<\/p>\n
Alien \u2014 the creature and the franchise \u2014 is a shape-shifter.<\/p>\n
In the interplanetary dystopia of the Alien movies, the parasitic creature that parasitic CEOs are always trying to capture \u2014 and that blue-collar space truckers, Marines, miners or convicts are always trying to escape \u2014 grows to full physical maturity within hours and tends to take on the physical characteristics of whatever mammal it hatched from. That endless mutability is also a characteristic of the screen stories inspired by these creatures, as the splashy new FX series<\/a> \u201cAlien: Earth\u201d demonstrates. It pays homage to the constellation of preexisting Alien media without being bound to their previously prescribed life cycle.<\/p>\n Sure, \u201cEarth\u201d is set in the same fictional universe as Ridley Scott\u2019s landmark 1979 sci-fi\/horror movie \u201cAlien,\u201d two years before the events of that film. The main character of the new streaming series \u2014 a pediatric cancer patient who becomes the first person to have her consciousness transplanted from a frail human body into an age-and-illness-proof synthetic one \u2014 renames herself Wendy upon her transformation from a sickly kid into a prematurely grown-up lady played by Sydney Chandler. Her new handle reflects a fascination with Peter Pan that creator and executive producer Noah Hawley \u2014 who wrote all eight episodes of the new series and directed the two strongest \u2014 has embedded throughout. He even has Boy Kavalier, the insufferable tech bro responsible for this breakthrough \u2014 played by Adderall-eyed Samuel Blenkin \u2014 read J.M. Barrie\u2019s 1911 novel \u201cPeter Pan and Wendy\u201d aloud to Wendy and several other terminally ill children he repots into sturdy synthetic vessels.<\/p>\n Kavalier doesn\u2019t rescue these kids from death out of altruism. He intends to market immortality as a luxury item. (His outfit, Prodigy, is the youngest of five warring megacorporations that by the early 22nd century have supplanted nations to rule the Earth and its solar system, we quickly learn.) Beyond that, he\u2019s hoping one of his human-synthetic \u201cHybrids\u201d will eventually prove smart enough to keep up with him. Greed has been a part of the Alien-iad from the beginning, but the show\u2019s exploration of megalomania is a relatively new wrinkle. (Yes, the razor-toothed, acid-blooded beasts you remember from the movies are here, too, along with some just-as-gross new monsters that evidently belong to a different unholy species than the H.R. Giger-designed Xenomorph.)<\/p>\n The self-conscious \u201cPan\u201d-coding of \u201cAlien: Earth\u201d is, to my lifelong Alien-obsessive<\/a> way of thinking, the most pretentious, least successful aspect of what is otherwise a surprisingly robust and compelling attempt to transplant an intermittently brilliant feature film franchise into the host body of a prestige TV show: serialized, lavishly budgeted (more than $250 million, purportedly) and with no content restrictions to prevent it from being as gory, profane and generally upsetting as any of the Alien features. (Phew!)<\/p>\n This format did not exist when the original \u201cAlien\u201d burst through our collective rib cage 46 Memorial Day weekends ago. Nor did the notion of a continuity between weekly TV series and feature films. That summer, when \u201cAlien\u201d shared multiplex space with the likes of \u201cMoonraker,\u201d \u201cRocky II\u201d and \u201cThe Muppet Movie,\u201d Paramount was running up massive cost overruns in a sprint to make the Christmas \u201979 release date it had advance-booked for \u201cStar Trek: The Motion Picture,\u201d which had been upscaled from a follow-up TV series to a feature only when the runaway success of \u201cStar Wars\u201d in 1977 sent execs scrambling for whatever pew-pew spaceship stuff they could find. None of them had yet grasped how much money there was to be made by taking sci-fi, comic books and such seriously, and treating the fictional canon of each such saga with the kind of sober dramaturgy previously reserved for Greek myth and Elizabethan drama.<\/p>\n Comic-book publishers were among the first to discover that the kudzu-like accumulation of lore over decades of storytelling needed some judicious pruning. Hawley has given himself license to deviate from the already loose continuity established by \u201cAlien\u201d and the half-dozen big-screen prequels and sequels it spawned. (That tally does not include 2004\u2019s \u201cAlien vs. Predator\u201d or its 2007 sequel because, like most fans and creators of the franchise, I prefer to ignore them.) And just like most Alien movies, Hawley\u2019s series is accessible even if you never saw or have just forgotten the prior chapters.<\/p>\n You can see why Hawley, who previously brought his mordant sensibility to the FX series \u201cLegion\u201d (a distant cousin of the Marvel\/Fox X-Men franchise) and \u201cFargo\u201d (which borrows its title and tone, but little else, from the beloved 1996 Coen brothers crime flick) would be enticed. A specimen of IP named for a parasitic species that gestates inside living hosts is naturally a Trojan horse for whatever thematic obsessions an ambitious creator wants to impregnate it with. The Alien-iad has always been an auteur-driven franchise<\/a>, even if nearly every individual entry within has had a complicated authorship.<\/p>\n The credits of the new show say \u201cbased on elements created by Dan O\u2019Bannon and Ronald Shusett,\u201d the screenwriters who wrote the initial draft of \u201cAlien,\u201d though producers David Giler and Walter Hill did a Page 1 rewrite before Scott\u2019s cameras began rolling in the summer of 1978. It was Giler and Hill who hired James Cameron in 1983 to write what was still called \u201cAlien II,\u201d and who subsequently slapped their names in front of his on the treatment he fleshed out from their almost comically sketchy two-paragraph blueprint. Cameron wouldn\u2019t be granted his dream shot of directing \u201cAliens\u201d until after \u201cThe Terminator,\u201d which he had written and directed, opened in October 1984, surprising everyone \u2014 particularly the skeptical execs who had paid for it \u2014 with its healthy box office and strong notices.<\/p>\n