An early teaser trailer for the movie Alien 3 famously showed a hatching Xenomorph egg above the planet Earth. The narrator says, “In 1992, we’ll learn, on Earth, everyone can hear you scream,” a riff on the famous tagline about space and not hearing screaming. For myriad reasons, the aliens coming to Earth never happened. It was only the roundly non-canon Alien vs. Predator movies that put those two things together. But creator Noah Hawley (Fargo, Legion) is putting his money where FX’s mouth is with the new series, Alien: Earth.
Nerdist was among a roomful of journalists back in May who got to watch an early, unfinished cut of the first episode of Alien: Earth, after which Hawley gave us all some fascinating context for allowing our planet to scream for once.
“It’s the first time coming to Earth,” Hawley said of why now is the time to move the franchise homeward, “so all the questions come into play. There’s a little Earth in Prometheus, but with no expansion on who rules the Earth. What are the politics, how does that work throughout the galaxy, et cetera? And so it was a gift to get a franchise this big with very little mythology to it so that I could say, all right, well, what do we know about the next a hundred years? It’s going to get hotter, it’s going to get wetter. It’s…well, I’m not betting against capitalism.” We certainly all let out a bitter laugh at that assertion.
“So I think corporate power is going to aggregate,” he continued. “All we really know about Alien is that there’s this corporation called Weyland-Yutani. For me, I think that story is really interesting, but I like the idea also of introducing competition.” Indeed, Weyland-Yutani is only one of two massive tech companies vying for global (and galactic) supremacy.
Hawley also brought in real world history and current day dilemmas. “I thought about the moment at the turn of the 20th century where you had Edison and Tesla and Westinghouse and you weren’t sure who was going to control electricity. So I thought if we had that kind of moment in which it’s a contest between the cybernetic enhancements and AI and transhumanism and any technology race…you don’t remember who the competitor to Xerox was.”
While we know from the films that Weyland-Yutani are proponents of android technology, Hawley decided their competition in the series would do things slightly differently. Many of our main characters are synthetics, meaning real human brains placed into advanced cybernetic bodies. Wendy (Sydney Chandler) is one such synthetic, a child put into a grown-up body. Her group, the Lost Boys, go up against the horrors of the xenomorphs and other creatures.
“One of the things is I looked at when I thought about this idea of children’s minds being put into adult bodies,” Hawley shared, “[was] what’s in the canon that feels like it triggers a familiar feeling? I thought about Newt and how the second movie has a literal child in it. And I thought about Bill Paxton, who may be the most childish character in the history of movies. I mean, if that’s not a child in an adult’s body, I don’t know what is. So I thought that tone of voice is in the franchise. If I bring children into it, it’s going to feel both original and familiar at the same time.”
Hawley, ever the thoughtful creator, spent a great deal of our time discussing what bringing an entity like the xenomorph would actually do to an ecosystem. “If you’re going to bring these creatures to a terrestrial environment, how are they going to change it and how are other creatures—bugs and any of it—going to interact with them? Seeing these creatures in an Earth landscape is such a profoundly unsettling and exhilarating thing when we get to that moment. It really felt like such a gift after, at that time, six movies to be doing something new.”
Alien: Earth takes place a mere two years before the events of the first Alien. Hawley’s thought behind this came directly from what we learn in that movie. “If you remember, [the crew] just get sent to this planet. They don’t know what they’re looking for. Clearly somebody knows about these creatures, they knew enough to send them there. So that’s the interesting thing about the lack of mythology. These people who find those first eggs have been out of contact with Earth for who knows how long. So there is a gray area that we could play in and try to create something with as big a scale as possible to justify the title while still making it credible for the rest of the canon.”
Alien: Earth premieres August 12 on FX.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.
The post Noah Hawley on What to Expect for ALIEN: EARTH appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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