What The ‘Alien’ TV Show Can Do To Help The Franchise
On July 18, 1986, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States.
On July 18, 1986, videotapes were released showing the remains of the Titanic.
On July 18, 1986, The Karate Kid II was the most popular film in theaters.
On July 18, 1986, the last truly great Alien movie was released.
The Alien (known by the more scientific name Xenomorph) is one of the most iconic monsters in all of cinema. Since its first appearance in 1979's Alien, it has become a pop culture icon, with numerous toys, video games, books, films and graphic novels showcasing this terrifying monster. However, as of this article, the year is 2021, and there has not been a truly great Alien film since the second one in 1986. 1992's Alien 3 was mediocre at best, and 1997's Alien: Resurrection was, um…not good.
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2012's Prometheus had some of the least intelligent scientists in any film ever, and I sat in the theater during 2017's Alien: Covenant having an internal argument with myself about whether it was somehow worse than the fourth movie. The two Alien vs. Predator movies were mindless fun at best. When the standard is two of the greatest sci-fi/horror movies ever, it's a pretty big step down. Studio interference was likely a big cause of the failure of the third and fourth movie, with the script of the third movie being rewritten more than once, and Joss Whedon's Resurrection script largely being thrown out as well.
Well, now someone else is taking a crack at bringing the franchise back to its heights. Noah Hawley is helming a television show with a currently unknown release date. He has mentioned in interviews that he has written two scripts and that he's hoping to start filming sometime in spring of 2022, possibly leading to a 2023 release date. With the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic still hitting the entertainment industry, these are just guesses for the moment. If anybody can make this good, it is Hawley, who helmed the hit anthology show Fargo. The first two seasons of Fargo are some of the best television hands down, ranking with the best of Game of Thrones, Breaking Bad, and The Wire. He has some experience creating masterful television, so it's a good sign to see him at the head of a show based on this beloved intellectual property.
However, there are some pitfalls that I hope he avoids. It is not a controversial idea that the Prometheus films were... complicated. Beyond that, they fell into the trap that a lot of other prequel films fall into: explaining what shouldn't be explained. In the original film, the Alien just...was. It represented the unknown of space, and what happened when we found something stronger and scarier that we could not fight against. It was a small piece of the vastness of space that we could never hope to understand or comprehend.
In the Prometheus films, we discover that it was an angry android who created them to kill his creators and... create the perfect organism, or something like that. Their creation and history was intrinsically tied to the familiar, making them much less terrifying. Those films complicated the lore, not to mention adding several plot holes, when the lore was never the most important part of the franchise.
The lore of the first few films was pretty simple, and served to set up what would be happening later on. The original Alien film was a haunted house movie set in space. It was about these space truckers being hunted in a dark, scary place by something they could not beat. The lore set up why they ran into the thing in the first place. Weyland-Yutani knew about this thing and wanted it as a weapon, and sent them down to get it. The crew was expendable. Ash was actually a robot who was trying to keep it safe.
Er... spoilers for a forty-two year old movie, I guess.
How did WY find out about the alien? It didn’t matter. What would they do with it if they got it? Who cares? What mattered was that it was loose, and Ripley and friends were just tying to survive. This was the same trap that the Terminator (slasher film with robots) and Pirates of the Caribbean (just a fun pirate movie) films fell into. The "why" became far more important than the "what." Long story short, of course, lore is important, but not as important as the story and characters.
The second trap that the series could fall into involves the theme. A Vanity Fair article revealed that the main theme of the series will deal with class warfare after seeing the aliens on Earth for the first time (so long as you don't count the Alien vs. Predators series as canon, and of course you don't). The victims of the aliens have always been blue collar workers. The first film had space truckers, the second one marines, the third a prison colony, and the fourth mercenaries. They were not really people who were making seven figures and eating Kobe beef for every lunch. They had always been at the mercy of Weyland-Yutani, who saw them as expendable pawns in their ultimate goal to get an alien. Seeing them out of control on Earth and finally actually attacking the leaders could be really interesting.
The films have always had some kind of subtext, of course. Aliens, for example, dealt with the themes of motherhood and loss, with the final battle being between a mother protecting her child, and a mother who just lost all of hers. My worry is that the show will be going the Avatar route of shoving the message down our throats to the point where it's distracting.
"Hey, destroying the environment is bad!"
"Yeah, no, I got--"
"And we did horrible things to the natives during colonization!"
"Yeah, I get your point just from watching the--"
"Unobtanium! Get it? Get it?!"
"Sigh."
The best media with messages like that are the ones whose story stands on its own without being spoon-fed the allegory. Squid Game, for the most part, was a good recent example of this. For the most part.
Hawley is creative enough that I can see him taking the franchise in a new, interesting direction while still keeping to the spirit of the original films. It has been thirty-five years since we've had a truly great Alien film, so to see one of the most talented people in television take his crack at it is exciting. Fans of the series have been waiting a long, long time for something amazing.
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Source(s): Vanity Fair