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This article contains spoilers for Alien: Romulus

At its core, the Alien franchise is about violation. Ever since a newborn xenomorph exploded out of John Hurt's chest in 1979, Alien has boldly unpacked our latent fears of bodily transgression. Between the franchise's artificial people, also known as synths, who are indistinguishable from flesh and blood humans, to the phallic aggressiveness of H.R. Giger's xenomorph designs, the Alien films' scares are rooted in our ability to recognize the worst parts about our humanity in the non-human. Our discomfort with seeing milky fluid drip out of synths like blood, among other scares, creates a feeling of the uncanny. 

The latest film in the franchise, Alien: Romulus, directed by Fede Álvarez, takes a disturbing turn when it introduces a synth named Rook with the face of late actor, Ian Holm. Holm passed away in 2020, and is immediately recognizable from his performance as Ash in Ridley Scott's original Alien film. This stomach-churning twist is made more upsetting by the fact that Rook had been lying facedown or in shadow for several minutes of the film before his face is revealed. And speaking of which, his face doesn't look particularly good, either: it's clear that it was digitally mapped onto the face of a living actor. It lacks a true three-dimensional surface, and looks like a projection at times. Rook's face clashes with the gorgeous (practical) visual effects throughout Romulus. This is all to say that Rook's appearance is a calculated decision meant to throw off the audience. 

Holm's appearance in Romulus has ignited a fierce debate online. Before I go further in unpacking what the consequences are of including him in this film, I want to state that I abhor and reject generative AI with every fiber of my being. To me, the world would be better off without generative AI and ChatGPT. I am disturbed by how generative AI was used to partly reconstruct Ian Holm's voice in the film, and I do not condone its use.

However, I believe the decision to reanimate Holm in a very literal sense is worth deconstructing the effects of, because whether or not we like it, this is the film that Álvarez has made. As much as I hate to see the faces of dead actors revived for a franchise role, it's clear that Alien: Romulus pads its inclusion of a synth fronted by Holm with a larger exploration of the uncanny and its transgression of human life. This is all to say that Holm's appearance is not an act of fan service, but rather a deliberate thematic assault on the audience. So let's dive in. 

The uncanny is a visceral part of Alien

Sigmund Freud wrote that we experience the uncanny when we are confronted with lifelike, inorganic objects like automatons. These machines remind us of the biological, automated processes taking place beneath our own skin, not unlike the gears of a robot. When we see Rook's torso for the first time in Romulus, both the audience and the characters are wary of it, because we assume that it's a corpse (itself an uncanny object). But once Bjorn (Spike Fearn) gets closer and notices the mechanical parts beneath the melted flesh, he breathes a sigh of relief, because the torso isn't "a person." For Bjorn, who hates synths, the violence that this synth experienced isn't worth dwelling on. It isn't worth fearing. 

However, as much as Bjorn tries to play off how scared he was a moment earlier, the appearance of the bisected synth with its spinal cord hanging out crosses a natural line between the living and the dead, the biological and the mechanical. In looking at the synth corpse, both audience and character must confront the fragility of their own flesh.

Alien: Romulus then draws a parallel between this uncanny experience to the mechanized reanimation of the late Ian Holm. This is why Holm's face is so poorly animated in comparison to the rest of the film's impressive visual effects. Álvarez deliberately avoids assimilating Holm's phantasm into the tangible and empathy-inducing cinematic plane that characters like Rain (Cailee Spaeny) and Andy (David Jonsson) walk around in. Holm's voice and face are thus a sinister invasion that must be eradicated - the very core of Alien as a story. 

What's so upsetting about seeing Holm is that it reminds us that in today's digital age, we don't truly die when our physical bodies die. Our Facebook pages get converted into memorial sites. Our loved ones might even go as far as to create AI-generated avatars of us they can interact with. And our faces and voices can be distilled to a model placed over a living human's. As the Alien franchise has suggested over and over, these horrific transgressions didn't come from alien invaders, but from ourselves. And that is the central horror of these movies. 

Seeing Ian Holm's face plastered over another actor's isn't supposed to make us feel good. Resurrecting a dead actor for a role where they're nothing but a leaky torso driven by a cold devotion to capitalism and The Company isn't fan service. In fact, the very idea of "fan service" and Alien are completely at odds with each other, because the franchise is the ultimate "feel bad" story couched in the slick skin of a blockbuster. These films are a dark warning of how capitalism erodes our humanity, and at their best, are criticisms of the current state of our culture. Alien: Romulus is a response to the existential threat that AI poses for millions of people today.

Let's just take a cue from Rain and let it die an explosive, fiery death before it can hurt us any longer. Please. 

If you love aliens bursting out of chests and hugging your face, then we have all you could want from  Popverse's Alien watch order, details on where Romulus fits into the Alien timeline, and all you need to know  on the upcoming Aliens TV show with Timothy Oliphant.