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Fame and fortune came to Noah Hawley after he implanted an idea in a foreign body – namely, the Coen brothers’ 1996 feature film Fargo, which he used as the template for a series that, since 2014, has brilliantly revisited American anxiety and remorse. It is hardly surprising, then, that this virtuoso practitioner of creative parasitism has turned to the xenomorph that has haunted human nightmares since 1979.
Nearly half a century ago, the first incarnation of the Alien creature burst from the chest of Second Officer Kane. This creature who carries the young of her species has served under the direction of Ridley Scott, James Cameron, David Fincher and Jean-Pierre Jeunet. Over the years, she has been by turns a symbol of the hubris that leads humanity to disregard the rest of the universe, the crystallization of corporate greed and the embodiment of an all-consuming femininity. What was Hawley going to do with her?
While revealing as little as possible about the tangle of narrative threads and twists that make this first season (six out of eight episodes were previewed) − a structure one never tires of exploring − a word of warning: That same xenomorph, with her grotesquely elongated skull, razor-sharp teeth and corrosive blood, is not at the center of Alien: Earth. The creature will appear, though, since her eggs are aboard the freighter Maginot, chartered by the multinational Weyland-Yutani (as was the Nostromo back in the day), which, at the start of the first episode, is preparing to return to Earth after collecting a few specimens of extraterrestrial wildlife.
The name of the spaceship, borrowed from the Maginot Line that failed to stop the German invasion in 1940, will make it clear – at least to French viewers over the age of 90 – that this is, above all, a story about borders and their permeability. Hawley brings his moralistic gaze to questions common to both science fiction and philosophy: humanity’s relationship to its environment (which here extends beyond our own planet), the desire for immortality and, as a corollary, the possibility of redefining what it means to be human.
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