Noah Hawley and the cast of Alien: Earth got fans excited for FX‘s anticipated take on the franchise during its Hall H panel at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday.
The audience in the room got to experience the entire first episode, which arrives on August 12, prior to a Q&A that included Timothy Olyphant, Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, and Babou Ceesay.
Hawley says he hopes viewers think his take on the terrors of the Zenomorph is a little different than the franchise has offered thus far, while also paying deserved homage to the titles that came before it, especially the original Alien.
“I have a relationship with the movies that I adapt at this point, and I do it from a place of love,” Hawley said. “These are movies that I loved [and] were very formative for me, and so it’s been such a joy when you walk onto that set the first time of the Maginot, which was built literally to the specifications of Ridley’s Nostromo, it really collapses time. You see it every time you watch an actor step on that stage for the first time…it’s really humbling.”
In Alien: Earth, its the year 2120 and Earth is governed by five corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold — and when Prodigy begins developing a new human-synthetic hybrid (that is, humanoid robots infused with human consciousness), it seems as though that will upend the current Corporate Era. But, when Weyland-Yutani’s spaceship collides into Prodigy City, well, we all know what those ships typically contain.
“The one feeling you can’t get back from watching the original Alien is the discovery of the life cycle of this creature, how it starts as an egg and it ends up as a 10-foot-tall Xenomorph, and every step along the way is worse than the one before,” Hawley said. “So the only way to create that feeling was to introduce new characters, and you don’t know how they breed or what they eat, so you can get back to that feeling of genetic revulsion that we all felt watching Alien for the first time. Obviously, it was a huge responsibility to try to follow in those footsteps of H.R. [Giger] and Ridley [Scott] and that team, but, you know, I always like the risk.”
But actually, while viewers can expect plenty of scary creatures in Alien: Earth, the scenes that will keep people up at night are not Xenomorph-related at all, says Olyphant.
“The things that wake you up in the middle of the night that you’re thinking about the next day are just scenes between two people, and they’re so riveting,” he explained, revealing he’s been able to see four completed episodes so far. “In addition to all the thrills and the scares and the drama, the character study in this thing is so phenomenal.”
That’s the perk of having eight episodes to flesh out the story, as opposed to the limitations of a film’s runtime. Hawley described them as “survival movies” that don’t often get to dig that deep into the psyche of the characters at the center of them.
The lengthened story gave Hawley a chance to spread out the horror a bit and infuse the narrative with more dramatic beats to propel the narrative in an entirely different way than audiences have typically seen from the Alien franchise.
“Each hour has to build and have its horror elements, but my feeling is that it really just has to work as a drama, and then all the genre elements can be built on top of that,” he said. “An Alien movie is a two-hour survival story, and a television show has to be more than that. It has to be a character journey, thematically rich and in which you really start to worry that I might kill some of these people, and I might. You’ll have to tune in and see.”
Alien: Earth premieres on FX and Hulu on August 12.
