By Two new “Alien” projects are on the way with Fede Alvarez’s new film “Alien: Romulus” expected later this year.
That will be followed by “Fargo” and “Legion” series creator Noah Hawley’s new “Alien” TV series for FX which will make its debut in 2025.
Speaking with Kim Master’s The Business podcast (via The Playlist), Hawley has gone into the most detail yet regarding the show and what his aims for the work are.
One quick realisation he had is the horror element isn’t enough, he had to build a lot more around it to justify the show and to recreate “those feelings that you had in watching those first two films”. He explains:
“If it were just a monster movie [or TV show], I don’t think there would be enough there. It’s one of the great monsters of all time, but when you think about making ten, twenty, thirty, forty hours of something, even if you had 60% of the best horror action around, you still have 40% of, ‘what are we talking about’? What’s the show about? Thematically, character-wise, it has to exist as a drama outside of those other elements.
The thing with ‘Alien’ is that it’s not just a great monster movie; it’s the story of humanity trapped between its primordial, parasitic past and the A.I. future, and they’re both trying to kill us, so there’s nowhere to go. So it’s really a story of: does humanity deserve to survive? Does humanity’s arrogance in thinking that we’re no longer food, and its arrogance in creating these A.I. beings who we think will do what we tell them, but ultimately might lose their minds – is there a way out?”
Hawley cites Sigourney Weaver’s famous “screwing each other over for a percentage” quote from “Aliens” as an intriguing idea to explore here. One thing you shouldn’t expect however is any real connection to “Prometheus” or “Alien: Covenant”:
“Ridley and I have talked about this and many elements of the show, but I think for me, this perfect lifeform, 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, and the idea that it was a bio-weapon created half an hour ago is inherently less useful to me. In terms of the mythology and what’s scary about this monster.”
That also carries over to aesthetics as he’s also sticking with the first two film’s retro-futuristic look as opposed to “Prometheus” with all its slick tech. Here there are no flashy looking gadgets – it’s all grungy, utilitarian and basic:
“I prefer the retrofuturism of the first two films, and so that’s the choice that I’ve made to embrace that. There are no holograms; the convenience of beautiful Apple store technology is not available to me.”
Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis, Adarsh Gourav, Kit Young, David Rysdahl and Timothy Olyphant co-star in the series which is expected to film throughout the first half of this year.
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