FX's 'Alien: Earth' Series Blends AI and Classic Sci-Fi Horror

Everything to know about 'Alien: Earth,' a spin-off of Ridley Scott's 1979 film

"Alien: Earth" is premiering Tuesday on FX Networks, and it's already creating a buzz. The series by creator Noah Hawley is described as a spin-off to the original Ridley Scott-directed film, "Alien," from 1979. The film follows a space crew aboard the starship, Nostromo, who are on their journey back home when they receive a distress call from an alien vessel. Like the science fiction horror film from Scott, Hawley told "Good Morning America" that he hopes "after every episode, you go, 'Well, I'll never do this thing again.'" "We've now put another idea in your head the same way that 'JAWS' kept people out of the ocean," he added. "When a mysterious deep space research vessel USCSS Maginot crash-lands on Earth, 'Wendy' and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet's greatest threat," according to a synopsis for the series. In this series, Earth is also "governed by five corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold." "In this Corporate Era, cyborgs (humans with both biological and artificial parts) and synthetics (humanoid robots with artificial intelligence) exist alongside humans," the synopsis continues. "But the game is changed when the wunderkind Founder and CEO of Prodigy Corporation unlocks a new technological advancement: hybrids (humanoid robots infused with human consciousness). The first hybrid prototype, named "Wendy," marks a new dawn in the race for immortality." When Weyland-Yutani's spaceship collides into Prodigy City, "Wendy" and other hybrids "encounter mysterious life forms more terrifying than anyone could have ever imagined," the synopsis adds. Sydney Chandler plays "Wendy" in the series. Also starring in the show are Timothy Olyphant as "Kirsch," Alex Lawther as "Hermit," Samuel Blenkin as "Boy Kavalier," Babou Ceesay as "Morrow" and "Adrian Edmondson as "Atom Eins." David Rysdahl plays "Arthur Sylvia," Essie Davis plays "Dame Sylvia," Lily Newmark portrays "Nibs," Erana James portrays "Curly" and Adarsh Gourav plays "Slightly." Also starring in the series are Jonathan Ajayi as "Smee," Kit Young as "Tootles," Diêm Camille as "Siberian," Moe Bar-El as "Rashidi" and Sandra Yi Sencindiver as "Yutani." Direct Dana Gonzales said in an interview with the L.A. Times that the Xenomorph, the alien from the 1979 film, will return for the spin-off. "We show more of the Xenomorph than everybody else has shown," Gonzales said. ""Later on, you realize why we do that; it doesn't just become a character that's coming out of a dark hole. There's this point where it's going to be much more present. Finding that language of how to get there, it starts with the first episode of giving fans what they hope to be tuning in for." FX released the trailer for the series in June. The trailer opens with a scene from Neverland Research Island. The year is 2120 on Earth. It introduces a young girl who is told that she will be the first person to "transition from a human body to a synthetic." "Because I'm special," she replies. A separate scene in the trailer cuts to a spacecraft crash landing and a group of people investigating the spaceship. "This ship collected five different life forms from the darkest corners of the universe," says Ceesay in the trailer as ominous shots of the spacecraft are shown. "Monsters." See the full trailer below. With Scott's 1979 film as the inspiration behind Hawley's new series, Scott has joined "Alien: Earth" as an executive producer. "Alien: Earth" will premiere with the first two episodes on Tuesday, Aug. 12, on Hulu and FX. Episodes will release every Tuesday through mid-September.

One of the Greatest Science-Fiction Franchises Is Finally Getting a TV Show. It's Not Quite What It Seems.

Are you sure you want to unsubscribe from email alerts for Sam Adams? One of the most perfect things about the original Alien is its fiendish simplicity. Driven in part by technical limitations, the movie largely confines its glistening monster to the shadows, and keeps the reasons for its existence similarly obscured. Driven purely by the instinct to drive and reproduce, the xenomorph -- a designation the creature didn't even acquire until the second movie in the series -- is both a perfect killing machine and the ultimate plot device. It not only requires no explanation but allows none, because the alien's very nature means that no one who might be in a position to pass on information about it survives to do so. Simplicity, however, is not really Noah Hawley's thing. His FX series Fargo was five seasons of elevated fanfiction, riffing on the collected works of Joel and Ethan Coen without tapping into the deeper ideas that inform their best movies. The Coens wrestled with the nature of evil; Hawley wrestled with the Coens. But Alien has proved over the decades to be the most malleable of franchises, in part because there's so little to be faithful to: a nigh-unstoppable monster, a villainous corporation, and an ass-kicking heroine are the only core requirements, along with the presence of a synthetic humanoid with questionable motives. The conceptual leap in Hawley's new series Alien: Earth is to combine the latter two. Wendy (Sydney Chandler) is an athletic brunette with a keen survival instinct, hell-bent on protecting those she loves, especially her brother CJ (Alex Lawther), from pressing threats. But she's also a new kind of life form, the human consciousness of a dying child transplanted into a synthetic adult body, courtesy of the Prodigy corporation. In nearly every previous Alien film, the sinister corporation has been Weyland-Yutani, the indistinct but apparently all-powerful company that time and again puts the chance of profiting from the alien's existence above the lives of the humans they sent to capture it. (The one Alien movie to omit Weyland-Yutani is the Joss Whedon-penned Alien: Resurrection, whose special edition reveals that the company has been bought out by Walmart.) In Hawley's series, though, Weyland-Yutani is just one of five massive companies that have carved up every inhabitable inch of the universe -- including the moon and Mars -- and now, by the year 2120, rule where governments used to. The newest of these is Prodigy, the brainchild of one Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), who is also the world's youngest trillionaire. The "boy genius," as he is sometimes called, is no longer a boy, but he has the lanky amorality of a tech titan who's convinced that styling himself like a perpetual child obviates him of the need to play by grown-up rules. He gets a juvenile kick out of placing his bare, grimy feet on a conference table during a high-stakes business meeting, and he flits from one thought to the next with the abruptness of a bored toddler. (He also, as the series makes clear long before it makes it explicit, has severe ADHD.) Never one to understate a point, Hawley gives his boy genius a Peter Pan complex and on obsession with Peter Pan itself. Before Wendy has undergone her consciousness transplant -- indeed, before she has even chosen the name to represent her new self -- Boy Kavalier shows her footage from the 1953 Disney movie, and he names the other children who subsequently undergo the procedure after other characters from J.M. Barrie's story: Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), Tootles (Kit Young), Nibs (Lily Newmark), Curly (Erana James), and Smee (Jonathan Ajayi). (There aren't quite enough Lost Boys to accommodate Hawley's extended metaphor.) It's a bit peculiar that a twentysomething man would use a 167-year-old movie to explain his latest invention to children half his age, but the series as a whole indulges in what might be called reverse nostalgia. Nearly a century in the future, its characters grow up watching the 2002 animated movie Ice Age and still collect signed Reggie Jackson balls from the 1977 World Series. Given that it's set in a period nearly as far from Mr. October's heyday as 2025 is from the beginning of professional baseball, one has to wonder if so little of note has happened between now and 2120 that children are still conversant in popular culture from before their grandparents were born, but it does underline that, for the first time, the series is taking place in a reality tangibly connected to our own. Hawley starts Alien: Earth in the most familiar of territories: aboard a spaceship, where the crew of a deep-space research mission is about to make a horrible discovery -- guess which -- about the alien species they've been sent to collect. (The timeline puts us only two years before the first Alien's space voyage, which gives the show license to recreate the interior of the Nostromo with uncanny accuracy.) The Maginot's cargo includes the classic xenomorph, with its slimy carapace and nested sets of jaws, but also a host of new critters, some more well-defined than others. There's one species that looks like a carnivorous plant, one like a basketball-sized mosquito, and another that's both a creepy-crawly bug and a pulsating mass of goo. (Even by the end of the eight-episode season, you get the sense that the show is leaving some of their evolutions to be filled in later as demand requires.) The scariest, and by far the most ingenious, is "the eye," which looks like a roving eyeball stuck on top of a fast-moving octopus, and has the ability to control its prey's body after it sucks the life out of it. The Maginot's crew is dispensed with in short order -- so short, in fact, that you might wonder why the show brought in actors like Fargo's Richa Moorjani just to have them fed to the lions before the series is 10 minutes old, and you should keep wondering. But it's all to the end of crash-landing that Weyland-Yutani ship in Prodigy-controlled territory -- right into an occupied skyscraper, in fact -- which sets in motion two parallel operations: a search-and-rescue mission led by Wendy's brother, who works as a medic in Prodigy's private army, and a retrieval mission featuring Wendy and her fellow hybrids, led by Boy Kavalier's synthetic enforcer, Kirsh (a white-blond Timothy Olyphant, who seems to have told his hair stylist to give him the Rutger Hauer). The series' opening titles, in familiar flickering green-on-black type, inform us of a three-way "race for immortality" between the makers of android synthetics like Kirsh; enhanced cyborgs like Morrow (Babou Ceesay), the Weyland-Yutani enforcer who emerges as the only survivor of the spaceship crash; and "hybrids" like Wendy et al., who combine the best of both. The winner, we're told, will determine no less than "which corporation rules the universe." That's the setup for a promising enough TV series, even if it's one that would seem to owe more to Ridley Scott's Blade Runner than his Alien. But it's not really the show Hawley has made. There's no universe-ruling in sight, just a lot of territorial squabbling about humanity's place in the order of the cosmos. As the synthetic Kirsh sneers at one human, "You used to be food." The aliens return humanity to the status of food, and although the hybrids lack bodies worth eating, they can still be damaged, and their minds can still be traumatized. Wendy and her fellow Lost Boys have all been put in the shells of human adults -- "I don't like these," the newly adult Wendy complains as she holds her breasts; "they move when I run" -- but they're still children at heart, and not just the innocent kind. Adult minds, we're told, are "too stiff" for the hybrid procedure, but children aren't yet formed, and giving them new bodies, and new powers, before they've decided who they are gives them the chance to decide for themselves whether human is something they even want to be. Like our own nascent A.I., which is clearly Hawley's inspiration for the series' core themes about the evolution of technology and self-awareness, the hybrids have the potential to usher humankind into a practically limitless new era, or to decide that people are merely a step on the ladder to something greater. Science fiction lends itself to the abstract inquiries that Hawley is drawn to, and Alien: Earth, whose budget has been estimated at as much as $250 million, has a real sense of scale, although it sometimes gets so weighed down that its forward progress slows to a crawl. (At the end of its two-hour premiere, the characters still haven't left that apartment building.) It's a big show about big ideas, expansive in a moment when most television is scaling back, and it's got a whole universe to explore.

'Alien: Earth' series asks: Which is scarier, a giant xenomorph or rogue AI?

Nobody pleaded that "Fargo," that 1996 cinematic gem from Joel and Ethan Coen, should be made into a TV series. And yet writer and director Noah Hawley has (so far) delivered five seasons and an award-winning hit, against steep odds. Now, Hawley is looking to smash another adaptation pitch into the bleachers with FX's "Alien: Earth" (streaming weekly starting Aug. 12 on Hulu), based on Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi opus that spawned eight movie sequels and prequels. So do we really need eight small-screen episodes - and possibly more, in future seasons - of multi-jawed monsters terrifying people in claustrophobic spaceships? No we don't. But, as actor Timothy Olyphant says, those fears are unfounded. "I started sleeping well the moment I heard Noah ask, 'If you take away the monster, what is the show?' He knew you couldn't lean on that little guy popping out of people's chests week after week." Hawley sums up his challenge simply. "It was in essence the same approach I had with 'Fargo,'" he says. "I tried to just figure out, what's the feeling I had when I watched that first 'Alien' movie, and how do I create the same emotions by telling you a different story?" What Hawley has crafted is part futuristic fright-fest, part timely allegory. The terrifying Xenomorph, created by Swiss artist H.R. Giger, very much appears, but almost in a cameo role. The focus instead is on Earth, which is now ruled by a handful of powerful tech companies each vying to create the dominant AI future. Sound familiar? While some of the companies are pushing for advancements in cyborg technology, others have banked on the rise of synths, or synthetic humans. Olyphant plays an unusually cagey synth named Kirsh who works for genius tech whiz Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), whose Prodigy Corporation is on to something revolutionary: infusing the human consciousness of dying children into artificial robotic bodies. The offbeat inspiration for Noah Hawley's 'Alien: Earth'? J.M. Barrie's 'Peter Pan' It gets heavier from there. The ailing children chosen for this journey reflect Kavalier's obsession with J.M. Barrie's "Peter Pan." The kids' new-body names - Slightly, Tootles, Smee, Curly and Nibs - echo the Lost Boys from the famous 1904 book, which Kavalier reads from obsessively. And they are led by a fearless Wendy, played with wide-eyed wonder by Sydney Chandler. "Noah is taking some really big swings here, and that's great, because Ridley was the first person to say, 'What more can you really do with that (Xenomorph) creature?'" says David Zucker, chief creative officer for the director's production company Scott Free. "Ridley's feeling about doing this series was the same thing he stressed when they wanted to do a sequel to 'Blade Runner,' which is, this show has to have a reason for being," says Zucker, adding that the British director was not directly involved in the new TV series. "He's not really interested in revisiting things he's done before. But what excited him about this is that while it honored the aesthetic of the original, it took a very original approach." The story of these Neverland kids, who are pressed into dangerous service for Prodigy as they navigate the transition into their adult synthetic bodies, is indeed a new twist, one that asks big questions but also provides ample laughs as we watch adult actors behaving like preteens. It's a welcome break from those jump-scare jabs. "To me, the show is in part about how we are raising our children today. What morals are we giving them? Where are the real adults?" Hawley says. For Chandler, "jumping back into the mind of my younger self was amazing," says the avowed sci-fi and "Alien" fan, whose father is actor Kyle Chandler. "That feeling of bravery and honesty. Playing a kid in a synthetic body in a future world with aliens was a scary challenge, but one I was ready for." 'Alien: Earth' features massive sets built partly off the blueprints of the original Ridley Scott movie 'Alien' Helping Chandler get into character were massive sets "that I would always get lost on" and a frightening 9-foot-tall Xenomorph suit worn by a "sweet man named Cameron, who when he put that on and chased you, it was genuinely scary," she says. To enhance the horror and appeal to "Alien" fans, Hawley coordinated with Ridley Scott to get the blueprints for the set of the original ship, the USCSS Nostromo, to create the research vessel that, through a series of deadly mistakes, winds up plummeting out of orbit and plowing into buildings on Earth. "The cryochamber in our ship is a bit bigger than Ridley's, but otherwise the bridge is the same," he says. "It was fun to see the actors react to being there on set. It was like they had stepped into the movie of their childhood." Whenever possible, Hawley used old-fashioned costume-based special effects, resorting only when necessary to digital magic created by New Zealand-based masters Wētā FX. Monsters may scurry around 'Alien: Earth,' but Noah Hawley suggests the really terrifying characters might be human beings Hawley says preserving the sheer horror of the original films was integral to his project, and as viewers will see, the Xenomorph eventually gets some creepy friends. But even more chilling was the prospect of ceding control of Earth to machines of our own creation. Although "Alien: Earth" was written "before ChatGPT was even launched," Hawley says, he's surprised and grateful the series is landing when the debate about the oversight of AI is gathering steam. "The show is about humanity being trapped between its monster past when we all were just food and its AI future, and in both cases something's out to kill us," he says. "So it's important to talk about it. Is AI the next step in our evolution, or will it be the end of humanity? Are we going down the road of (Elon Musk's company) Neuralink, where technology will be added to our bodies, or are we going beyond that to a place where we will all be transhuman? "It's just amazing how fast things have progressed just since I started writing this show back in 2020." For Olyphant, who played to type as a U.S. marshal in Season 4 of Hawley's "Fargo," the chance to work with the writer/director again, on a project focused on big-picture ideas about our unsettling human future, proved irresistible. "Ultimately, in 'Alien: Earth' Noah is writing about what we're dealing with right now. It's this pursuit of living forever, of taking great technology but just trying to monetize it, of being willing to manipulate the lives of children for profit," he says. "And it's about this distrust of AI, this thing that is not human, and my character more than others encapsulates this issue. There are so many 'Alien' franchise diehards out there, so I can't wait to see who comes along on our trip."

Alien: Earth Is Masterful, Deeply Unsettling Television

Oh, thank goodness! Alien: Earth, Disney's megabucks TV series set just before the events of the original Alien movie, is just brilliant. Showrunner, writer, and director Noah Hawley has created something truly special: a show that feels utterly built from the DNA of Ridley Scott's earliest vision, but with the non-stop thrills of James Cameron's Aliens sequel. And crucially, unlike every other film in the franchise since the first two, it remembers that this is a story about the hearts of the characters, rather than just the events happening to them. Here are my thoughts on the first two episodes. Alien: Earth makes a very interesting opening decision. You might think, given how the Alien sequels have all flailed under comparisons to the first two films, that Hawley would want to immediately put his own stamp on the show. The creator of the extraordinary TV series Fargo and Legion has a distinct approach, so surely the smart move is to hit that hard as we begin? But no, a far braver choice is made. The opening few minutes of Alien: Earth are an astonishing recreation of Scott's style, complete with a cynical and tired crew bantering around a table, sniping, mocking, talking over one another. Tensions and relationships are instantly established for the beleaguered crew you already know are about to die as their research vessel containing multiple alien specimens crash-lands onto Earth. It all looks and breathes like a perfect piece of 1970s science fiction. And in achieving this, the show immediately feels right. This is the Alien we love, not the weirdly incongruous blandness of Covenant or the dreadful misfires of Alien 3 and Alien Resurrection. This is then put into stark contrast by the events on Earth. While the crashing ship, the Maginot, is owned and operated by the Weyland-Yutani corporation, it crashes into a towering city owned by another company called Prodigy. Because, as we learn in the show's opening banter on board the ship, the Earth in 2120 is controlled by four corporations, and it's soon to be five. We learn that Weyland-Yutani owns North and South America, but we're yet to be told about the rest-although we're quickly introduced to the new force to be reckoned with, Prodigy. Created by the youngest-ever trillionaire, Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), Prodigy owns at least a large city in New Siam and vast research island, and is about to make a major breakthrough regarding synthetics-the androids with the gooey white blood from those first films. Kavalier has developed a way to transfer the consciousness from pre-teen children into the bodies of synths, and as we join the facility on Neverland Island, Kavalier is preparing to try it for the first time, moving the mind of terminal cancer patient Marcy Hermit (Florence Bensberg) into an adult synth body, where she renames herself Wendy (Sydney Chandler). And yes, let's pause to address all this Peter Pan business. Eeehhh, this TV show is about as close to perfect as you could hope for, but if I had to pick at something, it'd be this. It's wildly heavy-handed (indeed, all the names are pretty painfully on-the-nose-"Kavalier" for our move-fast-break-things trillionaire, "Hermit" for our girl about to be moved into a new shell...), to the point where clips of the Disney cartoon are repeatedly shown and we even get Kavalier reading out loud from the book. She's Wendy, it's Neverland... good grief, we get it. They're children who get to live forever, I guess? Except, of course, the point of the book is they stay children, but here they're intended to mature into adults. It feels deeply cumbersome. But honestly, that's my only complaint. Prodigy rapidly moves ahead with transferring a bunch of dying kids into adult bodies, all now living under the mentorship of more traditional synthetic Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), moments before the Maginot crashes into the base of two skyscrapers in Prodigy City. A search and rescue team of Prodigy employees is instantly dispatched, including a medic who happens to be Joe Hermit (Alex Lawther), brother to Wendy. And, of course, the alien specimens got out. What follows is a lot of extremely good, proper Alien business, or terrified humans with guns moving through dimly lit corridors that very probably contain monsters. It's especially enjoyable here because so much is completely unknown. We know the Maginot was carrying Xenomorphs at many phases, from egg to Facehugger to full-grown Xenomorph XX121s, but we're also aware there's some fucking eyeball-with-tentacles thing in there, along with various other alien species we've never seen before. And while we're left in no doubt that the Xeno is still the worst of the bunch, none of them seems vaguely friendly. But this is elevated by the show's central, most abhorrent and chilling aspect: some super-rich 20-something just put a bunch of 10 to 12-year-olds' minds into super-powered adult bodies, and then sent them into danger. The body-swap between child and adult is a beloved formula, and almost always played for laughs. From Big to Freaky Friday, the notion is wrung for humor (even if you do get something as deeply troubling as Big's 13-year-old boy losing his virginity to an adult woman). So when you first see Marcy become Wendy, there's that jovial sense to it. Firstly, she's not going to die as a just-turned-12-year-old any more, and that's wonderful, but also you've got an adult actor acting like a kid. At one point she grabs her boobs and declares how weird they are, how they move around while she's running. The program is very clearly playing with those body-swap tropes, telling us how jolly this all is. After a bunch of the kids have been put into the adult synth bodies, there's a wonderful scene in which they're all sitting around chatting in a common area, a room of adult actors moving and talking like children. Jonathan Ajayi especially shines at this, his leg movements incredibly familiar for anyone with a kid with ADHD, but it's all delivered without pantomime. It feels wrong, because body-swaps always feel wrong, but we're being told how right it is throughout. But it's so wrong! This isn't being done with families around them, or friends from their previous lives, and they certainly don't have appropriate adult supervision or counselling. They're experiments, their former terminal diagnoses and separation from their families clearly designed to make them disposable should something go wrong. Wendy's compulsion to find her older brother once more seems to test the adults, unsure whether to prevent it for the project's secrecy, but ultimately driven to let it play out purely for the test results. It's grotesquely mercenary, and the second episode switches to endlessly reminding us of this, as we see these adult shells acting like utterly terrified kids in the face of alien danger. Almost everything is shot perfectly. In fact, Alien: Earth feels like the final obliteration of any difference between film and television, its massive-budget movie quality and ultra-widescreen format giving it the sense of being cinematic at all times. The only sop to traditional television at any point is a peculiar flashback to Marcy's childhood, which sticks out like a sore thumb among the rest of the format. It would be incredible to be able to go watch these weekly episodes on the big screen, and god knows, movie theaters could use the custom. What's also so exciting is to think where this program could be going next. The claustrophobic events in the ruined ship and destroyed apartments make up most of the second episode, but clearly this is soon to head outside. There's surely no chance of containing this incident, and it's going to be extraordinary to see how the corporations address the outbreak. The other aspect to think about is the words from the first episode's opening text. In the future, the race for immortality will come in 3 guises: Cybernetically enhanced humans: Cyborgs Artificially intelligent beings: Synths and Synthetic beings downloaded with human consciousness: Hybrids While the program has already featured all three, and we see the terrifying capabilities of Weyland-Yutani cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay), there's yet to be any sense of how the various corporations are looking to ensure their creations become the dominant force. It's surely to come. In Alien: Earth, Hawley et al have done something that seemed so impossible for the last 40 years-combine the terror of Alien and the thrill of Aliens, while keeping humans as the focus of the story. Not even Ridley Scott could come close in his two glum prequels. But in FX's TV show, it's all there, with an amazing eight more hours of it to come.

'Alien: Earth' creator Noah Hawley reveals why he introduced new creatures and how it is linked to AI, Tesla and Thomas Edison

FX's upcoming sci-fi series Alien: Earth aims to recreate the sense of shock and horror that made Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien a classic. But with seven films and two crossover movies already revealing much about the franchise's alien creatures, creator Noah Hawley says new challenges demanded new ideas. "I've managed somehow to have this niche of reinventing classic movies as television shows. If I have a skill at it, it's in understanding what the original movie made me feel and why," Hawley told reporters in May. "Seven movies later, there's no discovery or mystery in the life cycle of this creature, so that feeling the audience has is unavailable to me, which is why I felt I had to introduce new creatures." David W. Zucker, Alien: Earth executive producer and chief creative officer for Scott Free, said Ridley Scott's main concern was whether these new additions could be as impactful as the original Xenomorph. "Ridley, candidly, his biggest concern for Noah and this series was the ambition to build out these other creatures -- the necessity of that but also just how steep that challenge is to pull off in a way that is impactful but also that really taps into your imagination," Zucker said. Like the 1979 film, the new series does not reveal how these creatures live or reproduce. Instead, it shows that they are the last thing anyone would want crash-landing on Earth. Set two years before Alien, the series follows Wendy (Sydney Chandler), the first human to have her consciousness transferred to a synthetic body. When a space vessel carrying alien specimens crashes on Earth, Wendy and a group of hybrids step in to respond. Alongside the alien threat, they face powerful corporations that could be as dangerous as the creatures themselves. "One of the reasons that 'Alien' was so exciting to me to adapt was that it's not just a monster movie. It's that moment [in the first movie] where Ash is revealed to be an Android," Hawley said. "You realize that humanity is trapped between this parasitic primordial past and the AI future, and they're both trying to kill us." Hawley began work on the project in 2018 and drew inspiration from the late 19th-century rivalry between Nikola Tesla, Thomas Edison, and George Westinghouse. "It certainly seems like we're in a race for a global monopoly. There's usually a last step, which is a few players left all competing," Hawley said. "I thought, 'What if we make it that moment, technologically, of what's next for humanity?'" Wendy, while physically an adult, has the mental and emotional maturity of a 12-year-old. Hawley said this perspective allowed the story to explore humanity's worth through the eyes of children. "Let the children navigate the discovery both of what these creatures are and then, also, what it means to be a grownup on some level," he said. Hawley has yet to meet Ridley Scott in person, but the director, who serves as an executive producer, reviewed footage and episodes during production. Zucker said Scott was especially impressed with the faithful recreation of original sets. "I sent him some shots when he was shooting production in Hungary, and he was just, 'Well, f-k me. I built that, and it's still there all these years later,'" Zucker said. "One of the things among many I know he's grateful to Noah about is, in the credits, there's acknowledgment for some of those original designers who put that ship set together."

FX's 'Alien: Earth' Combines Aliens and AI To Bring Bloody Mayhem to Our Little Planet

When it comes to delivering the scary goods, the series succeeds, with several heart-stopping and yet pulse-pounding action sequences in the second episode. Artificial intelligence occupies the minds of many these days, including the showrunner, Noah Hawley, of a new FX series based on the long-lurking "Alien" franchise, "Alien: Earth." Mr. Hawley informs us via introductory text of three different engineered beings that will populate the show: cyborgs (humans with both biological and artificial parts), synthetics (human-looking robots with AI), and the latest invention, hybrids (robots infused with human consciousness). Difficulty telling them apart and the distinctions between the three -- one wonders whether all cyborgs have a flesh-and-blood brain -- are presumably part of the horror awaiting the viewer, in addition to the titular alien species. Yet along with the several artificially enhanced humanoid types, the first two episodes of the series also introduce multiple extraterrestrials besides the now-iconic xenomorphs. The year is 2120, two years before the events of the first "Alien" movie, and there's a whole host of creepie-crawlies, such as a small octopus-like creature with multiple eyes as well as legs, and a dolphin-snouted organism that may turn out to be a pernicious plant. Continuing with the cataloguing of the show's universe, we're told that five corporations control Earth's landmasses, including the conglomerate for which Sigourney Weaver's Ripley worked for and against in the original films, Weyland-Yutani. The mention of our planet and its incorporation is purposeful in the first few scenes set on a spaceship, as the ship soon crash-lands in the middle of New Siam, also known as Prodigy City to denote its corporate owner. The research vessel carries several alien lifeforms, and with its crash it's clear that unearthly beings will no longer be relegated to distant planets or creaky spacecraft. In conceptualizing the program, Mr. Hawley, who additionally serves as showrunner of the acclaimed anthology series based on "Fargo," may have been inspired by prior unproduced screenplays in which the xenomorphs breach our world, with even "Alien" at one point involving an alien-ridden Earth. The collision of the ship with several skyscrapers is just as harrowing as the bloodletting that occurs later. Yet the first episode has an eerily placid side as well, as we meet several characters who will eventually tangle with the aliens, including hybrid Wendy, whom we see transition into the robotic, "healthy" physique of a young woman from the body of a dying girl, and synthetic Kirsh, who, like other androids in the franchise, is icily intelligent. We also get acquainted with Boy Kavalier, the so-called genius behind Prodigy and its hybridizing technology, who comes across as part Elon Musk, part Shakespeare's Puck, and part J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan. Indeed, the Peter Pan allusion is rendered not just through the "Wendy" character but by having Kavalier read from the novel and present clips from Disney's animated movie. The show's philosophical themes become clear in the second episode when the cocky Kavalier directly discusses AI with Sylvia, a doctor tasked with overseeing the well-being of a group of emotionally and intellectually adolescent but young adult-looking hybrids, including Wendy. He speaks of increasing human potential to counteract intelligent machines, yet Sylvia wonders if their souls will remain intact considering their supercomputer brains and bodies. That question will be put to the test in subsequent episodes, as the hybrids are soon commandeered to find the precious, otherworldly cargo onboard the fallen Weyland-Yutani vessel. Back at the crash site, Wendy's fully human brother, Hermit, who believes his sister died from her illness, serves as a medic in a military unit of the Prodigy Corporation sent to secure the area and evacuate the affected, collapsing buildings. The reunion of the radically transformed sister with her brother provides the episodes' biggest emotional moment; otherwise the story resembles past "Alien" entertainments: several different groups tread dark passageways and enter various rooms in search of survivors and strange lifeforms. Regarding this perambulation, some scenes already betray errors of logic and physics, while the bones of the plot structure already bear sizable fractures -- such as how could a corporation as sizable and sophisticated as Prodigy not be aware that a large spacecraft was about to enter its airspace. Still, when it comes to delivering the scary goods, the series succeeds, with several heart-stopping and yet pulse-pounding action sequences in the second episode. The art direction, costuming, and sets reflect not only the show's big budget but the creative team's considerable contemplation and consummate talent. Sometimes, though, these very elements lead to distracting instead of disconcerting shots, particularly on a small screen. The series also suffers from a certain cheesiness when it comes to its digital effects, the occasional hammy performance, and stiff, portentous pauses -- a television cliché. As the show unfolds over the coming weeks, one is curious to see how the immature and inexperienced hybrids will engage with the classic xenomorphs, particularly as Wendy seems to be able to hear some type of clicking frequency. Will she eventually be able to understand them and, in turn, circumvent their evisceration of every Homo sapien -- enhanced or otherwise? And will her humanness prove to be more than just a ghost in her machine body? It's possible these questions are markers of this reviewer's all-too-human mind.

Designing the Earth of Alien: Earth - IGN

Our home planet is a whole new frontier for sci-fi's most terrifying creature. Our humble home planet has always had an important role to play in the Alien franchise. It's where Ellen Ripley spent much of her life, where the Weyland-Yutani Corporation is headquartered, and the place a few scrappy space truckers/colonial marines/knucklehead mercenaries have repeatedly had to protect from xenomorph infestation. Yet despite its prominence in the plot, Earth has never been the setting for an Alien movie, and we've only ever had a glimpse of what it looks like during the series' timeline. That all changes with FX's Alien: Earth, which takes place almost entirely on the planet's surface. The blasted, near-inhospitable landscapes of planets like LV-426 and Alien: Romulus' Jackson's Star colony could easily lead you to believe that the entire galaxy is a harsh, miserable place. Alien: Earth dispels that idea in seconds - its vision of Earth in the year 2120 is incredibly recognisable. Sure, there are a few extra giant megatowers dominating the skyline, but this world is clearly very much our own, yet to collapse into a cyberpunk dystopia ala Blade Runner's perpetually rainy Los Angeles. Still, it was important to establish that this version of Earth is not the one we live on today. "Part of the reason that we went to Bangkok is it has a skyline that most Western audiences aren't familiar with," explains Noah Hawley, showrunner and director of Alien: Earth. "But the reason to set the show there, and in that time period, is about relatability and accessibility. [If] you move into a dystopian reality, people are like, 'Well, that's not my reality.'" "I dunno why the future's always brutalist," he adds with a slight shrug. It's not just the show's buildings that aren't brutalist, though. Hawley avoided the harsh, brutal depiction of corporations the franchise has traditionally used, opting instead for something that communicated intense wealth and status. "The thing that Ridley [Scott] and James Cameron were facing with Weyland-Yutani Corporation was this nameless, faceless bureaucracy of capitalism," he observes. "But that's not what capitalism is now. Capitalism is billionaires, celebrities, right? It's literally an individual who is using their money and whim basically to control their part of the world." "On some level, Alien reflects the decade in which it's made," he explains. "So I think the capitalism of the show has to reflect the moment that we're in. If it was this sort of 1984 dystopia, we would look at it and go, 'Well, that's not my world. I can't relate to that really.' It's not that it would be a bad story, it just wouldn't feel relatable." Hawley's vision was to develop a world that did not subscribe to the popular idea of dystopia. Sure, there would need to be some truly chilling concepts underpinning this undesirable future - he explains how, within his new contributions to the lore, there are three grades of people: Humanity Prime, Humanity Plus, and Humanity Minus. Those in the Minus category, such as Alex Lawther's Hermit, would be so poor that they are forced to live in single rooms amongst other families with barely a tarpaulin to create privacy. But it was important that this world support believable human characters, rather than husks crushed beneath the heel of capitalism. The key to that was balance. "There's a lot of animated movie references, and one that's not on the screen, but was part of the conversation that I had with Alex Lawther, was Wall-E," Hawley reveals. "Wall-E is alone, but he's not sad. He has Hello Dolly. He has his cockroach. He's going through, he's performing his function, he's going home at the end of the day. He has his space. I didn't want it to be a sad thing. [Hermit] is grieving, clearly, but there is a positivity." The Earth that Hermit lives on is governed by five corporations: Weyland-Yutani, Prodigy, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. After years of exclusively focusing on Weyland-Yutani, the series now turns its attention to Prodigy. This shift demanded that Hawley and his team devise a completely new aesthetic for the corporation's technology, weapons, and physical spaces. "It took a while, and we went through different iterations and over the course of the five years it took to make it," he explains. "It is a complex thing because the only aesthetic of Alien is a Weyland-Yutani aesthetic. [Prodigy is] a different company and they're not all going to look the same, but it can only look so different. It can't be an Apple store. [Prodigy's aesthetic is] more like Star Trek, which is a different science fiction brand." While the show's threats are clear to see, there's another subtle destroyer of worlds lurking in the background: climate change. The Earth of Alien: Earth is hotter than our present-day one, and the oceans have risen. The architecture of 2120 accommodates that, partially because "technology hates water." Combine that with the show's very different focal point - a boy genius CEO - and naturally the scenes set at Prodigy HQ have a very different feel to what's come before. "You've moved up from the grunt space, trucker engine room feel of it," says Hawley. "Now we're with the trillionaire. But even so, they're still fighting the mold. They're still fighting off the water intrusion. The fungus and mold scrubber characters that we brought in, all of that stuff is in order to bring the identity of Alien. Where something's always dripping into the Neverland world." Yes, Neverland. As in the home of Peter Pan. It wasn't enough that Prodigy would look different to Weyland-Yutani. It had to act differently. It had to want different things. So if the horrifying goal of Weyland-Yutani is to gain control of the most deadly thing in existence, what is the creepy aim of Prodigy? Well, only the thing every billionaire wants: the secret to eternity. But beneath that base desire is a deeper connection between Prodigy and Disney's classic cartoon. "There's this idea of children in adult bodies," says Hawley, referring to the show's new hybrids - human minds installed into synthetic bodies. "Because if what you're talking about is humanity, and do we deserve to survive... who is more human than a child? And so now, once they're children in adult bodies, now they're the children who never grew up. So the Peter Pan analogy comes in that way. And then the idea that the CEO of the corporation that has made them is himself a child genius, a prodigy, and sees himself as Peter Pan." Transporting the story of Alien to a planet the series had never truly explored before meant that so much of it was inevitably going to feel new and fresh. But Alien: Earth is still the latest chapter in a series with a 46-year legacy. It still needs to feel familiar. For Hawley, there were a couple of main anchor points. First, of course, was the xenomorph itself - one of the most recognizable creatures in all of cinema. But then there was the visual language of Alien. The dreamlike cross-fades. The 1970s filmgrain. Motifs like a computer display reflected in a helmet's visor. All that and more can be found in an episode of Alien: Earth. "When you translate something from film to television, it's different than just making a sequel," Hawley explains. "You have to convince the audience that you understand what the original movie is. And you signal [that] in literally using some of the setup from the first movie... So we shot on anamorphic lenses. We use zoom lenses, which are a very seventies kind of feeling thing. There was a design challenge to it and a cinematic challenge. That's part of the fun of it." Even within the new, you can expect to hear many of the same sound effects or visual cues that were in the original film. Computers still make that "thunk" when fully loading an application. MOTHER's visual interface still makes the same rolling clacker noise as it types out orders in the same flickering green font. It even goes beyond the in-universe, with each episode's end credits replicating the soft-edged fonts of Ridley Scott's 1979 classic. Hawley explains that all of this is deliberate, not just for authenticity, but also to communicate the show's intentions. Like Prometheus, this is a prequel to the original film, but unlike Prometheus, there's no attempt to modernise the technology to fit our modern-day understanding of futuristic. "We had to tell the audience 'We're not doing that'," says Hawley. "[Ridley Scott] came along, he did that. That was how he wanted to play with that material the second time around. This is where we're living. We're living in the retro futurism of the first two films." While the show itself is uncontestably set in the world of Alien, the story's heavy focus on the creation and use of synthetics, cyborgs, and hybrids means there are long sections with a somewhat different feel to traditional Alien. Through subtle adjustments to pacing, direction, and framing, it's almost as if the show drifts into being Blade Runner at times... "I think it's inescapable," Hawley admits. "I don't think Ridley can escape it. He made two movies that are complimentary. In one, he made a monster movie that hands off to a synth movie, that then hands off to a literal synth movie. And the aesthetic of Alien and the aesthetic of Blade Runner, you could easily believe that Blade Runner is the earth of Alien. So there are those echoes that are unavoidable. Anytime you dig down on artificial intelligence, you're going to end up in the neighborhood." After 46 years of barren colonies, dingy prisons, and industrial starships, Alien: Earth finally provides an in-depth look at the planet Ellen Ripley fought so hard to protect. And thanks to the striking world created by Noah Hawley and his team, it's certainly been worth the wait.