While Noah Hawley’s Alien prequel series won’t premiere until 2025, fans are eagerly awaiting the Fargo creator’s take on the storied science fiction-horror franchise. The series takes place 30 years before the events of Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) and will take place on Earth, a first for the franchise. Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley will sadly not appear in the series.
Hawley appeared on KCRW’s The Business podcast, where he discussed his plans for Alien. Hawley noted that he would be taking both thematic and design inspiration from both Alien (1979) and James Cameron’s Aliens (1986). And while Scott’s 2012 Prometheus is a prequel to the original quadrilogy, Hawley will largely be ignoring the complex mythology laid out in both Prometheus and Alien: Covenant (2017).
Hawley said,
“Ridley and I have talked about this — and many, many elements of the show,” Hawley says. “For me, and for a lot of people, this ‘perfect life form’ — as it was described in the first film — is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space. The idea that, on some level, it was a bioweapon created half an hour ago, that’s just inherently less useful to me. And in terms of the mythology, what’s scary about this monster, is that when you look at those first two movies, you have this retro-futuristic technology. You have giant computer monitors, these weird keyboards … You have to make a choice. Am I doing that? Because in the prequels, Ridley made the technology thousands of years more advanced than the technology of Alien, which is supposed to take place in those movies’ future. There’s something about that that doesn’t really compute for me. I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films. And so that’s the choice I’ve made — there’s no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple store technology is not available to me.”
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As a diehard Alien fan, I was thrilled when Ridley Scott returned to his science-fiction horror saga with 2012’s Prometheus. But while the performances and cinematography were excellent, the plot felt overly complicated and unsatisfying. Scott presents the idea that humanity was created by the Engineers, a humanoid race of giant pale aliens whose DNA seeded life on Earth. Somewhere along the way, the Engineers grew tired of humanity and manufactured the xenomorphs (via black goo) to wipe them out.
While this lore is clearly an allusion to both Greco-Roman mythology and Christianity, it dilutes the core themes of the series itself. Alien is, above all, a commentary on corporate greed, as embodied by the Weyland-Yutani corporation. As the series’ corporate overlord, Weyland-Yutani is the real villain of the franchise, as they continue to exploit and sacrifice employees in the name of profits. The Xenomorphs are just doing what they were designed to do, i.e. be the most efficient killing machines.
In addition to bringing the focus back to the core themes of the franchise, Hawley also promises to bring the tangible, grungy feel of the technology of the first two films. In sci-fi landscape already overrun with CGI worlds, I’m excited to see a return to the tactile production design and feel of the original films.
Hawley’s series isn’t the only Alien prequel in production. Fede Álvarez (Don’t Breathe) is directing Alien: Romulus, a feature film that takes place between the first and second Alien films. The film stars Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla), Isabela Merced (Madame Web), and David Jonsson (Rye Lane). The film is expected to hit theaters on August 16, 2024.
(featured image: 20th Century Studios)
