“I feel we will all agree that the planet’s about to get lots hotter and lots wetter,” Hawley says, and Bangkok is a tropical location stuffed with rivers and canals. Initially, he envisioned Prodigy’s troopers transferring round New Siam on trains, however as soon as he visited Bangkok, “it turned very clear: We’ll put folks on boats, [and] it’s going to assist promote this concept that the water has reclaimed a few of the metropolis.”
Hawley’s design group constructed out a sq. mile of New Siam in Unreal Engine, the identical graphics software program used to develop video video games like Fortnite and Closing Fantasy VII Rebirth. Within the eyes of Prodigy, there are “tiered layers” of town, in accordance with Hawley: Humanity Minus, Humanity Plus, and Humanity Prime (although this idea isn’t mentioned on-screen within the closing minimize of the collection).
“The upper you go, the richer you might be, and the decrease you go, the poorer you might be,” Hawley says. When Prodigy troopers descend to the place the Maginot crashed, we see “Humanity Minus” dwelling in darkish subterranean hovels, however once they ascend the corporate’s supertall towers, they encounter a Louis XIV-themed occasion straight out of J. G. Ballard’s Excessive-Rise. Even greater, we first meet the CEO of Weyland-Yutani 1000’s of ft above one other company metropolis (an unnamed one Chicagoans will acknowledge).
“The place Are the Adults” in a World Run by Trillionaires?
In our precise current, Elon Musk, a 54-year-old man who nonetheless thinks 4/20 jokes are humorous, is poised to turn into one of many first trillionaires. Within the twenty second century of Alien: Earth, the “youngest trillionaire ever” is Boy Kavalier, performed by Samuel Blenkin, an egomaniacal “boy genius” who based Prodigy when he was six years previous and is now in his early 20s.
“The CEO of this firm tells himself he is Peter Pan,” Hawley says. “And then you definately learn Peter Pan and also you go, ‘That’s a darkish ebook.’ He’s kidnapping these kids, he is taking them to this island, [and] it is implied that once they begin to develop up, he removes them.” In a pleasant literary parallel, Kavalier creates the primary hybrids in a analysis facility on a secluded island referred to as Neverland and renames them after Peter Pan’s “Misplaced Boys.”
Alongside his costume designer Suttirat Anne Larlarb, Hawley determined that Kavalier would put on pajamas with no sneakers all through the collection as a result of he owns every thing in Prodigy Metropolis and Neverland. “Every little thing’s his home,” Hawley says. “The factor about cash that I’ve noticed is at a sure level, every thing is simply free. You don’t really feel the lack of the cash, you’re not truly shopping for something or conscious of the transactions.”
However Kavalier’s ultrawealthy mindset additionally impacts the way in which he sees and treats different folks. “Triage the rescue by revenue bracket,” he instructs his right-hand man after the Maginot crash turns Prodigy Metropolis right into a mass casualty occasion. Hawley says Kavalier “is a approach of literalizing what I really feel after I look world wide that I am dwelling in proper now, which is: The place are the adults? The place are the individuals who assume extra about tomorrow than at this time?”
“Retro-Futurism” Meets Model New Monsters
The primary episode opens on the Maginot, the place Hawley’s manufacturing designers painstakingly recreated the feel and appear of Ridley Scott’s Nostromo. “That’s what Alien is, so far as I’m involved,” Hawley says. “It’s the retro-futurism. It is these previous cathode [ray] tube screens. It’s the inexperienced ASCII textual content. It is these loopy keyboards with the Egyptian hieroglyphics the place, like, how do they even know what they’re writing?”
Whereas 1979’s Alien spent 40 minutes establishing the on a regular basis lives of house truckers, Hawley knew Alien: Earth needed to accomplish the identical factor in simply 4 minutes. “Translating a movie to tv, your first job is authenticity,” Hawley says, so the Maginot was designed based mostly on Ridley Scott’s Nostromo blueprints “right down to the props.”