In ‘Alien: Earth’, the Future Is a Corporate Hellscape
“I think we can all agree that the planet is about to become much hoter and much wet,” says Hawley, and Bangkok is a tropical location filled with rivers and canals. Originally, he envisaged prodigy soldiers moving in New Siam in the trains, but once he visited Bangkok, “It has become very clear: we will put people on the boats, [and] This will help sell this idea that the water has recovered part of the city. »»
The Hawley design team built a square mile from New Siam in Unreal Engine, the same graphic software used to develop video games like Fortnite And Rebirth Final Fantasy VII. In the eyes of Prodigy, there are “layers on several levels” of the city, according to Hawley: Humanity Minus, Humanity Plus and Humanity Prime (although this concept is not discussed on the screen in the final cup of the series).
“The higher you go, the more rich you are, the more you base, the more poor you are,” says Hawley. When prodigy soldiers go down to the place where Maginot Crazed, we see “less humanity” living in dark underground slums, but when they go up the supervall towers of society, they come across a party on the theme of Louis XIV straight out of JG Ballard High -rise. Even higher, we first meet the CEO of Weyland-Yutani to thousands of meters above another corporate city (an unnamed chicagoans will recognize).
“Where are the adults” in a world led by trillionaries?
In our real gift, Elon Musk, a 54 -year -old man who always thinks that 4/20 jokes are funny, is about to become one of the first trillionaries. In the 2nd century of Alien: earthThe “younger trillionaire of all time” is the Kavalier boy, played by Samuel Blenkin, a selfish “Boy” who founded Prodigy at the age of 6 and now has the start of their twenties.
“The CEO of this company says he is Peter Pan,” says Hawley. “And then you read Peter Pan And you are going: “It’s a dark book”. He kidnaps these children, he takes them to this island, [and] This implies that when they start to grow, he gets rid of it. In a nice literary parallel, Kavalier creates the first hybrids of a research installation on an isolated island called Neverland and renamed them after Peter PanThe lost boys.
Alongside his costume designer Suttirate Anne Larlarb, Hawley decided that Kavalier would wear pajamas without shoes throughout the series because he has everything in Prodigy City and Neverland. “Everything is his house,” said Hawley. “The thing about the money I observed is at some point, everything is just free. You don’t feel the loss of money, you don’t buy anything or don’t consider transactions.”
But Kavalier’s ultra-realizing state of mind also affects the way he sees and deals with other people. “Sorting the rescue by income tranche,” he instructs his straight man after the Maginot Crash transforms Prodigy City into a mass event. Hawley says Kavalier “is a way of literalizing what I feel when I look in the world in which I live at the moment, which is: where are the adults? Where are people who think more tomorrow than today? ”
“Retro-Futurism” meets new monsters
The first episode opens onto the Maginotwhere Hawley production designers have meticulously recreated the appearance of Ridley Scott Nostromo. “It’s what Stranger Is, as far as I’m concerned, “says Hawley.” It’s retro-futurism. It’s this old cathode [ray] Tube monitors. This is the Green ASCII text. These are these crazy keyboards with the Egyptian hieroglyphs where, as, how do they even know what they are writing? “”
During the years 1979 Stranger I spent 40 minutes to establish the daily life of space truckers, Hawley knew Alien: earth I had to accomplish the same thing in just four minutes. “Translating a film on television, your first job is authenticity,” says Hawley, so the Maginot was designed on the basis of Ridley Scott Nostromo Blueprints “up to the accessories”.
