In science fiction films, villains are not just people or monsters. They can also be multinationals whose limitless greed and corruption make them formidable enemies of heroes, and sometimes of all humanity.
Cyberdyne Systems – Terminator
Cyberdyne Systems was just a factory manufacturing processors when a T-800 – a cyborg sent from the future to assassinate Sarah Connor – was blown up in one of its factories. She will recover from her carcass a chip and a mechanical arm which will be entrusted to her researchers. Without knowing what was going to happen.
Thanks to this, the latter will make unexpected discoveries which will allow the development of Skynet, a super-powerful artificial intelligence which will eventually become autonomous, and bring about the “last judgment” by causing a global nuclear cataclysm, before the advent of machines. She’s probably the least terrifying on the list, since she didn’t plan on losing control of her creation.
Omni Consumer Products – RoboCop
Released in 1987, directed by Paul Verhoeven, “RoboCop” features the company Omni Consumer Products, or OCP, a powerful military-industrial and commercial conglomerate which seeks to privatize the police force of the city of Detroit under the leadership of its vice-president, Dick Jones. The latter is in reality linked to the world of crime, and receives a commission on the sale of drugs, gambling or even prostitution networks.
“Good business is where you create it,” he says during the board meeting during which he presents the ED-209 prototype, an imposing police robot available 24 hours a day, which he wants to see replaced city police officers. Fortunately, a malfunction during the simulation will allow another employee to seize his chance and launch RoboCop, which will succeed in revealing the corruption of Dick Jones.
Biosyn Genetics – Jurassic World
Even more despicable than the InGen corporation in the “Jurassic Park” saga, Biosyn makes its first official appearance in the first film in the guise of Lewis Dodgson, who offers Dennis Nedry, the park’s computer scientist, a large bribe to that the latter seizes dinosaur embryos.
The company specializing in genetic research resurfaces in “Jurassic World” with its army of lawyers and industrial spies ready for all the worst machinations to ensure significant financial benefits for the company.
-In particular, they plan the creation of prehistoric locusts to take control of world food production by planning the destruction of crops that do not use the seeds manufactured by Boisyn. Any resemblance to an actual multinational is entirely coincidental.
Umbrella Corporation – Resident Evil
A powerful pharmaceutical company omnipresent in the lives of consumers around the world, Umbrella Corporation is responsible for the creation in great secrecy of a powerful virus which it consciously propagated in order to launch the apocalypse on its terms. It will generate within it different armed branches in charge of defending its interests against those who try to prevent it from carrying out its disastrous objectives.
Development of biological weapons, experimentation on human guinea pigs, targeted assassinations of their own employees, and incidentally the contamination and death of billions of people, this multinational is never short of ideas for mistreating humanity, and above all , ensure absolute power over its future.
Weyland-Yutani Corporation – Alien
The all-powerful multinational from the Alien saga has built its empire through the development of advanced technologies, the manufacturing of synthetic androids with superior intelligence, supercomputers and space colonization through interstellar travel.
The discovery of the xenomorph, and its limitless potential as the ultimate biological warfare weapon, revealed its limitless greed. The lives of one’s own employees don’t matter as long as the goal is achieved. A society that Noah Hawley’s “Alien: Earth” series should allow us to discover in more detail.
