Why You Like … Really Dope Names

We all love a movie where a long, heartfelt kiss turns into a chestbursting moment of excitement. But there are masterpieces—Alien, Aliens, and Alien: Romulus—and then there are the also-rans. What separates the brilliant from the mediocre? Hint: it’s not the creature. They’re all the same goddamn monster, excepting the travesty of justice that arrived in Alien Resurrection.

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More Than A Monster Movie

Spoilers for this entire piece, but a good Alien movie has always been about the commentary, not the abattoir they leave behind. There’s a hidden litmus test, a secret that reveals whether a story really groks the Alien universe. It’s not in the script or the special effects. It’s welded right to the hull of the starships. With Alien: Earth hitting next month, I felt it was time to signpost a reminder about which of the franchises movies were dope, and hope that drug can be used as a precursor exam for the new series.

Like the pervasive presence of love in Love Actually, names, actually, are all around; by the end of our journey, not only will you see this hidden language in Alien, but you’ll start spotting it elsewhere, changing the way you watch your favourite movies forever. The power of names is everywhere and is one of the marks that determines whether a storyteller is making a standard-issue genre flick/book, or whether they’re truly invested in the universe you’re rocking along in.

See, the names of ships in Alien aren’t just labels. They’re a mission statement. They’re the North Star for the filmmakers, dictating the story’s tone, visual design, and commitment to the franchise’s true monster: the cold, corporate cyberpunk machine. For us, these names are the ultimate clue. Did the director think they were making an Alien movie, or just a monster closet fetish flick? We knew Alien was cool as all hell, but after you hear about how the Nostromo got its name, you’ll understand why it was even cooler than you thought.

Feeling the Grime of the Nostromo

When I first watched Alien, I would broadly consider that event an act of bad parenting. I was a young teenager, alone in an old house up on a hill. There was a storm brewing, the rain lashing the windows and lightning arcing across the sky. The roll of thunder was something I could feel in my young bones. The homeowner had a vast collection of bootleg movies, and one—no cover, no art, nothing—had a simple name: Alien. Handwritten in a charming, friendly style, I felt this might be just the movie to lift me out of a gloomy night alone.

While I didn’t move from that couch for perhaps 27 hours, terrified of what might be waiting in the high-ceilinged darkness of the hallway between the lounge and the toilet, I knew about the Nostromo before I discovered its literary origin. I understood what that ship felt like. The name sounded heavy. Sinister. A place where hope goes to die.

It wasn’t until I started researching this piece that I comprehended just how genius the freighter’s name was. Named after the protagonist and the title of Joseph Conrad’s 1904 novel, Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard, this book I have never read and have no intention of ever opening explores themes of moral corruption, greed, exploitation, and the destructive nature of material wealth. Nostromo (the character) is an Italian-born “capataz de cargadores” (a chief of cargo loaders), a highly respected and seemingly incorruptible figure who ultimately succumbs to the lure of silver.

If you’re following along at home, this directly parallels the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s greed, its subsequent desire for the xenomorph, and the crew’s exploitation and near-total fatality score. But as with all things, WeYu got a pretty good deal here. Incalculably valuable R&D on a new bioweapon was handled by an expendable crew of suckers far away from any of the suits, and rolls nicely into the company’s desire to have it all.

Ridley Scott was clearly a fan of Conrad’s work, and when James Cameron picked up the torch to make Aliens, he didn’t skip the homework. The USS Sulaco was named after the fictional South American country (and a mining town within it) in Conrad’s Nostromo. In the novel, the Sulaco region is undergoing political upheaval and revolution; it’s a place of intense conflict and struggle for control. Those of you keeping score will see how the movie’s Sulaco aligns almost perfectly: it’s a military vessel carrying Colonial Marines, sure, but it’s also carrying a reptile in a skinsuit in the form of Paul Reiser’s Burke, a man so focused on company outcomes he’s willingly complicit in the sacrifice of an entire colony and their Marine rescuers just for the chance to get one of these xenomorph monsters offworld. 

The Sulaco is in better trim than the Nostromo. It’s a military vessel, kept in good condition; we see none of the evidence of corporate cost-savings we saw on the Nostromo. And the mission itself is better supplied than Ripley’s initial one to LV-426 Acheron. But it’s all taxpayer expense; Weyland-Yutani doesn’t care if the entire ship is scrapped because it carries no risk on this gig.

They think they’re in control.

Our final clue is the USCSS Patna: a Weyland-Yutani Bio-Weapons Division ship that appears briefly in Alien 3. It arrives to tag and bag the xenomorph, and the brevity of its screen time gives some indication that Alien 3 is not one of the classics. The Patna is named after the ship in Conrad’s 1899 novella Lord Jim. Director David Fincher must have gone for the Cliff Notes edition of Conrad’s work. In Lord Jim, the Patna is a decaying, overloaded steamship carrying Muslim pilgrims to Mecca. Its white officers (including protagonist Jim) abandon the ship when it seems doomed. It’s an exploration of honour, cowardice, and redemption.

The movie’s version of the Patna continues this theme… but this is where the thread begins to fray. The name foreshadowed a doomed voyage, but the film itself seemed to lose track of why it was doomed, focusing on the monster over the corporate machinations that put it there. Perhaps all the name really foreshadowed was a lousy 6.4 on IMDb.

Back to the Nostromo: only Weyland-Yutani would name a ship after a story of greed and exploitation. It’s a private joke, worn with the kind of conceit that has made the company very, very wealthy. No one reads books anymore, and by the time 2122 rolls around, Conrad’s works will be consigned to humanity’s fossil records.

Fuelling the Cyberpunk Horror

This is where the litmus test becomes crystal clear. Naming a ship after a theme of greed directly serves the franchise’s central cyberpunk message: the impoverished are always fuel for the booster rocket engines of the wealthy. In my Alien: Romulus review, I said we know the story is set in space and has an alien, but what’s not always explicitly spelled out is that the monster is not actually the xenomorph. The monster is us. It’s late-stage capitalism. The military-industrial complex. Corporations grinding us down into meal.

We see this in crystal clarity when Rain’s contract is extended without her consent in Alien: Romulus—she will die on Yvaga III, and there is no appeal. In WeYu-controlled worlds and ships, the future tech we crave is constantly breaking down because the company cut corners. The horror is not the chestbursting, although I’ll admit that’s not a rosy future any of us want. It’s that Weyland-Yutani sees people as an asset on a balance sheet, not as human beings.

If we take a slight left step toward the expanded universe, we get a glimpse of just how effective WeYu has been in insinuating itself into the Colonial Marines. Masters of getting other people to write the cheque, the company is fine dropping breadcrumbs on a trail of misery others must go fix. Games like Aliens: Dark Descent  and Aliens: Fireteam Elite feature Marines, but they aren’t heroes on a noble quest. They’re the publicly-funded, high-risk arm of corporate expansion. It’s a dark mirror of our own world, where taxpayers often front the cost and risk for ventures that will only profit the few. The Alien universe has been showing us the terrifying future that’s coming for us since 1979.

We can imagine how Alien’s corporate-military-industrial complex came to be. The right contracts, the right deals, and the right top-shelf liquor sees humans on distant worlds dying without ever seeing the sun. The good news in all of this is that heroes like Rain find a way above the clouds. They finally see a golden dawn; the only problem is their ladder to get there is constructed of corpses.

When the Commentary Fades

So, if the Conrad connection is the franchise’s secret ingredient, what happens when it’s engineered out of the DNA? The litmus test gives us a clear answer. We’ve all had our fill of Joseph Conrad for one day, so let’s look at what happens when that thematic core is abandoned. While Alien 3 showed us how damaging it is to simply dilute the formula, the prequels threw it out the airlock entirely. Let’s start there.

The Alien movie people most love to hate is Prometheus. As a monster-closet movie, it’s fine. As an exploration into whether you should run left or right when a giant donut is about to roll over you, it fails spectacularly. It also fails in its naming: the USCSS Prometheus is named after the Titan in Greek mythology who stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity. This name reflects the film’s theme of humanity seeking knowledge from our creators (the Engineers) and the catastrophic consequences of meddling with forces beyond our comprehension. It’s the apple all over again: forbidden knowledge, and the high cost of seeking it.

Then there’s Alien: Covenant. Those with a dictionary handy will know a covenant is a formal agreement or promise, most often used in a religious or historical context. As a well-known example, there’s the biblical covenant between God and Abraham. The Covenant is a colonisation vessel, carrying people to a new world under the premise of a new beginning. The film subverts this, showing how quickly the covenant is broken and transformed into something horrific by David’s actions and the Engineers’ own designs. It speaks to the breaking of foundational trusts.

The problem here is fairly plain. We started a series about corporate greed, and now we’ve got Ridley Scott’s prequels riffing the light fantastic and broadening the naming conventions to include classical mythology. He changed the tone: it’s no longer about our own dark masters. It’s about us being imbeciles and burning ourselves on a stove that’s too hot. It doesn’t resonate as well with the core audience who loved the first movies. Sure, as far as monster closet films go, they’re fine, but that’s what they’re closest to: slasher flicks where people do dumb shit and pay the price. We lose the iconic heroism of Ripley standing up for the justice we want to see. We don’t get to see her grieving for the daughter she’ll never see again, and the implicit devil’s bargain she made by signing onto that starship in the first place. Hell, the Special Edition of Aliens shows us the daughter connection, and it’s this kind of detail that grounds her character and makes her fight so personal. The human/corporate element is key.

The names Prometheus and Covenant—showing us hubris and broken promises—are clever enough, but left the stories untethered from the OG’s grounded, blue-collar horror. They became grander, more philosophical monster movies, but they lost some of the sinister dark of the corporate machine. It’s all tossed aside, a new fabric stitched into its place.

And in Alien 3 & 4, we see further fumbles. Alien 3 lost the crucial vibe of corporate exploitation by setting the film on a prison colony, and Alien: Resurrection’s military-industrial complex felt too cartoonish, failing to land the cynical punches of the originals.

The good news is that our universe gave us Fede Álvarez. He brought Alien: Romulus to us: the film includes a deliberate conversation about its namesakes, Romulus and Remus. It’s a clear signal: the writers understand. They know Weyland-Yutani fancies itself the new Roman Empire, willing to build its dominion on the bones of anyone who gets in the way. The litmus test passes with flying colours. Here, we’ve finally come home and can dare to scream in space once more.

The Future of Alien

Names aren’t just Easter eggs. They’re a promise to the audience, and in the case of the Alien franchise, a promise that the story understands that the xenomorph is just a symptom. The disease is us.

As a writer, I know that choosing a name is an act of creation. In Alien, it’s an act of dedication—a commitment to a theme that makes the universe real. Lived in. It’s got just the right locker-room smell; you know when it’s game time.

As we wait for the new Alien: Earth series, this gives us a new lens through which to speculate. We can forget the casting and trailer breakdowns for a moment and ask the most important question: What will the ships, the stations, and the colonies be named? Will their names echo the working-class tragedy of the Nostromo? Or will they be something else entirely? The answer will tell us everything we need to know about the story we’re about to get.

What are your favourite cinema or book names? Let me know in the comments below. And if you want to see Rain and Andy in a new movie, because I sure as hell do, click Like! And thanks for watching.