I looked recently Alien: Romulus in theaters. I won’t spoil the movie here, but I will say that I enjoyed it much more than the more recent entries in the franchise, such as Prometheus And Alien: Covenant. The original Stranger and its sequel Aliens were among my favorite movies growing up – and Romulus is very successful in capturing the spirit and feeling of those films. But the movie also made me wonder something: Why is Hollywood so bad at writing stories about companies that are believably evil?
The story of Alien: Romulus revolves around the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s efforts to capture and somehow “utilize” the xenomorphs for criminally underspecified reasons. (No, this isn’t a spoiler – this is actually the plot of each movie in the Stranger franchise.) The first Alien vs. Predator film is set in modern times, while the original films are set hundreds of years in the future. This means that Weyland-Yutani has literally spent ages attempting this task, with a 100% failure rate. The xenomorph is an incredibly dangerous creature that unstoppably kills everyone in the area and reproduces by harvesting humans as hosts and killing them in the process. Every time the company attempts this project, the end result is “basically everyone dies and pretty much everything is destroyed.” The company has endured huge costs in lost staff and lost equipment while getting nothing of value in return, yet they keep trying the same thing over and over again.
This film series is also not unique. RoboCop was also one of my favorite films from childhood, and this film series also centers their plots around the actions of evil, greedy corporations. Indeed, the first RoboCop Film in particular is often praised as a brilliant form of social commentary on corporate greed. But just like the fictional Weyland-Yutani from the Stranger franchise, the evil company of the RoboCop films, Omni Consumer Products, is portrayed as doing nothing more than making a series of catastrophically stupid, very expensive decisions that make no business sense at all, and are almost guaranteed to cost enormous amounts of money and resources while doing nothing to the company produce valuable results. In the second RoboCop movie, OCP decides to make another RoboCop, but instead of using a recently deceased, highly dedicated law enforcement professional like in the first movie, they decide it’s a good idea to build their new RoboCop around a very dangerous drug lord, cult leader and career criminal. In addition to turning this person into a virtually indestructible walking tank, they also decide it’s a good idea to simultaneously operate him on a supply of mind-altering drugs. Shockingly, this plan somehow fails! But this seems less like something someone would be driven to do because it seems like a viable strategy to make money, and more like something they would do out of sheer dedication to making the most cartoonishly bad decisions possible, profits be damned.
Another example – the Tyrell Corporation out Blade Runner. Again, I love this movie, but the “evil greedy corporation” angle of this movie just doesn’t make any sense at all. The Tyrell Corporation sells “replicants,” essentially vat-grown humans used for short-term labor. Short term, because replicants are programmed with a four-year lifespan. And replicants also feel pain and emotions and have an independent will, which often causes them to flee. This happens so often that there is an entire section of the police force, called Blade Runners, dedicated solely to tracking down runaway replicants. This is one terrible business model. If I offered you the opportunity to invest in a company of mine that sold tractors, but I also told you that every tractor I produced was guaranteed to break down within a few years, I would feel pain and emotions (including resentment towards the people they serve), were able to find a way and often did so, and could blend in so well with society that it would take an entire department of highly trained specialists to find and identify them, I dare I bet you would turn down this investment opportunity. The more greedy you are, the less likely you are to want to be part of such a fantastically terrible business strategy.
In all of these films, it seems that the only thing keeping these companies from destroying themselves because of their incompetent business choices is that The Screenwriter wants to make a point, and somehow these companies remain profitable despite their incompetence because The Screenwriter’s Point Requires It. I’m not against using fiction to make points that are relevant to the real world, but if your point requires jettisoning even an ounce of verisimilitude, perhaps that’s a sign that your point isn’t that strong is as you think it is.
Of course, I didn’t spend my entire childhood watching hyper-violent films aimed primarily at adults. I’ve also seen things that were actually aimed at kids, like the show Captain Planet. I absolutely loved that show when I was in grade school. But then again, looking back, the villains of that show just didn’t make sense. Captain Planet does not describe pollution as an inevitable side effect of the productive activity that both makes modern human civilization possible and significantly increases the length and quality of the human lifespan. Instead, inside Captain Planetpollution happens because morally bad people with names like “Looten Plunder” or “Hoggishly Greedy” (or toxic radioactive sludge monsters like “Duke Nukem”) decide to take oil tankers and deliberately crash them on the beach for… the sheer pleasure of it watch Baby seals suffer from it, I think?
It’s not that writing characters with believable motivations is an impossible task. For example, I once wrote about how the show went House, MD contained a realistic representation of Bryan Caplan’s model of rational irrationality. And part of what made it compelling were the believable motivations of the characters involved:
As with all good fiction, this is a completely believable piece of writing. No one watching this episode will think, “The way Foreman acts is so unrealistic.” We can all see how that kind of behavior makes sense, and how we would almost certainly do the same thing if we were in a similar position.
That’s why I find it so curious that the films that are often presented as scathing critiques of corporate greed fail so badly at writing stories where greed is actually a credible basis for the actions the company takes. Instead, these companies seem motivated by the “be as evil as possible, no matter how wasteful, expensive, and unprofitable it becomes” directive.