Remaking a classic is a minefield. Stray too far, and you alienate fans; stay too close, and you’re accused of lacking originality. For Noah Hawley, creator of the new prequel series Alien: Earth, the key was to adapt the feeling of the original, not just its plot. He went back to the source: Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece.
🎬 Adapting a Feeling, Not a Story
Hawley made his mission clear to Ridley Scott from the beginning. “I am adapting your movie,” he told the legendary director. “I’m not looking at seven movies that I have to work into some kind of hodgepodge of a show. I’m adapting Ridley Scott’s Alien, with some flavours of James Cameron”. His skill, he says, is in understanding what the original movie made him feel and then recreating those feelings for a new audience.
🚀 The Power of Practical Sets
A huge part of honoring the original was recreating its iconic aesthetic. The production built enormous sets in Bangkok, including a near-perfect facsimile of the Nostromo. Hawley describes the feeling of stepping onto the bridge or the cryo chamber as a moment that “collapses time,” taking him back to being a 10-year-old stepping through the screen into the movie. This commitment to practical, detailed sets grounds the sci-fi horror in a tangible, believable reality.
🤝 A Master’s Advice
To capture the immense scale of the Alien universe, Hawley even had a conversation with another modern master of sci-fi, Denis Villeneuve. He wanted to understand how Villeneuve so effectively conveys the feeling of being dwarfed by massive ships or sandworms. The key takeaway was to balance the epic with the personal. “You have to have the two, the big and the small,” Hawley says. “The moment that it’s style over substance, you’re in trouble”. This philosophy is at the heart of Alien: Earth, a show that promises both intimate drama and cosmic horror.
Bibliography:
“Alien: Earth.” SFX, issue 394, Future plc, August 2025, pp. 24-33.
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