Noah Hawley breaks down what his FX Aliens series will be… and no, Ripley won’t feature

We reported last December that Fargo’s showrunner Noah Hawley was developing a series based in the Aliens universe and now, in a new interview, he’s given the first details bout the series.

In December the announcement promised the first story in the franchise set on earth (well, not counting the AvP movies) that will blend the horror of Scott’s original Alien along with the action of James Cameron’s Aliens. That’s a big, big claim.

Now, Hawley reveals it’s not the grunts, civilians or prisoners that will face the xenomorphs this time out, but rather the white collar executive who have been responsible for sending others to get facehugged to death.

“What’s next for me, it looks like, is [an] Alien series for FX,” Hawley says, “taking on that franchise and those amazing films by Ridley Scott and James Cameron and David Fincher. Those are great monster movies, but they’re not just monster movies. They’re about humanity trapped between our primordial, parasitic past and our artificial intelligence future—and they’re both trying to kill us. Here you have human beings and they can’t go forward and they can’t go back. So I find that really interesting.”

He describes where he is in the writing next, saying: “I’ve written a couple of scripts, the first two scripts, and we’re looking to make them next spring. When you get to something with this level of visual effects, there’s a lot of preparation that has to go into it.”

He explains that, due to the pandemic and the fact that the industry is just snapping back, they’re trying to make up for a lot of lost filming and production time across the board, so knowing when exactly filming will begin.

As for the story, many believed it would focus on Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley, the star of the movies, below, but no, this is a story that doesn’t involve her at all: “It’s not a Ripley story. She’s one of the great characters of all time, and I think the story has been told pretty perfectly, and I don’t want to mess with it. It’s a story that’s set on Earth also. The alien stories are always trapped… Trapped in a prison, trapped in a space ship. I thought it would be interesting to open it up a little bit so that the stakes of ‘What happens if you can’t contain it?’ are more immediate.”

Comparing the xenomorph monsters to a pandemic? Yeah, that’s topical, right? But that might just be the beginning of where the topical goes.

“On some level it’s also a story about inequality,” Hawley continues. “You know, one of the things that I love about the first movie is how ’70s a movie it is and how it’s really this blue collar space-trucker world in which Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton are basically Waiting for Godot. They’re like Samuel Beckett characters, ordered to go to a place by a faceless nameless corporation. The second movie is such an ’80s movie, but it’s still about grunts. Paul Reiser is middle management at best. So, it is the story of the people you send to do the dirty work.”

So, this isn’t the feel he’s going for at all but rather turning the tables on the fatcats who sit back while others get creamed in space: “In mine, you’re also going to see the people who are sending them. So you will see what happens when the inequality we’re struggling with now isn’t resolved. If we as a society can’t figure out how to prop each other up and spread the wealth, then what’s going to happen to us? There’s that great Sigourney Weaver line to Paul Reiser where she says, “I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t f@#k each other over for a percentage.””

It seems like this series could have a lot of potential… I’ve seen a lot of people balk at the word ‘ineqality’ in this description, assuming it was Aliens Vs The Wage Gap, but it seems it’s not that at all.

Plus, Aliens on TV? Weekly?! What’s not to love?

Source: Vanity Fair