This One Key Aliens Scene Has Been Turned Into a Lie by Romulus & Alien: Earth

The continuity of the Alien movie franchise is a mess, and it doesn’t look like a knot that’s going to get untied anytime soon. In fact, as the Alien franchise continues moving forward into its next era (with films like Alien: Romulus and TV spinoffs like Alien: Earth), it’s becoming trickier and trickier for new Alien content not to step on the established lore of past films.

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?

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Like so many other continuity errors in Alien, this scene from Aliens could arguably be explained away by some simple details of lore. As Alien: Earth and the prequel film Prometheus have demonstrated, many factions and folds exist within the Weyland-Yutani corporation that don’t necessarily play well with one another. The Weyland and Yutani families each seem to be following their own agendas, while the science and/or bio-weapons divisions seem to operate in a compartmentalized structure, so that one hand often doesn’t know what the other one is doing. Some fans have already re-written their own head-canon to reframe the original Alien as the story of Ripley and the Nostromo crew purposefully being sent to LV-426 by some Weyland-Yutani executive, who secretly knew about the xenomorphs’ existence and their potential value to the company.

Honestly, though, you don’t have to work that hard. Any fan knows that Alien has been the furthest thing from being a franchise universe with carefully coordinated lore. Ridley Scott only intended to make a standalone sci-fi/horror film; James Cameron wanted to tell his own story; Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection were one-off misfires that don’t count as canon, and the Prometheus and Alien: Covenant prequels only confused the main lore even more. Even the new installments like Romulus and Earth don’t quite fit neatly with any one Alien film, but try to acknowledge them all, in some way. A loose chronology seems to be the best we’re going to get.

Every Alien movie and TV series is currently streaming on Disney+. Let us know what you think about the franchise continuity by leaving a comment on the ComicBook Forum!