In 1979’s sci-fi classic Alien, Ian Holm played the role of a machine, wearing the skin of a human, designed to prioritise the corporation it served. On the face of it, the movie is about a monster battling the crew of a spaceship, but underneath is the allegory of corporate greed consuming human life. Unlike the crisp-uniformed and hairsprayed crew of the Enterprise, the crew of the Nostromo are working people, doing the bare minimum to put food on their table. We join them not when they’re embarking on a crusade of discovery, rather when their journey home from a freight operation is redirected to investigate a distress signal on a nearby planet. This task is met by the crew with enthusiasm not unlike a minimum wager being ordered to work late. The crew land on the planet to investigate what is revealed to be a derelict spaceship, executive officer Kane (John Hurt) is betrayed by his curiosity and finds himself on the business end of an alien parasite that has planted a creature in his chest.
Step-by-step the forces of Weyland-Yutani pull strings to ensure that the specimen is protected and returned to them by science officer Ash, masterfully played by Ian Holm. Ash is a cyborg posing as a human among the team. While the crew are focused on getting home intact, Ash is covertly engineering the situation at the behest of the organisation. When warrant officer Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) observes quarantine for the integrity of the ship, Ash is there to undermine her. When Kane is placed in observation, it’s Ash who quietly ensures that no drastic action is taken. The performance of this is excellent on rewatch, the weird non-human tics, the quiet social engineering to make sure the alien isn’t simply killed when opportunity is available.
Alien is the story of how the gears of Capitalism will emotionlessly grind the bones of human beings in exchange for growth. Ash takes no joy in placing his colleagues in harm’s way, because feelings are not a feature. Holm plays Ash just human enough to trick a team of freight workers, but with an uncanny rhythm that layers the character with an inhuman form that draws interesting parallels with the Alien itself. While it can be argued that the Alien acts out of instinct, defending itself in a strange territory in being hunted by strange beings, Ash operates through duty, taking his orders from inside the womb-like communication chamber with the onboard AI “MOTHER”.
Why are we talking about Alien? 2024 saw the release of the latest instalment in the franchise, Alien: Romulus, a midquel set between the events of Alien and Aliens. The film focuses on a team of mining workers who are attempting to salvage parts of an abandoned spacecraft in order to escape their prison-like situation. The film does not burden itself with developing the theme or characters beyond the general premise, so neither will I. Romulus is a broadly unimaginative thrill-house ride of best-of compilation of moments from the Alien franchise, often in a very literal sense, as iconic moments from the original saga are repackaged wholesale. Not content with lifting whole sequences from previous instalments, Romulus is also bringing faces back. Among the debris and bodies aboard the Romulus is a nearly-destroyed cyborg unit of the same series as Ash, this time named Rook.
Who plays Rook? No one plays Rook, really. Although voiced by Daniel Betts, Rook appears as a 3D render of Ian Holm’s face that has been deepfaked onto a stand-in, broadly to the finish quality of Grand Moff Tarkin in 2016’s Star Wars: Rogue One, another contentious posthumous portrayal. Ian Holm passed away in 2020, and it’s important to note that this performance was rendered with the consent of his remaining family. The technology to put Ian Holm in the movie involves using thousands of images of Holm to have a software arrange them into a sequences of frames to create an almost-convincing animation.
Rook’s role in Alien: Romulus is that of a store-brand Ash, clumsily providing exposition and acting as a secondary antagonist. However the true utility of Rook is similar to the Sigourney-coding of lead Cailee Spaeny, to invoke your nostalgia for a better movie. The previous two Alien movies cast Michael Fassbender as an equally dastardly robot villain named David, but opted against it here in order to wheel out one of the hits.
Alien is, in my opinion, a masterclass in filmmaking. A lean script that is confidently executed on by all departments to make something timeless. Underneath the production design and special effects is a message about greed as relevant now as in 1979. Alien: Romulus has certainly had love poured into it, there are some novel sequences, and an appreciable attempt to nod at better times through using classic puppetry and animatronics. Alien: Romulus doesn’t have a huge amount to say, or even layer onto the world of Alien. Ironically, their inclusion of the face of a man long dead, to invoke the memory of a classic movie, is the most metanarratively profound thing the movie has to say.
In 1979, Ian Holm pretended to be a machine, in 2024, a machine pretended to be Ian Holm. Even when you’re gone, Disney will dig up your face and feed it into a computer. Even Weyland-Yutani didn’t think of that one.