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Sci-Fi Alien: Earth (Noah Hawley and Ridley Scott) | FX on HULU

I just hope that since this is set two years before Alien, it makes sense and they will find a good way to figure how how they contained this on Earth when they've already been there years before.

But like ultimately, either Prodigy City has to be wiped off the map without a trace, and no one can ever truly know what happened there, except maybe a couple of survivors who never come forward.
 
Covenant poster is a thing of beauty.
Both of them are.
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The teaser poster is great in it’s simplicity, with the Xenomorph head slightly emerged from the shadows looking straight at you and and just the word “Run.” It’s so effective, it actually got me hyped for the film. And then reviews came out, and then not so much. But, for that one moment, I was pretty excited.

They’re also all thematically consistent. Alien has our characters trapped on a ship with this dangerous entity? Glowing green light emerging from a cracked egg over a weird grid like landscape vanishing into darkness. Aliens leans into the action, has space marines and Ripley protecting a young girl? Ripley holding Newt and a gun in a farm of Xenomorph eggs. Prometheus dealing with the nature of existence and creation? Character standing in front of and looking up at a gigantic, partially illuminated, ancient carved head of an Engineer. And so on and so forth.
 
I’m ultimately unconcerned with questions of canon in Alien simply because nothing counts to me but the original. I’m a staunch defender of Scott’s prequels, for all their sins, but it’s not like I watch the original and think about how the space jockey is a Large Adult Space Son. I don’t think about any of the biological details added by Cameron either.

Whether this lines up coherently or not simply isn’t important, imo.
 
This show could end up being amazing and this nitpick is not going to ruin my enjoyment of it, but I just like the idea of the Xenomorph being this mysterious species that's never been encountered before the first Alien. I like the idea that the company just has this general rule "if you encounter an alien species you bring a sample" and them having no idea about the specifics of the species themselves.

If Alien Earth turns out amazing I can live with this nitpick and I'm still very hyped for the show. It's just anything they decide to place before or around the time of those original movies does have an impact on the larger story/universe.
 
Honestly, humans encountering a Xeno before Alien makes a few things make more sense in the original.
 
I'm just ready to watch this already. :p I don't like waiting.
 

As Hawley emphasized during our group set visit interview, Alien: Earth is most heavily influenced by Alien and Aliens, and he wanted to hold tight to the most iconic qualities of the Xenomorph from those films. “In the design phase with Wētā, I didn't want to mess with the silhouette of the creature at all.”

While a priority was keeping the Xenomorph design “classic,” Hawley and co. did seize some opportunities to experiment.

“I always felt like it was the least effective when it looked like a guy in a suit. You know what I mean? So there are elements, like in the classic, there's just this big ribcage, which feels very human to me, so I wanted to try to minimize that and play around with some other ideas.”
The team found more room to play when it came to the color of the Xenomorph. Hawley explained, “It's very black in the movie. I wanted to play into more of the bug-like quality of it, so maybe it falls a little more in the roach coloration.”

While the Alien franchise has featured some top-tier visual effects over the years and Alien: Earth does involve CG in post-production, Gonzales made a point to emphasize, "We don't have any CG Xenomorph. It’s 100% real." He continued:

“And the Facehuggers we have, they're all real. I don't know how many we have, but we have many Facehuggers that do different things. So there are mostly real creatures. I think [it's] the fact that Wētā built these incredible characters that do several things really well that we can see them longer. Even the eggs are quite sophisticated, and we can show them. I think that's gonna be the strength of the show, especially to have eight hours of that compared to an hour and a half movie and, like you said, four minutes. I don't know our running time of creatures, but it's going to be quite a bit.”

Thus far, the Alien franchise has largely focused on humans and synthetics (humanoid robots with artificial intelligence). However, Alien: Earth will heavily incorporate two other types of beings - cyborgs, humans with biological and artificial parts, and also hybrids, humanoid robots infused with human consciousness, like Sydney Chandler’s Wendy. With four human or human-like beings in play, how much time will that leave for the Xenomorphs? Hawley promises, “It leaves a lot of time, honestly.” Incorporating them into the series demanded a significant amount of time on the filming schedule, but Hawley and co. were committed to it.

“We have some very big set pieces that require a kind of disproportionate amount of our shooting schedule compared to the amount of screen time. You just have to work all that stuff into it.”
Gonzales teased the early episode roadmap, offering a sense of when you can expect the series to go especially big in the action department. As he explained, Episode 1 will deliver a “massive event” and introduce some of the key characters, but from there, Episodes 2 and 3, which he directs, will see those characters grow and become immersed in the action. “There's been a little bit of a rewrite between 2 and 3.” Gonzales continued, “Two used to be super massive. Now 2 and 3 are both massive.” And then came the money quote; “There's a lot of Xenomorph activity going on wall-to-wall.” He also teased, “Two and 3, I can tell you, are massive episodes. One, 2 and 3 together are going to be unbelievable.”

While Gonzales wouldn’t go as far as giving us a Xenomorph count for Alien: Earth, he did promise, “We're seeing more Xenomorph than any of these movies.” He continued:

“All the movies, if you really study them, are like, 20 frame, two seconds, they show the Xenomorph. We have huge sequences where all you're seeing is the Xenomorph. It’s driving a lot of things. We have a pretty incredible performer that's doing it and a great stunt team. We're asking them to do a lot. Again, it’s finding the balance of how that works, because seriously, [nothing] in the franchise has shown as much as we have.”
 

“I think we exist somewhere around Aliens, around the James Cameron story. I haven’t had to get crazy specific with it, but the events of the first film are referenced in the show at some point. So, I think it's somewhere around the events of the second film, either before or just after.”

This has me really scratching my head. Hawley said in a recent interview with Vanity Fair that the incident on the Nostromo hasn’t happened, but this was taken from the set visit in 2024.

Hmmm.
 
Hawley referenced one of my go-to too often reference episodes of the Twilight Zone.

I think about that Twilight Zone episode where there's the kid who has all the powers, and everyone around him has to act like all they want to do is make him happy and keep him happy. There's something so awful about having to please someone who doesn't have a rational view of the world, or is subject to whims. So, I think that's the spin on it that we brought to it, and that the Weyland-Yutani side is more of that corporate identity.”
 

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