Noah Hawley ‘Alien’ Series Won’t be Inspired by ‘Prometheus’
Noah Hawley revealed more details about his Alien series, including not looking to the new movies for inspiration.
Two new projects are being added to the Alien franchise in the near-ish future. Alien: Romulus, a movie from horror director Fede Alvarez, is scheduled to arrive on Hulu on August 14th. It focuses on a group of young colonists on a faraway planet who have a run-in with the universe’s most deadly lifeform. It promises to lean into the original movie’s horror roots.
The other is an FX series from Noah Hawley (who created Legion), which was announced in 2020. News on the series has been slow. We know it’s about the evil corporate side of the franchise and that it’s set on Earth rather than an outpost or ship light years away. Hawley told Esquire last year…
“It’s set on Earth of the future… In the movies, we have this Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which is clearly also developing artificial intelligence. But what if there are other companies trying to look at immortality in a different way, with cyborg enhancements or transhuman downloads? Which of those technologies is going to win? It’s ultimately a classic science fiction question: does humanity deserve to survive?”
Hawley’s Alien series is going in a different direction than previous projects, which tend to focus on the unknowing victims and places that require time in a hibernation pod to get to.
Noah Hawley’s Alien Series
The director recently sat down with KCRW’s The Business to discuss his vision for his Alien series. Hawley is rejecting the clean, modernist, high-tech look of Prometheus for the series. Instead, he’s looking at the movies earlier in the franchise.
“… 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.”
I’m thankful for this choice. The Aliens universe is better when it’s dirty, leaking random cooling fluids, filled with clicky keyboards and CRT monitors, furnished with beat-up cargo containers, and imperfect.
Hawley also spoke about the themes of the series…
“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 its AI future, and they’re both trying to kill us. So, there’s nowhere to go. 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 AI beings who we think will do what we tell them — but ultimately might lose their mind — is there a way out?”
Listen to the Full Interview Here
More Details
Scripts for the series were completed ahead of last year’s strikes, and filming is supposed to start soon. The large ensemble cast was announced last fall.
It includes Babou Ceesay, Jonathan Ajayi, Erana James, Lily Newmark, Diêm Camille, and Adrian Edmondson. Other confirmed cast members are Sydney Chandler, Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther, Essie Davis, David Rysdahl, Samuel Blenkin, and Adarsh Gourav.
Fans have been waiting for this series to make it to the small screen for four years. If filming is on schedule, we can realistically hope for a late 2025 release window. Cross your fingers.
