Noah Hawley's Alien series (2025)

[hermitical]

fan edits of Prometheus and Covenant work pretty well, really enjoy them.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

Here's a few quotes from Hawley that may delight / depress you:

On the overarching theme of the series: "There's a moment in the second film where Sigourney Weaver says, 'I don't know which species is worse — you don't see them screwing each other over for a percentage.' I think there's something really intriguing about exploring humanity in all its goods and evils and then trying to recreate for an audience those feelings you had in watching those first two films"

Maybe.... Maybe WE'RE the real monsters, not them?

[Alberon]

To be fair, it's a theme in the very first film with Ash's mission.

[badaids]

Prometheus looks amazing, Fassbender is great and it's good until they get on the planet. Then the pacing and characters go completely and don't even obey the own rules they set out - it must have a record amount of « oh fuck off ! » moments.  The fucking rock bloke and Jurgen Klopp ffs. They must have all known that sucked very early on.

But Ridley missed the point with Prometheus when he asked the question 'who was the guy in the chair?' NO ONE gave a toss about that. The fact that this great set piece with the Space Jockey in Alien was built up to and discarded was a great bit of that film. Most the wonder of Alien is that nothing is explained or spelled out to you, and you can imagine.

Covenant is an (over)reaction to Prometheus: 'let's put an aliens in it then'.  Doesn't even understand his own film?

Lots of the short films and radio series (and the original script for Alien 3 which is online) are fantastic so if the series can capture even a bit of that it should be fine.

[badaids]

fan edits of Prometheus and Covenant work pretty well, really enjoy them.

Where can these be seen?

Oh and I'm sure I've posted this before, but check out the Alien podcast 'Perfect Organism'. 

It's good, but only because it's like On Cinema at the Cinema.  The two hosts with scant knowledge of the franchise locked in a hilarious and for real never ending Tim and Greg battle for control.  It's uncanny, there at times when you think they must be taking the piss, but no, it's life imitating art.

[Menu]

In what film do they say that the alien was a manufactured bioweapon? I can't remember now. Have to admit, I do quite like that idea, and it does fit with the first film. But I understand why Hawley might want to junk it. If there's one person who I'd trust to make something good out of this material, it's him.

Whoever said upthread that Prometheus should have just been a standalone film and not part of the Alien franchise probably has it right. I wish there were more films about ancient aliens - it's such a potentially rich topic.

[13 schoolyards]

I'd always assumed the deal in the first film with the crashed alien ship was that it had been carrying the alien eggs, one got loose and killed the space jockey, crashed ship that's it.

But then recently I was reading something about the first film's production design and it said no, the alien eggs that the humans find were meant to be in a chamber that was under the ship. The ship had been loading / unloading / who knows the eggs and that's where things went wrong.

It obviously doesn't make much difference if the alien eggs were stored on the spaceship or on the planet in some kind of facehugger warehouse, but having them stashed on a planet (where it doesn't seem like they're a native lifeform) does make them slightly more likely to be some kind of commodity or weapon

[Pete23]

I'd always assumed the deal in the first film with the crashed alien ship was that it had been carrying the alien eggs, one got loose and killed the space jockey, crashed ship that's it.

But then recently I was reading something about the first film's production design and it said no, the alien eggs that the humans find were meant to be in a chamber that was under the ship. The ship had been loading / unloading / who knows the eggs and that's where things went wrong.

In an early draft of the script the Nostromo was meant to find a temple on the planet, like in Prometheus, and the eggs would have been in there. That's where they were going to use this famous image:



Then as different people tweaked the script the derelict and the Space Jockey were born. Alien's story is very much a reflection of the work of many drafts and many people over many years, I don't think you can say there's a "correct" interpretation, and that's it's strength. Giger's idea of what the Alien is is different to Scotts, and his is probably different to Hill and Giler's etc. With the prequels there's less people involved in the actual story and so they're less ambiguous and that makes them less interesting, to me anyway.

[hermitical]

Where can these be seen?

They are dotted around, sources changing etc. If there is something in particular you want and can't find then let me know and I'll see what I can find later, after work.

There are some details/discussion here:
https://ifdb.fanedit.org/fanedit-search/tag/franchise/alien/

[Mister Six]

What's the point of this? I mean, creatively.

Alien was brilliant because it was such a shock to the system. The Alien really was alien, totally bizarre and inexplicable and like nothing seen before. The more you see it and explain it, though, the less interesting, less scary it gets.

Cameron, being smart, knew this and so Aliens was a shift to a war/action movie where the scale of the threat made up for the inevitable familiarity with the material. Spaceballs roped John Hurt into its Alien parody the following year, FFS.

Alien 3 had a bunch of production problems and isn't a bad film, but I think any attempt to recreate the isolated horror of Alien was doomed to fail.

And since then it's just been the same shit recycled over and over, with Prometheus being the only one that was even slightly interesting, mostly because it sacked off the alien shit for the most part. And even then, the explanation and visuals for the Space Jockey were so mundane. They ripped off At the Mountains of Madness and made the elder things boring!

Alien Covenant's backburster was emblematic of how worn out this idea is. "It's that thing you like, rotated 180 degrees!"

So yeah, unless Hawley is going to throw out all continuity, including the original Alien, and come up with something completely new and unsettling in the way that the chestburster was 44 years ago, I'm not interested by this at all.

[beanheadmcginty]

Why are they Space "Jockeys"? They're not small, they don't wear colourful uniforms and they are not astride animals.

[Elderly Sumo Prophecy]

I think Cock Jockey would be more apt, seeing as how the navigation console thing he's strapped into looks like a big long todge.

[Famous Mortimer]

Why are they Space "Jockeys"? They're not small, they don't wear colourful uniforms and they are not astride animals.

Nor is there any evidence of them being on "the ones and twos" dropping the latest space bangers

[buzby]

In an early draft of the script the Nostromo was meant to find a temple on the planet, like in Prometheus, and the eggs would have been in there. That's where they were going to use this famous image:

Then as different people tweaked the script the derelict and the Space Jockey were born. Alien's story is very much a reflection of the work of many drafts and many people over many years, I don't think you can say there's a "correct" interpretation, and that's it's strength. Giger's idea of what the Alien is is different to Scotts, and his is probably different to Hill and Giler's etc. With the prequels there's less people involved in the actual story and so they're less ambiguous and that makes them less interesting, to me anyway.

The derelict and Space Jockey were there in Dan O'Bannon and Ron Shussett's original script, as was the pyramid. In their script, the derelict ship had landed on the planet, found the pyramid and the crew brought an 'urn' (in reality a spore pod) from it back to their ship. The facehugger from it then hatched and the resulting adult alien then killed them, with the last member of crew setting up a radio beacon to broadcast a warning.

The Snark's crew on landing on the planet in a storm find the derelict containing the empty 'urn' and skeleton of the space jockey, and a triangle scratched into the wall. The next day the storm subsides and they then see the pyramid. They then decide to go back and investigate and one of the party is lowered down the 'chimney' and finds a vault filled with hundreds of the spore pods. He then starts looking at one too closely and is attacked by a facehugger that hatches from it. During all this, the ship's computer decodes the message as a warning, not an SOS.

The pyramid/egg silo was cut from the script in rewrites during pre-production to save money, and the urns/spores would become more like eggs as Giger's designs developed (the original idea to make them into eggs came from SFX sculptor Roger Dicken - he made an egg-shaped plasticene model of the 'spore pod' based on Giger's original painting and showed it to Giger, who then redesigned the spore pod based on that idea). The pyramid/egg silo and original idea for the 'urns' would then go on to form the basis for Prometheus many years later, hence O'Bannon and Shussett getting 'based on story elements by' writing credits on that film.

Giger's 'lifecycle' mural that you posted was started just before the decision was made to merge the silo and derelict scenes together. He continued on with it and it was going to be used on the wall of a corridor or the cockpit of the derelict. Shots of it being examined with a torch were filmed, but it was cut out by Scott as he felt it might give the game away too early. The mural was also modified as originally the figures had human shaped heads wearing astronaut helmets. These were changed to egg-shaped heads with integrated breathing apparatus like the space jockey.


Walter Hill and David Giler were the producers (Brandywine Productions), and after buying the script from O'Bannon and Shussett set about making rewrites, but their only real contributions were the addition of Ash and combining the derelict and pyramid elements to save money. The story was all O'Bannon and Shussett's work (Shussett being the one who came up with the alien's lifecycle), and the WGA gave them the writing credit.

[Mobbd]

The space jockey really captured my imagination as a kid. As an adult I see how narratively useful it is (because it implies back story in a single shot, that we're inadvertently blundering in on something bigger than us). But neither then nor now did/do I think there should have been prequel films about him or his people.

[Mobbd]

I love it when a proper artist (contemporary or outsider) is called in to help with the look and logic of a film. It's an injection of originality from outside the usual studio flavour.

As well as Geiger on Alien I'm thinking of Gaultier on Fifth Element.

Doesn't happen so much these days but I believe working artists created the alien language in Arrival and the film was all the stronger for it. Can anyone think of other examples?

[buzby]

I love it when a proper artist (contemporary or outsider) is called in to help with the look and logic of a film. It's an injection of originality from outside the usual studio flavour.

As well as Geiger on Alien I'm thinking of Gaultier on Fifth Element.

Doesn't happen so much these days but I believe working artists created the alien language in Arrival and the film was all the stronger for it. Can anyone think of other examples?

As well as Giger, Alien also had Chris Foss (co-designer of the Snark/Nostromo), Ron Cobb (the other co-designer of the Nostromo, and designer fo the Nostromo interiors and human tech) and Moebius (human costume designer). O'Bannon had worked with all of them on the Jodorowsky's aborted version of Dune (that project being cancelled is what made them all available to work on Alien).

Scott later enlisted 'visual futurist'/industrial designer Syd Mead  to design the props and vehicles for Blade Runner (and Moebius again did some uncredited work on the costume design). The backgrounds of Mead's designs for the vehicles went on to become the basis for the look of the street sets as well. Mead had previously supplied designs and concept drawings to ST:TMP, and went on to do the same for Tron, Empire Strikes Back (indirectly), Short Circuit, Aliens, 2010 and many others.

[Claude the Racecar Driving Rockstar Super Sleuth]

I believe working artists created the alien language in Arrival

Someone just spilled their coffee down the side of the mug.

[phantom_power]

Fuck all prequels. They fundamentally / deliberately misunderstand what people like about the originals; it's not that we were crying out for more background on the corporation who sent them to space, or the alien's social structure or what the fuck ever. Not that I watched a minute of the "Fargo" TV series, but "crimes in North Dakota" is generic enough to go in a million directions (I presume there's not a lot of lore there) whereas "Alien" is going to be about one of two things.

I think it is a prequel only in that it is set before the original two films. I don't expect it to tie into them in any way or explain anything about the genesis of the aliens or characters. I think it is more about using that world as a setting to tell a story pertinent to the themes of the films but not strictly linked to them

[Famous Mortimer]

I wish I had your optimism, but we'll see.

[Mobbd]

I think it is a prequel only in that it is set before the original two films. I don't expect it to tie into them in any way or explain anything about the genesis of the aliens or characters. I think it is more about using that world as a setting to tell a story pertinent to the themes of the films but not strictly linked to them

That's how it looks to me too. Fingers crossed and time will tell.