First, my belated review of Alien: Romulus. It’s a good film. By the time this article gets sent to print it’ll be on streaming, so go watch it. 

But for the brainrotted genzees lacking the attention span for a two-hour movie (and so that I don’t have to explain this later), here’s a spoiler-free synopsis: A group of young labourers living on an inhospitable mining colony break into a derelict orbital science station to secure passage to a better life in a free, independent system. Hijinks ensue, and they end up being menaced by a very deadly, very phallic alien. 

You’ve seen the original, you know how these things go.

Now, let’s talk about Andy the Android. This is as good a time as any to mention that actor David Jonsson absolutely steals the show in Romulus, continuing the tradition of synthetic characters in Alien movies being their most interesting and nuanced by a country mile (I could watch a whole miniseries about Prometheus’s David playing basketball and doing proto-Indo-European Duolingo, but that’s an article for another day). 

While the human characters in Ridley Scott’s franchise tend to fall into the categories of “clueless saps trying their best to survive” or “profit-motivated corporate stooges”, androids typically sit somewhere in the middle, never strictly aligning with any given faction, and even sometimes expressing a kind of kinship with the lethal bioengineered Xenomorphs. However, Andy flips the usual script: from the start, his loyalties are firmly on the side of humanity, specifically his adoptive ‘sister’ Rain on whom he relies for constant maintenance and repairs (a relationship which itself acts an inversion of the typical human-android dynamic) 

Oh, and they also made him autistic.

Yes, even before Andy’s synthetic nature is revealed through a pale trickle of robo-blood, Romulus gives him a slew of neurodivergently-coded behaviour patterns. He has trouble understanding social cues and mirroring body language. He responds to most humour with puzzlement or distress, but delights in the highly structured linguistic play of silly puns and call-and-response “dad jokes”. While he’s capable of feeling shame, pain, and sadness, he’s outwardly quiet and unexpressive, and doesn’t readily grasp that others aren’t privy to his vibrant inner world (where he fosters a dream of one day owning a horse named Rain-dy). He even responds to high-stress situations by going into a kind of sensory meltdown, requiring Rain to put him through an invasive “reboot” procedure (you could argue this part is more like an epileptic fit or allergic reaction, but bear with me). 

This might sound a little familiar. A socially awkward artificial being that fails to grasp the subtleties of human interaction and verbal communication? A few characters probably just popped up in your mind. From Star Trek’s Data and Tim Burton’s Edward Scissorhands to Marvel’s Vision, science fiction on the big screen has a history of using the struggles of robotic characters as an analogue for autism, often through a Pinocchio-esque desire to be “more human”. After all, what’s more classically autistic than meticulously analysing the behaviour of everyone around you in order to better fit in? 

But Romulus goes a bit further in explaining why Andy acts so differently than the series’ other androids, and here’s where we hit the central problem with how the film handles him: he’s broken. The film explicitly describes him as a “worn out” and “damaged” labour unit, salvaged and put back together by Rain’s father to protect her. Already, there are some issues with this: Andy’s differences aren’t just “who he is”, but rather the result of a mechanical malfunction. His undying devotion to his loved ones (itself part of the filmic language of autism in the tradition of Forrest Gump and Rain Man) is explained as being a simplistic “prime directive” (“Do what’s best for Rain”) that governs his behaviour, instead of just being, I dunno, genuine love?

So there’s a bit of a paradox here. On one hand, Jonnson himself plays the role of Andy with sensitivity and respect, and the feeling of “seen-ness” I feel upon witnessing his performance gets me genuinely emotional. On the other hand, the writing of the film constantly implies that these aspects of his character are defects, and that a healthier, more true version of Andy might have existed prior to whatever accident caused his damage. 

When we learn that Rain intends to abandon Andy in order to find her better life (androids are, for some reason, not allowed in independent systems), the film encourages us to, for the moment at least, empathise with her. Come on, she’s human! She actually matters, and he’s, well, “not real”. We care about our neurodivergent little robot pal, but only insofar as his needs don’t impinge on those of everyone else. After all, the only reason they brought him in the first place was because he’s uniquely able to interface with Weyland-Yutani security systems (there’s a point to be made here about neurodivergent people being valued when their special interests / skills make them “useful” before being discarded again when they become inconvenient).

But then Andy gets an upgrade, in the form of a neat little Weyland-Yutani microchip.

Post-chip Andy is, to put it bluntly, fun to watch. He's introduced in classic action-movie-badass style, saving his friends by snatching a pouncing facehugger in mid-air and delivering some snappy scienc-y dialogue. Though his sum knowledge remains the same, the new Andy is articulate and coordinated where the old one was clumsy and harmless. Where pre-upgrade Andy’s facial expressions convey a perpetual state of pained confusion, “Andy 2.0” is constantly listening, processing, considering possibilities and re-evaluating courses of action. When he says “Run” (fans of the film know exactly what moment I mean), you fucking run. 

Unfortunately, while the chip seems to “fix” much of what was “wrong” with Andy, it also erases his previously mentioned prime directive and along with it, any trace of empathy and love for his friends. Andy 2.0 does what’s best for the Company, and helping his human companions survive is just a means to that end.

Now, here’s the theory that germinated this article to begin with: I posit that while pre-chip Andy’s behaviour patterns are meant to be reminiscent of mid-functioning autism, post-chip Andy swaps those for tropes of high-functioning autism, both positive and negative.

Because, how are high-functioning autistics usually portrayed in media? They’re cold, distant, and incapable of feeling emotions like regular people. They tend to fixate on a single task, often to the detriment of other obligations or their own health. Close personal connections to friends and family are irrational, and therefore expendable. Their rigid, top-down perspective might make them useful to other characters, but a measure of caution is always necessary, since they might betray you at the slightest sign that it makes logical sense to do so.

Andy 2.0 has all of that and more. Sure, when crewmate Navarro gets facehugged, Andy can quickly deduce exactly what’s happening to her and plot a course back to safety, but ultimately he judges that it’s not worth the risk and refuses to do anything but abandon her to her fate. Later on, he makes a similarly callous judgement that costs the life of the pregnant Kay, citing that statistically, she was already dead. He’s also unwilling to go back to his previous state, and who can blame him? Why choose to be a quivering wreck when you can be an indestructible genius instead? Just as we feel the urge to empathise with Rain’s pragmatism in abandoning Andy, we can’t help but share his pain, relief, and resolve when he promises Rain, “Today, I can finally help. You won’t see me as a child anymore”.

So ultimately, which of these versions of Andy is a more “positive” representation of autism? From where I’m sitting, both and neither. It’s gratifying to see the vulnerable, more difficult aspects of neurodivergence portrayed in pre-chip Andy, but these are muddied by the film’s constant reminders that he’s a piece of junk whose existence is justified solely by the generosity of his sister. It’s empowering to see post-chip Andy hatching plans and saving his friends from danger like a genius superhero, but it’s uncomfortable to know he’s little better than a sociopath when it comes to actually valuing human life.

In the end, Rain makes the decision for us, utilising her good-old irrational, indomitable human spirit to save Andy’s life, risking her own in the process and rebooting him back to his pre-chip state. She chooses to save the Andy that she knows and loves, with all his strange quirks and idiosyncrasies and glitches. It’s very heartwarming if you don’t think about it too much.

Which is why one of Romulus’s final lines of dialogue––Rain’s promise that she will “fix” Andy, before sealing him into cryosleep––is so frustrating. It not only carries an uncomfortable Autism Speaks-esque attitude towards “curing” neurodivergence and reasserts the earlier issues with the context of Andy’s character, but also runs entirely counter to the film’s central theme about how humanity should view its place in the universe. 

To zoom out a little, the film’s central conflict directly stems from Weyland-Yutani’s megalomaniacal drive to improve upon the perceived fragility and weakness of humanity, using alien biology to shape us into a “perfect organism” more suited to life on interplanetary colonies (conveniently ignoring that it’s the company’s fault that humans are forced to live in such inhospitable conditions in the first place). Presently, humans can’t bear the horrors of space, so we have to become something closer to the xenomorphs in order to survive. Not only is this view misguided, but as the film implicitly proves it’s also flat-out wrong. 

Compound Z-01 (a.k.a. The Black Goo, a.k.a. The Third-Act Macguffin) completely fails at improving anything about humanity, invariably transforming its subjects into horrific, bloodthirsty body horror mutants, not into perfect astronautical superbeings. In fact, it’s the so-called flaws of humanity (compassion, irrationality, courage) demonstrated by Rain and her friends that end up saving the day, beating the statistically-impossible odds and living to ride off into the sunset. Rain doesn’t so much save Andy as they save each other, reinforcing how strong their adoptive bonds are.

“Maybe,” the film seems to suggest, “our ‘flaws’ are an integral part of what makes us who we are. To give them up would be to renounce our humanity and our ability to care for each other. What point would there be to life if we prioritised function over feeling?” The film pauses for a moment, before remembering to add: “Except for Andy. He’s broken and his flaws still need fixing.”

Am I wrong in thinking that the film’s ending would be infinitely more thematically cohesive if Rain instead came to the realisation that she loves Andy for who he is, even when that’s difficult or inconvenient for her? Isn’t that what nearly every aspect of the film has been building up to since the beginning?

Alien: Romulus is a good movie, and I applaud it for telling a story about autism that resonates so strongly with neurodivergent audiences. However, it also has flaws that reflect the negative attitudes the film industry still clings to. Fortunately, I think that’s what makes it worth talking about.