Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus is expected this year. There is also another Alien project bubbling away in the background. Fargo and Legion creator Noah Hawley has his Alien TV show for FX underway.
It will make its debut in 2025, on Disney+ worldwide and FX in the US. In an interview with Kim Master’s The Business podcast (reported by The Playlist), Hawley dropped some more details about his thinking and approach. It’s given us much more detail about what to expect from the show.
He says he had to go beyond the horror and thriller approach, as that works for a movie but couldn’t sustain a whole TV series:
“If it were just a monster movie, 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?”
What was his starting point for this train of thought? Ellen Ripley’s line that everyone is “screwing each other over for a percentage” in Aliens was his spark:
“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 sounds to us like he’s pretty much going to ignore, or at least not reference, Prometheus or Alien: Covenant. A good start! This will carry across to the production design, too:
“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.”
The cast is made up of Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis, Adarsh Gourav, Kit Young, and David Rysdahl. Timothy Olyphant co-stars. Shooting is expected to start imminently.
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