Our condolences to Michael Fassbender and the makeup-slathered husk of Guy Pierce this week, as Fargo’s Noah Hawley has stated that he has no interest in using multiple major elements from Ridley Scott’s prequel film Prometheus in his upcoming Alien TV show.
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Hawley, who’s been working on this Alien prequel of his own for a while now, was interviewed about the planned FX show by KCRW this weekend, and says that he’s had a number of conversations with Alien and Prometheus director Scott about, let’s say, focusing primarily on the Alien part of the director’s filmography while making the series. Specifically, he’s disinterested in making use of Prometheus’ sci-fi aesthetics—which, for some reason, were far glossier and more iPhone-esque than the rusty future depicted in the original Alien, despite the 2012 film being a prequel—and its big plot reveal, that the titular Xenomorphs were a freshly minted bio-weapon by those pesky human-creating Engineers, rather than the product of millennia of deadly evolution.
“Ridley and I have talked about this — and many, many elements of the show,” Hawley stated in the interview “For me, and for a lot of people, this ‘perfect life form’ — as it was described in the first film — is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space. The idea that, on some level, it was a bioweapon created half an hour ago, that’s just inherently less useful to me.” Also not as useful: Getting away from those “giant computer monitors, these weird keyboards” from 1979's Alien. “I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films. And so that’s the choice I’ve made — there’s no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple store technology is not available to me.”
Hawley is currently barreling toward the fifth season finale of Fargo, which airs on Tuesday night. He’s said his Alien show is currently aiming at an early 2025 release; he also acknowledged that the franchise is gearing up to be active in theaters again, too, with Fede Álvarez directing Alien: Romulus, currently slated for an August 2024 release.