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.
Matt Purslow is IGN's Executive Editor of Features.
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