Though technology has always played an important role in the Alien franchise, FX’s Alien: Earth series is the first chapter to really dig into the inner workings of the tech companies responsible for unleashing xenomorphs onto humanity. To corporations like Weyland-Yutani and its competitors, the show’s aliens present an opportunity to develop products that could boost their stock valuations to astronomical new heights. But to show us how powerful these companies already are, Alien: Earth spends a lot of time focusing on the tech that made them rich — things like futuristic guns, space ships, androids, and tablets.
Because Alien: Earth focuses on parts of the franchise’s universe that have never really been explored before, production designer Andy Nicholson needed to dream up a host of new ideas to make the series’ world feel real. With projects like Sleepy Hollow, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and Gravity under his belt, Nicholson came to Alien: Earth with a deep understanding of how small artistic details can be a big part of what brings fantastical realities to life. To realize an Alien series set in the franchise’s distant past, Nicholson knew that he could look to Ridley Scott’s original film for inspiration. But when I recently spoke with him ahead of Alien: Earth’s finale, Nicholson told me that the real trick of making Alien: Earth feel fresh was to think of the future as it might have been imagined in the late ‘70s when Alien first hit theaters.
“Alien was a fantastic combination of things for me because the original film was and still is a very important benchmark for science fiction production design,” Nicholson told me. “As far as I’m concerned, Alien elevated the art form in terms of what sci-fi was at that time because nothing like that — focusing on space truckers and how they fit into the world — had been done before.”
Set two years before Alien, Alien: Earth chronicles what happens when a Weyland-Yutani spaceship carrying multiple extraterrestrial creatures crash lands on Earth. To most of the citizens living in Prodigy City, the USCSS Maginot’s arrival is a chaotic disaster that leaves many of their homes in ruin. But to Boy Kavaliar — the city’s owner and CEO of the Prodigy Corporation — the vessel and its cargo are exciting surprises, and he’s certain that his business rival Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver) doesn’t want him to have it.
It’s through flashbacks to life on the Maginot before it crashed that Alien: Earth establishes the strongest visual throughline between itself and the first Alien. Shots of the new ship’s hypersleep pods, common area, and Mother System control room immediately evoke scenes from the original film where the crew of the USCSS Nostromo are hunted down by another newborn xenomorph. On one level, the ships’ stylistic similarities work as a series of easter eggs. But Nicholson also saw the Maginot as an opportunity to emphasize how closely connected Alien and Alien: Earth really are.
“I did a combination of studying, absorbing, and refining the first Alien to design another ship that could exist as part of that same original fleet,” Nicholson explained. “The Maginot is a Yutani ship, and much in the same way that if you go into three cabins on three different naval vessels, they’re pretty much the same. There’s the bridge where everything is, and a bunch of machines that are all relatively the same because they’re manufactured by the same company.”
Though Weyland-Yutani looms large in Alien: Earth’s story, the series puts much more focus on Kavalier and his team of synths — humanoid robots that have been uploaded with the minds of terminally ill children. The synths are meant to be Prodigy’s next big luxury consumer product, but they aren’t the only things that the company makes. Because Alien: Earth is set so close to the first Alien, Nicholson felt that the best way to develop a signature look for Prodigy’s tech was to think of “what the view of the future was back in 1979.” This sent him down a rabbit hole of research that, among other places, led to vintage European automotive design.
“When you look at the industrial, furniture, and car design — especially French and Italian car interior design — from that period, there’s a very clear view of the future,” Nicholson said. “It’s the first time you saw companies like Citroën and Renault making digital dashboards, or steering wheels with just one spoke.”
You can see many of Nicholson’s design ideas coming together clearly in the chunky tablets featured throughout Alien: Earth’s first season. Nicolson wanted them to feel distinct from similar fictional tech audiences might have seen before, which meant they couldn’t just be translucent bits of CGI — a personal sci-fi pet peeve Nicholson doesn’t care for — or something akin to the screens Tom Cruise waves at in Minority Report. Alien: Earth’s tablets needed to be a fusion of weird, familiar, and a little bit retro, which is where Sony’s Watchman line of portable pocket televisions came in.
“When I was researching tablet technology from the era, our props master Morritz Heinlein brought me a load of things and he managed to find an original, working, black-and-white 4-inch screen Sony Watchman,” Nicholson told me. “It was basically a CRT tube that projects onto a diagonal screen, and you watch the reflection. We thought the aesthetic of it was great, but ‘what if we just made it into a tablet?’ So, we took the Walkman’s design language, made it into a big screen, and we gave it a thickness.”
That design language wound up helping Nicholson add even more narrative texture to Alien: Earth, as he was able to use the devices to telegraph some of the differences between the products that Prodigy and Weyland-Yutani make. Prodigy’s tablets have wide screens because Nicholson was inspired by the way Aliens’ production design was impacted by the advent of 16:9 CRT screens — which were developed shortly after Alien first hit theaters.
“Almost all of the monitors in Aliens are 16:9 screens because that was the new thing at the time, and if you’re set dressing a film like that, you’re going to use the most futuristic new thing,” Nicholson explained. “We made the decision that Weyland-Yutani-produced tech should always feature 4:3 displays whereas Prodigy’s devices would be more like the 16:9 screens you see in Aliens.”
Leaning into the Sony of it all gave Nicholson and his team even more ideas about how the tablets’ design could be reflected in other aspects of Prodigy’s technology. Because the Walkman’s screen was lenticular and became distorted when Nicholson pushed onto it, he thought it might be interesting if that kind of visual detail became part of the UI for more of Prodigy’s devices.
“That one idea became a baseline for all of the Prodigy screens, and it was great because you immediately recognize and don’t question that these are tablets,” Nicholson said. “They’re slightly chunkier than what we use, but they’ve got a believable design language rooted in technology that we know, but they’re also something interesting that you haven’t quite seen before.”
Alien: Earth’s season 1 finale is set to air on FX tonight.
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