One of the greatest twists in the original 1979 Alien isn’t just that there are murderous aliens on the loose with acid for blood, but that you might have a secret robot at your job that you didn’t even know about. As Ash in Alien, the late, great Ian Holm brought a crucial layer to the believability and thrill of the classic film. Not only was the horrible Xenomorph on the loose, but one synthetic crewmember wanted it there.
And now in Alien: Romulus, the idea that Weyland-Yutani built other versions of a familiar synthetic is given another new layer; one which connects the continuity of Alien to its famous sequel, Aliens. Spoilers ahead.
When Rain (Cailee Spaeny), Tyler (Archie Renaux), Bjorn (Spike Fearn), Navarro (Alieen Wu), Kay (Isabela Merced), and Andy (David Jonsson) attempt to hijack some cryopods from an abandoned Weyland-Yutani ship, they instead encounter the twin laboratory/space station Romulus/Remus. A tribute to the mythological twins Romulus and Remus who founded Rome, and supposedly were nursed by a wolf, this reference continues the elegiac naming structure of Alien sequels/prequels begun by Prometheus.
On board the Romulus/Remus, the would-be hijackers encounter a face from the past on the Remus side of the station — someone many audience members will recognize, but our heroes do not.
Who is Rook in Alien: Romulus?
The mastermind of most of Romulus turns out to be a badly damaged synthetic called Rook, played by a digital avatar of Ian Holm. Perhaps most famous for his portrayal of Bilbo Baggins in The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Holm passed away in 2020, though according to the credits of Romulus, he appears here thanks to the “Estate of Ian Holm.” This is a visage of Ian Holm circa 1979, which is how he appeared in the first Alien where he played a character named Ash. Infamously, in Alien, none of the crew of the Nostromo knew that Ash was, as later declared by Parker (Yaphet Kotto), “a goddamned robot!”
The idea that Ash was secretly a robot placed on the Nostromo by the “the company” remains, perhaps, the greatest twist of Alien, because it means the discovery of the Xenomorph was not an accident. In Romulus, the discovery of the various Xenomorphs is very much an accident but a new version of Ash, named Rook, has tried to continue the work of his predecessor: harness the power of the aliens to make hybrids. In Romulus, Rook implies the Z-01 compound is designed to help improve human life, but, it seems that, like David (Michael Fassbender) in Prometheus and Covenant, Rook is more interested in making Island of Doctor Moreau-style monster mash-ups.
Does Weyland-Yutani only want creepy new aliens to be created? Or is the company really trying to harness the power of the Xenomorphs for other uses? Based on the actions of David in the Ridley Scott prequels, Ash in the original movie, and Rook in Romulus, the true motivations of these experiments remain unclear.
From Rook to Bishop in Aliens
Despite the duplicitous anti-human behaviors of the synthetics that we’ve met, not all the artificial beings in the Alien-verse are bad. In fact, one of the biggest twists of 1986’s Aliens is that Bishop (Lance Henriksen), the film’s resident android, is a hero. In Aliens it is Bishop who saves Newt and Ripley, nearly at the cost of his own existence. In opposition to Ash, Bishop represents a more Asimovian robot, preceding the idea of Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, just one year later. In essence, not all Weyland-Yutani robots are evil schemers hoping to create scary hybrids.
Retroactively, this idea manifested in Alien: Covenant, when two versions of a Michael Fassbender android — David and Walter — clashed with each other over their duties to humanity. Walter ended up on the good side of things, while David continued to be amoral and violent.
By naming the new Ian Holm android “Rook,” Romulus suggests a link between this model of synthetic and what we would eventually get with Bishop in Aliens. Obviously, both are chess piece names, but while Rook is more similar to Ash, the heroism of Bishop is alluded to in Romulus in the form of Andy (David Jonsson), who we are told is a model that predates everybody. Maybe, at some point, not all of these robots were so corrupt.
Like Covenant, Alien: Romulus gives us a good robot and a bad robot, which is a smart dichotomy since, chronologically, the film represents a bridge between Alien and Aliens. While some of the Easter eggs and callbacks might be read at fan service, Romulus reminds us that the story of the robots in Alien may be slightly more interesting than the titular extraterrestrials themselves.
