Aliens Established Xenomorphs As Total Unknowns
In the scene from Aliens, Ripley is trying to convince the Weyland-Yutani execs that the threat of the xenomorph is very real. Unfortunately, the corporate suits don’t buy Ripley’s story, citing a total lack of evidence; in fact, one female exec sums it up by calling into question how Weyland-Yutani could’ve missed discovering the xenomorph species, “something never recorded once in over 300 surveyed worlds.” They go so far as to read all the traits of the creatures Ripley described, with total skepticism that such an organism can even exist.
Cameron’s film put much greater emphasis on the “monstrosity” of capitalism and a future run by corporate oligarchies, turning Weyland-Yutani’s skepticism about (and later enthusiasm for) xenomorphs into a metaphor for how rampant greed could lead to biological and ecological disaster. As Ripley eventually says to her corporate liaison, Burke (Paul Reiser), humans are worse monsters than xenomorphs, due to their penchant for betraying each other for profit.
Aliens Now Contradicts New Lore About Weyland-Yutani’s Xenomorph Project
This one scene from Aliens is now creating a major continuity plothole. Alien: Romulus already stretched credibility to the limit with its opening scene: Weyland-Yutani scientists salvaging the body of the xenomorph from the wreckage of the USCSS Nostromo, and using it to reverse-engineer the “compound Z-01” mutagen created by the Engineer race. That scientific breakthrough was the entire catalyst for the story of Romulus – but it obviously doesn’t jibe with Ripley’s debriefing scene in Aliens. The recent TV series Alien: Earth has dug even deeper into that plothole by revealing that Weyland-Yutani had ships like the USCSS Maginot out exploring the cosmos, on a specific mission to discover and capture dangerous alien species, decades before the events of the first Alien movie – let alone by the time of Aliens.
How could Weyland-Yutani executives not be aware that xenomorphs existed by the time Ellen Ripley was begging them to do something about them on LV-426? And why would the company create an entire colony on the planet?
