Alien: Romulus and How We Don’t Want Our Disadvantaged Loved Ones to Be Fixed

Imagine what it’s like to be unable to read or write. To not be able to communicate or even find your way home. To not be able to use a smart phone, a PC, thus order things, research things, even find entertainment that you enjoy. Imagine what it’s like to be unable to count, thus use money, or to perceive things beyond your immediate environment – to imagine, to envision, to anticipate. For millions of severely learning disabled people, this (to varying degrees) is an every day reality. And these human beings are cared for and cared about by millions more people – each dealing with everyday stresses as seemingly miniscule as the number of fish fingers on a plate or as life-definingly large as urgent medical care. To these loved ones, carers and invested others, the worries of every day life are exponential. To acknowledge that a human being you care deeply for will need hands-on care for the rest of their days is life-altering – especially when you begin to consider how your own eventual death will impact them. You worry about how they’ll navigate… everything. Walking, communicating, friendships, school, puberty, work, money – all of life. And yet, if you were to ask every single one of these people who have experienced these worries if they would ever change a thing given the chance, they’d tell you “no”.

Because learning disabled people don’t need fixing.

In Alien: Romulus (2024), the latest from 20th Century Studios’ Alien franchise, David Jonsson of Rye Lane fame plays a homemade and repurposed android named Andy who suffers from a number of cognitive differences that not-so subtly make him representative of the same learning disabled people described in this article’s introduction. In the film, his character is “upgraded” by inserting a new chip into his neck, and a once lovable and innocent character is transformed into a more capable and stereotypical adult male – this transformation is marked by Andy himself saying “I don’t have to be a child anymore”. This transition is one that the general public assumes would be the stuff of fantasy for the loved ones of learning disabled people, but Andy’s journey is one that we are encouraged to root against. His once noble pursuit of happiness is replaced by a more philosophical and consequently cold presentation, and Andy becomes a character who puts logic ahead of everything. He becomes the secondary antagonist of Alien: Romulus, a menacing presence that we hope to be “unfixed” – not just because of his potential threat to our heroes, but because of his transformation from likeable to antagonistic. Director and co-writer Fede Álvarez puts the viewing public in the position of the millions of people who care for learning disabled people – teaching us that “fixing” people fundamentally changes them; that we lose what we love about a learning disabled person by wishing away what others consider to be “wrong” with them.

The film’s title, as well as the franchise that the film is attached to, prime general audiences to expect thrills and scares. Viewers of Alien: Romulus are therefore prepared for a visceral experience that sparks the brain’s survival instincts, its protective mechanisms. To view any horror is to experience a rollercoaster – anticipating the scares around every corner, and being thrilled by the experience of utter fear in a relatively safe environment. This ensures that related instincts – such as the preservation of our species – are firing neurons at an unusually high rate, too, guaranteeing that our empathy is at the forefront of our minds (after all, the tribe does not survive by the hands of just one person). This environment is crucial to Andy’s journey in Alien: Romulus, and particularly his earliest moments, before the “fix”. We see Andy struggle with his speech, David Jonsson portraying his physicality as hunched and nervous, and we see him bullied for no reason other than being different. His sister, Cailee Spaeny’s Rain, has to guide him, look after him, further priming our empathy. We see how Rain looks after Andy, and later how people attempt to exploit Andy, and we mirror Rain’s protective instincts; each of which have been primed by our expectations (based on the title, franchise, and trailers). Vitally, then, Alien: Romulus exploits our humanity to ensure that we care for Andy before his transformation.

With our empathy charged, we embrace Andy’s difference and feel a collective responsibility towards him, or at least some degree of investment, especially when considering the danger we have anticipated is to come. Even though we see his usual self manipulated and exploited, bullied and belittled, his transformation is not a victory. Andy is suddenly very masculine – strong, empowered (as an individual and within his group dynamic), philosophically confident. Feminist theory will be written about Andy’s transformation in this film, and especially how it introduces the theme of gendered violence ahead of the film’s impactful finale, but with regards to this specific analysis it is important only to recognise that “normalising” Andy is something the filmmakers make clear to us is wrong.

The original Andy of the opening moments may suffer, may be easy to manipulate, but he is not a victim. In a future of extreme capitalist ideology and the relative slavery of the ordinary person to a corporation’s goals, individualism is assumedly rampant. Our group of protagonists are driven by their goals to improve their own lives, inviting only trusted people into their plan to steal cryogenic sleeping pods, and other Alien movies seem to be constructed around similarly (if not more) disconnected people working for money, escape, or some other individualistic goal. Andy, in contrast, is partnered. His sister, Rain, looks after him. In return, he makes her laugh, he puts her happiness first. They eat together, travel together, live every day life together. Then, she betrays him by lying to him to help her get away and by keeping from him the most vital information of all: that he will not make the eventual trip with her. It is not spoken aloud, but it is inferred that the key reason Andy embraces the idea of using a new chip – thus rewiring his whole self – is because of how he is upset that his sister would use him for her own gains without a second thought about Andy, the person she sees as a brother. It is a hurt that he cannot communicate, because Andy isn’t very good at communicating.

The relationship between these self-termed siblings is the crux of the narrative throughout the film, and by seeing Andy coming to understand Rain’s betrayal, we witness him grow into a threat – we also witness Rain re-evaluate her initial plans. Their togetherness is the light, their separation is the dark. Eventually, Rain decides that even if Andy is forever changed she will not leave him, because she loves him. He is her brother no matter what. Andy suffers from android-specific issues that are effectively seizures – it’s how we learn of him being an “artificial person” (as he prefers to be described) in the first place – and these are returned to at important moments in Alien: Romulus’ narrative when Rain (and therefore each of us as the viewing public) need to be reminded of the person beneath the “upgrade”. It is not coincidental, then, that Rain chooses to abandon guaranteed escape to save Andy when he’s having one of these seizures, and that her reward for her love and protection is Andy once again becoming who he always was to her, his original self; her brother.

Alien: Romulus is a film with a myriad of metaphors, allegories and meanings – its contemporarily relevant sexual assault metaphors and female bodily autonomy iconography at the top of the list – and yet it is this rather simple narrative arc at the core of this bombastic space horror of VFX marvels, memorable scares, and extreme body horror, that is the film’s beating heart. We care for Andy, we root for him to return to who he is at the start once he is changed, and we are therefore put in the shoes of the millions of people who care about severely learning disabled human beings. We come to understand that even with all the othering that comes with such developmental restrictions, and all the sadness and concerns that grow from any initial acknowledgement of a person’s learning disability, that we too prefer Andy just the way he always was, that we too would not leave Andy behind, that we too would not change him.

For a studio franchise movie to tell this story without othering Andy or Rain (thus learning disabled adults or their loved ones) and instead encouraging us to side with their collective perspective, is frankly remarkable. In an industry that has for its entire lifetime used otherness as shorthand for wrongness – think Captain Hook and his hand, the myriad of villains that wear spectacles, Scar’s name and appearance, Blofeld (and by association Dr Evil), Voldemort, Joker, Emperor Palpatine, all of the overweight or scarred or in some way disfigured antagonists – and has for long enough treated learning disabled adults as either figures to make fun of (the r-word slur in just about every teen comedy 1995-2010) or some kind of godly genius (Rain Man, Forrest Gump), it is ironic how a relatable, genuinely emotive, and powerful portrayal has been born of the horror genre, a space historically known for emphasising otherness as wrong. But that is exactly what has happened.

Without the need for the incessant promotion that fellow so-called “inclusive” hits like The Greatest Showman have had to beat us over the head with, Alien: Romulus has quietly and beautifully constructed one of the most understanding and empowering representations of how it is to live caring for a learning disabled person. And, how special and lovable those people can be. Everyone wishes they could take away the stresses their loved ones might face, and everyone hopes for those they care about to remain healthy, but nobody would “fix” their learning disabled friend, family member, or patient, because they’re not broken. Fede Alvarez showed through Alien: Romulus that he gets that. In turn, millions of people felt seen for something unspoken for the first time in their filmgoing lives. That is a very special thing.