A lengthy article, filled with numerous story spoilers and character insights regarding FX’s Alien: Earth has been published over on Vanity Fair. It’s well worth a read and contains twelve new production stills.
Vanity Fair have spoken to showrunner Noah Hawley and the article is particularly focused on the characters that we see in Alien: Earth. Their relationships with each other, what their motives are, and how they fit into Alien: Earth.
For instance, the Hybrids, as they are called, are artificially made bodies that contain a consciousness uploaded from a human being. These are the “brainchild” of Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), who is the leader of Prodigy Corporation, who rivals Weyland-Yutani. The first Hybrids were taken from children who volunteered to be test subjects due to them having a terminal illness.
Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis) looks after the so-called Lost Boys and Timothy Olyphant plays Kirsh, who is an android and wants the Hybrids to become something more than human. Atom Eins (played by Adrian Edmondson) is the “fixer and first lieutenant” for Boy Kavalier, while the technician Arthur Sylvia (David Rysdahl) is the husband of Dame who is sceptical of the Hybrid program.
David Rysdahl plays Arthur Sylvi – the researcher who is not sure if the Hybrids are being used for good. Weyland-Yutani features in the series and Yutani is played by Sandra Yi Sencindiver. A long time ago, Yutani’s grandmother sent the Maginot on a hunting and gathering mission in space. Yutani thinks the creatures they’ve harvested are a family heirloom. Prodigy also wants the creatures.
Morrow is a cyborg security officer, played by Babou Ceesay on the Maginot, and he spent 65 years trying to retrieve the creatures. He has to come to terms with the fact that everybody he knew on Earth is long dead. After the Maginot crashes on Earth, Prodigy sends a tactical team in to investigate which includes a medical officer named Hermit (Alex Lawther). He is the brother of the little girl Wendy once was. He doesn’t know that Wendy is his sister.
As I said, the article on Vanity Fair is well worth a read to learn more about the characters in Alien: Earth. In addition to the production stills, there’s a new promo artwork piece of the Xenomorph we haven’t seen before.
Alien: Earth will premiere Tuesday, August 12th, with the first two episodes releasing on FX at 8 p.m. ET/PT, and on Hulu at 8 p.m. ET. Alien: Earth with premiere its first two episodes in the UK on Disney+ the day after, on August 13th, with a new episode out each Wednesday.
Thanks to HuntERS whip for the news.
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The famous space truckers. Cameron added an aseptic, military touch, but broadly speaking, it was a continuous aesthetic, something that gave cohesion and a hallmark to the franchise. You recognize those corridors and that technology immediately. Not incorporating it in the prequels was a mistake.
It's something that distances the franchise from the generic aesthetic that floods current science fiction films, which is completely forgettable.
Multi track drifting!
https://static.wikia.nocookie.net/trolley-problem/images/d/d5/MultiTrackDrifting.png
A lonely what now?
Or not even an anchor point (essay...) - just a spin off. Like MASH film and TV series.
I don't disagree that he likely doesn't care. What he could say and what he cares to say are different. I think he *could* say what I suggested. It doesn't seem too hard to imagine Weyland negotiating to retain a corner of the company for his passion projects.
I'd include Aliens and Alien 3 as near-constants, but still just the primary tangent from the original anchor point. Coz I'm not just talking in relation to Alien: Earth but in regards to all the various films, comics and plastic tat.
Hear, hear. Maybe throw Aliens in there too alongside Alien, since Hawley seems to be treating that one equally as gospel based on his comments.
But all of this is more or less the way most Godzilla continuities treat the original 1954 film... and that is totally ok with me!
Honestly, it's just easier to think of Alien as the anchor point and one solid "fact" of the whole thing, and everything else as tangents extrapolating from there in various ways that may not all work at the same time but can be fun all the same.
Hawley has also described the Maginot, a ship that is very Nostromo in flavor and design, as a top-of-the-line science vessel.
There are all kinds of head canons to make sense of this stuff, but... for me it's easiest to just roll with "this is the aesthetic that the filmmaker is going for and that's why this ship looks the way it does" with each installment. It's worked out well enough for me so far!
With the founder of the original standalone corporation in tow, calling the shots on a secret multi-trillion dollar passion project that isn't really intended to benefit anyone other than himself?
I think it's much easier to just accept that Hawley didn't care one way or the other about the prequels and, in doing so, (accidentally) established an element in his story that just does not gel with them.
I love the prequels (Covenant specifically, but Prometheus is also very interesting despite its problems), but I'm fine with this being the case. I'm willing to meet Earth on its own terms.
Is not just the military stuff. In the year 2179 the Gateway station on Earth looks dated compared to Prometheus or Covenant technology (almost 100 years later) ,and is not a lonely gas station for dirty space trucks.
Someone had a very bad day going outside the ship, scrubbing the old logos out and painting new ones...
All of this could've been done in dry dock too.
According to the Weyland Industries website and the W-Y Report, before the Prometheus sailed from Earth on August 2, 2091, Weyland Corporation had 63 off-world colonies. As a competitor, Yutani Corporation must have had many off-world colonies as well. Changing markings, updating parts and picking up supplies must have been done at the colonies.
Argument tends to get a bit fragile though when 'state of the badass art' military equipment only tracks in 2 dimensions when three REALLY would have been handy.
"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."
https://www.avpgalaxy.net/2024/01/14/noah-hawley-speaks-to-prequel-films-being-inherently-less-useful-to-the-story-of-the-fx-alien-series/
SEPTEMBER 6TH, 2024 – HOLOGRAPHIC ENVIRONMENT SIMULATOR
Weyland Industries makes first foray into the luxury goods market with its holographic Environment Simulator. It is the first HES able to accurately recreate the aesthetic mood and sounds of any place in the known world, as well as provide live video feed from any calibrated receiver.
https://alienseries.wordpress.com/2012/10/19/weyland-industries-timeline/
And Fede Alvarez has long said that many people make the mistake of seeing the Nostromo and assuming that the ship's technology is everything the human civilization of Alien Universe has. The Nostromo is really the equivalent of a trucker's cargo truck, while the Prometheus is the luxury vehicle of the richest boss. Fede also says that technology changes over decades, but that depends mostly on location, not time. Jackson's Star is actually a small town dotted with blue-collar people with a population of just over two thousand. Advances in technology do not mean a better quality of life for everyone, but instead may exacerbate the class gap. Alien franchise itself has always explored class contradiction.
How tough was it to find a balance between the little green computer monitors of "Alien" and the futuristic technology of the more recent films?
I know a lot of people felt like it makes no sense. But I think we make the mistake when we watch the Nostromo and assume that's how the entire universe looks like. If I decide to make a movie on Earth today, and I go to the Mojave Desert and I take an old truck because a guy drives a Chevy, if you're an alien, you're going to go, "That's what the world looks like." But it doesn't mean there's not a guy in a Tesla in the city, which would be the "Prometheus" ship. The first movie is truck drivers in a beat-up truck. "Prometheus" is the ship of the richest man in the world.
https://variety.com/2024/film/news/alien-romulus-trailer-fede-alvarez-1235946491/
The first thing anyone watching the new trailer will be struck by is how your film's retro-futuristic production design recalls the Nostromo. Is it your hope that Romulus will feel of a piece with Ridley Scott's Alien?
It was the era I was most interested in when we were thinking about making this movie and were suddenly faced with so many choices. Where do you start? That's what I wanted it to be – that era of science-fiction – and particularly that physical space of the first movie. So it starts there, honestly.
And there were narrative reasons why. It takes place 20 years after the first film. Technology in the world of Alien can change vastly, but I think it's not dependent on time. It's dependent on place. Where you are.
So the characters of this movie and the world are very blue-collar. The technology is still very low-tech and analog. And, look, I'm a kid from the '80s. Any monitor with some VHS tracking issues puts a lot of joy in my heart.
https://www.gamesradar.com/alien-romulus-trailer-breakdown-fede-alvarez-interview/
I'm not talking about the logo interfaces on the cat's camera, though. I'm talking about the logos on physical parts of the ship.
https://www.avpgalaxy.net/2024/11/10/new-alien-earth-artwork-trailer-shown-at-d23/
Anyway, i dont see a problem with that. The black goo will have its time again in the Romulus sequel. Im sure Disney want to ignore all the "David create the xeno" stuff (becouse is the less popular part of the prequels imho) but just that. They like the black goo part.
Either way, from the article it seems that Noah Hawley is either aware of this himself or the show has a continuity error with itself.
Which would be fine if the ship was a Yutani ship, but it has the WY logo plastered all over it.
Also, in the article this thread discusses, it is stated: 'Yutani's grandmother sent the Maginot on its hunting and gathering mission to deep space,' which is preceded by: 'The Yutani side is a matriarchal corporation,' Hawley says. 'Her grandmother ran the company, and then her mother ran it, and somewhere there was a merger with Weyland. Now Yutani is trying to navigate being the second name in the corporation.'
This heavily implies that when Yutani's grandmother sent the ship out, the merger hadn't happened yet, since it is only 'now' that Yutani is trying to navigate being the second name in the corporation, post-merger. The way it's written implies that the merger occurred after the current Yutani came into power.
That doesn't explain the printed WY logos on physical surfaces in the cat cam videos!
[waves hand]
"remote updates"
There are plenty of franchises in which installments have continuity issues like this regarding their timelines, yet they don't split each installment into its own universe. These errors are simply left unexplained.
There was a great Inverse article about this that got deleted but you can still read the archived version.
"Other than the shark in Jaws, this is the most iconic monster in all of film history. And I lived for 28 years of my life believing that this creature was the perfect organism that had evolved over millions of years. Right? Then, Ridley made Prometheus and engaged with another idea in terms of the origin of these creatures. It just wasn't part of my DNA of how these movies worked. So, so I chose not to engage with that part of the story and to just sort of speak to the Alien that I had encoded."
To be clear, Hawley isn't pretending like the rest of the Alien timeline doesn't exist, however. "It's not that I didn't do a timeline around the events," he clarifies. "But I didn't expand it to incorporate everything that had ever been written."
So, fans who were hoping that Alien: Earth would tie up loose ends about David (Michael Fassbender) or the various different kinds of xenomorphs from Covenant might want to curb their canon dot-connecting expectations. Alien: Earth won't violate the chest-bursting canon. But it's not going to be obsessed with that canon, either.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250527030212/https://www.inverse.com/entertainment/alien-earth-canon-alien-timeline-noah-hawley-sxsw-2025
The point is, on screen, there are two origins presented. It doesn't matter that AvP is part of the series or canon or whatever; the films happened, they exist, they showed something.
Not if it's a legally distinct property from the main franchise.
(Note, my headcanon is that the goo is derived from and will always try to reconvene into, something resembling the Alien and that it represents some form of primordial chaos, but as far as the Alien brand is concerned, there's only one origin for now)
But Earth not having them made by David doesn't suppose a third option, just back to the first option.
They currently have one.
Fox abandoned AvP movies after the second movie bombed. Scott had nothing to do with it.
No and never did. Fox owned it and Brandywine produced Aliens and Alien3 from a practical standpoint. After that, Fox ran it in house. Ridley has influence though due to his industry clout. If anyone could truly claim ownership it's Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shusett.
So far there's one. There might be another when this show comes out. Or there might not.
I know this isn't anything definitive, just something I thought about.
0:58
What a weird thing to make or break Alien for you.