Alien: Earth creator Noah Hawley knows the tables are stacked against him. He knows the Alien franchise is a tough one to crack and that the idea of bringing it to televsion might elicit groans from certain fans. But Hawley is also really good at his job. He somehow turned Fargo into a TV show worthy of the incredible film. He made Legion one of the best comic book shows in recent memory. And he knows he’ll never be able to remake or recapture the terror you felt watching the Ridley Scott original, or the exhilaration created by James Cameron’s sequel. Instead, he’s figured out a way to draw inspiration from those things, but also make it his own. The hope is that it’ll create something that’s 100% recognizable as Alien, but will also stand on its own as a way to totally flip the franchise on its head.
Starting August 12, Alien: Earth tells a story set three years before the events of the first movie. However, while that was in space, this takes place—you guessed it—on Earth. There, a spaceship that was tasked with acquiring deadly aliens from across the galaxy is finally on its way home, when something goes wrong and it crashes. To explore the crash, a team of hybrids—synthetic beings with the consciousness of children—are sent in to explore. What they’ll find is not just the iconic xenomorph, but several other species as well.
A few weeks back, io9 was among a group of journalists who were able to watch the pilot episode of Alien: Earth (which was awesome) and speak with Hawley, as well as producer David Zucker, about all things Alien: Earth. Here are the highlights.
Alien: Earth won’t play the hits
Alien: Earth couldn’t exist without the xenomorph, but Hawley knew he had to add new creatures to hopefully capture what makes Alien so special. “One of the things you can never reproduce in an audience that has seen an Alien movie is the feeling you had the first time you saw the life cycle of this creature in that first film,” Hawley said. “It’s just unreproducible. You know that it’s an egg, it’s a face hugger, it’s a chestburster, and all that. And so that’s where the idea for other creatures came from. I want you to have that feeling because that feeling is integral to the Alien experience. But I can’t do it with those creatures. So let’s introduce new creatures where you don’t know how they reproduce or what they eat. So that you can have that, ‘I’m out’ feeling multiple times a week.”
The humans are scarier than the aliens
Another intergral part of the Alien franchise is that, yes, the aliens are brutal killers. But the humans who are trying to capture them are often worse. That’s why Alien: Earth will feature an equally important story centered on a technological race, personified by those hybrid characters.
“One of the interesting features of the movies, especially Jim Cameron’s movie where he has that line from Sigourney [Weaver] to Paul Reiser where she says, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t fuck each other over for a percentage.’ Right? And so this idea about humanity and the terrible things that we do to each other, it really opened my mind as to the types of horror that would populate the show, not just body horror or creature horror, but also the moral horror of what people do. And the question is, if you take a girl and you put her into this synthetic body, is she going to choose human or other? And so it becomes about the push-pull between ‘Well, why be human if this is what humans do to each other?’ But there’s such a beauty to the human experience, etc. So that’s the tension, I feel like, that elevates it above just who lives and who dies.”
It’s all about the feel…
Hawley’s story is set in the world of Alien, with names and companies you’ll recognize, but that wasn’t the most important thing to him. “I’ve said before but, if I have a skill at reinventing classic movies, it’s understanding what the original made me feel and why, and then recreating those feelings in you by telling you a new story,” he said.
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