I just watched Alien: Romulus in theaters. I won’t spoil the movie here, but I will say that I enjoyed it a lot more than recent entries in a similar franchise Prometheus again Alien: Covenant. The first one Alien and its sequence Aliens were among my favorite films growing up – again Romulus he is very successful in capturing the spirit and feel of those films. But the movie also made me wonder something – why is Hollywood so bad at writing stories about bad companies in a believable way?
The story of Alien: Romulus focuses on the Weyland-Yutani organization’s efforts to capture and somehow “imprison” xenomorphs for unspecified criminal reasons. (No, this is not a spoiler – this is the basic layout all of them movie in Alien franchise.) The first Alien vs Predator the movie is set in the present day, while the original movies are set centuries in the future. This means that Weyland-Yutani has spent hundreds of years attempting this task with a 100% failure rate. A xenomorph is an incredibly dangerous creature that kills everyone nearby and reproduces in favor of humans as hosts, killing them in time. Every time a company tries this project, the end result is “basically everyone dies and almost everything disappears.” The company endured huge costs in lost workers and lost equipment while getting nothing of value in return, but they never stop trying the same thing over and over again.
And this series of movies is no different. RoboCop and it was among my favorite childhood movies, and this movie series also centers its plot on evil, greedy corporations. Indeed, the first RoboCop The film in particular has often been praised as a clever form of public comment on corporate greed. But as a legend Weyland-Yutani from Alien franchise, bad association of RoboCop movies, Omni Consumer Products, is described as doing nothing but making a series of disastrously stupid, expensive decisions that make absolutely no business sense, and are almost guaranteed to cost huge amounts of money and resources while giving the company nothing of value. In the second RoboCop movie, OCP decides to make another RoboCop, but instead of using a recently deceased, highly dedicated law enforcement expert like in the first movie, they decide it’s a good idea to have their new RoboCop built around a very dangerous drug kingpin, a cult leader. , and a career criminal. In addition to making this person a nearly indestructible walking tank, they also decide it’s a good idea to have him operated on a tank of mind-altering drugs at the same time. Shockingly, this plan somehow backfires! But this seems less like something someone would be forced to do because it seems like a money-making ploy, and more like something they’d do out of sheer dedication to making as cartoonishly bad decisions as possible, profit be damned.
Another example – the Tyrell Corporation from Blade Runner. Also, I love this movie, but the “evil greedy corporation” angle of this movie makes absolutely no sense. The Tyrell Corporation sells “replicators,” which are basically people raised to be used for temporary jobs. It’s a short time, because the repeaters are scheduled for four years of life. And repeaters also feel pain, emotions, and have an independent will, which leads them to continue running. This happens so often that there is a section of the police force, the venerable Blade Runners, dedicated solely to tracking down the fugitives. This is a badly business model. If I give you the opportunity to invest in my tractor sales business, but I also tell you that every tractor I have produced is guaranteed to break down in a few years, you can actually feel the pain and emotions (including the anger of the people who drive it), they knew how to use the road and they often did, and they knew how to communicate with the public so well that it would take all department of highly trained professionals to find and identify them, I bet you can’t turn down this investment opportunity. With your greed, you are unlikely to want to be a part of such an evil business plan.
In all of these movies, it seems that the only thing that prevents these companies from destroying themselves due to the inability to make business choices is that the Screenwriter Wants to Make a Point, and these companies somehow always make a profit despite their stupidity because the Screenwriter’s Point Needs. It. I’m not against using fiction to make points that relate to the real world, but if your point needs jettisoning even a smidgen of verisimilitude to be done, maybe that’s a sign that your point isn’t as strong as you think it is.
Of course, not all of my childhood was spent watching extremely violent films primarily aimed at adults. I also watched things that were aimed at children, like the show Captain Planet. I loved that show when I was in elementary school. But in retrospect, again, the villains of that show were ridiculous. Captain Planet it shows pollution not as an inevitable consequence of productive work that enables modern human civilization and greatly increases the length and quality of human life. Rather, in Captain Planetpollution happens because morally evil people with names like “Looten Plunder” or “Hoggishly Greedy” (or toxic radioactive sludge monsters like “Duke Nukem”) decide to take oil tanks and crash them on the beach on purpose so that… Water babies suffer, I guess?
It’s not as if writing characters with believable motives is impossible. For example, I once wrote about how the show House, MD showed a practical illustration of Bryan Caplan’s model of rational irrationality. And part of what made it so compelling was the believable motivations of the characters involved:
Like all good fiction, this is a completely believable script. No one watching this episode is going to think “The way Foreman is acting is ridiculous.” We can all see how that kind of behavior makes sense, and how we would do the same thing if we were in the same situation.
That’s why I find it curious that films that are often held up as offering a scathing critique of corporate greed fail miserably in writing stories where greed is actually the believable basis of corporate actions. Instead, these companies seem to be motivated by the directive “be as bad as possible, no matter how wasteful, how expensive, and how unprofitable.”
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