This article contains spoilers for Alien: Earth through Episode 6, as well as the rest of the Alien movie series.
Alien: Resurrection, the fourth movie in the Alien franchise, is a mixed bag. Written by Joss Whedon and directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet, the 1997 movie almost directly suffers from an error of translation. Whedon’s American geek-speak contrasted with Jeunet’s French absurdism to the point that the two have spent the past several decades trashing each other in the press. But while your mileage may vary as to Resurrection itself, what Noah Hawley’s FX and Hulu series, Alien: Earth, is doing is a revelation for fans who saw the promise in the earlier feature. Plot points included by Hawley and company in Alien: Earth are giving Resurrection’s most intriguing ideas a second life.
To be clear up front, Hawley has been very open about not caring about any of the movies except the original 1979 Alien and its 1986 sequel, Aliens. “It's not my instinct to care about it necessarily,” Hawley said on FX’s official podcast for the series when asked about how important the wider canon was to his TV show. “The big things that general audiences invest in are sacrosanct to some degree… The real canon is the first film, and to a major degree, the second film also… That's the reality of which I came to the series. And the degree to which I'm introducing these new creatures allows me to create new canon.”
But at the same time, it’s hard not to watch Alien: Earth without thinking of Resurrection, particularly in this week’s sixth episode, “The Fly.” While there was a hint of this revelation in the season’s fourth episode, Wendy (Sydney Chandler) is talking to the xenomorph, and not just any xenomorph, but a baby one in a stage of development we’ve never seen before. In Resurrection, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is, well, resurrected after her fiery death at the end of Alien 3, only to discover that scientists 200 years in the future have made some changes to her DNA. Specifically, they brought her back with a mix of her own DNA and that of the xenomorph Queen that was inside of her in order to create a Queen as well.
All “your scientists were so preoccupied” aside, we discover over the course of the movie that this Ripley, called Ripley-8 as it turns out she’s the eighth clone after a line of horribly unsuccessful grotesqueries, can also communicate with the xenomorphs. That leads to the most controversial scene in the movie featuring a creature called the Newborn. Ostensibly Ripley-8’s grandchild, the hideous monstrosity is a drippy, pale mix of human and xenomorph features that can almost form human speech and really wants to make out with its grandma.
While it’s unknown at this time how badly the baby xeno wants to hook up with Wendy, some sort of twisted familial relationship is clearly present between the two in Episode 6; a lot of Alien: Earth is about familial bonds, thanks in large part to Wendy and her brother, Joe (Alex Lawther). But the looming question over the entire season is whether Wendy is his sister at all. She’s the consciousness of his sister transferred into a synth body, but does that mean she is the human sister Marcy, or did Marcy die and Wendy is merely a robot copy? In lieu of a real connection between Joe and Wendy, it’s possible that Wendy is forming a twisted mother/sister bond with the xenomorph instead, something that Joe is clearly wary of.
The big difference between Wendy and Ripley-8 at this point is that Chandler plays her relationship with the xenomorph with childlike delight, while Weaver infused the Ripley clone with a mix of revulsion and sexual yearning. There has always been a sexual element to the Alien franchise, but usually it’s been of the invasive variety. Here, it’s likely that Hawley, who has been playing with themes of growing up (thanks to the pervasive Peter Pan references, among other things) is using the xenomorph as an awakening of adulthood, with all that implies. It’s not exactly what Jeunet threaded through Resurrection, but what Wendy is going through with the xenomorph is certainly a 180 from the experiences of nearly every other (mostly dead) character that encounters a xenomorph in any of the films or the TV show so far, with the exception of Ripley-8.
To touch on the Newborn a little more, which towered over Ripley-8: Whedon hated it. While the Newborn existed in Whedon’s script (which went through multiple revisions thanks to studio notes that in reflection seem to be of the “throw spaghetti at the wall” variety), the accused abuser noted in a 2005 In Focus interview (no longer online but excerpted here) that, “I don’t remember writing, ‘A withered, granny-lookin’ Pumpkinhead-kinda-thing makes out with Ripley.’ Pretty sure that stage direction never existed in any of my drafts.”
Jeunet, meanwhile, loved the Newborn.“It’s like King Kong!,” Jeunet told The Independent in 2022 during a 25th anniversary retrospective on the film. “I think it’s kind of sexy and weird. They almost make love. It was very disturbing to American people. You know how they are puritan.” Still, Jeunet did stop short of pushing things too much; the animatronic was shot with male and female genitals, which were later digitally removed.
Alien: Romulus would similarly riff on what happens when you get chocolate in my peanut butter (or alien DNA in your human DNA) with the Offspring, another horrifying creation that played with the idea from Resurrection and injected it with Ridley Scott’s Engineer mythology from Prometheus and Alien: Covenant.
But Alien: Earth is taking this idea back to basics. What if instead of overthinking it with controversial designs that ‘uncanny valley’ humanity into the creature, we just let the Offspring or Newborn be a baby xenomorph, and see how the main character bonds with that? It’s keeping it simple, stupid, and it’s as thrilling as the general idea of what would happen if “human” and “alien” met in the middle, but without the contentious complications.
Wendy, too, seems to be the halfway point of ideas from Resurrection. It’s hard to see a brunette woman at the center of the franchise and not compare her to Ripley…unless, of course, you’re comparing the ostensible villain to Ripley. But Wendy is also eerily similar to Winona Ryder’s humanistic synth from Resurrection, Annalee Call. Unlike earlier takes, such as Ash (Ian Holm) in Alien or Bishop (Lance Henriksen) in Aliens, Annalee was essentially human in every way that counts other than her insides. In fact, she’s a synth that essentially gained human consciousness and cut herself off from Weyland-Yutani. While Alien: Earth is coming at things another way, Wendy’s bob haircut and general demeanor call to mind a real-life, younger Ryder. And with Call as an earlier experiment in whether androids can be considered alive in the Alien franchise, Hawley has moved that concept front and center with Wendy and her Lost Boys.
That’s hardly even the largest point of comparison between the movie and show, which is the whole “Earth” of it all, probably the storyline that made Resurrection run into a wall the most. Whedon reportedly wrote five versions of the end of the script for the movie, all ending on Earth in different ways. He argued at the time that the movie needed to show audiences something they’ve never seen before, and in his mind (and as directed by the studio), that was taking the action from space and alien planets to seeing what’s become of our homeworld in the intervening several hundred years.
It never happened, though Resurrection ends with one ship crash-landing on Earth, and Ripley-8 and Call looking down on the planet, intrigued about what life might be like down there once they return home; the plan was to take the action there in Alien 5.
“You know, Fox was going to do another one,” Sigourney Weaver said back in 2009 via MTV Movies Blog. “They had it written. Joss Whedon wrote it… It took place on earth. Which, I have to say, just really didn’t interest me. And I just felt that every time we went out there, we needed to have a really original piece.”
The rest is history, as Weaver and James Cameron at varying times discussed continuing the Ripley story in space, even returning to the original planet from the first Alien. That never happened either, and thanks to the abysmal box office returns and mixed critical response to Resurrection, the series went in different directions from there.
But read the above, and now try and tell us that Noah “I only care about the first two movies” Hawley didn’t have Resurrection and its aborted sequel in mind when planning Alien: Earth. While the TV series takes place hundreds of years earlier in the timeline, the inciting incident is “What if a spaceship carrying the xenomorph crashed into Earth?” That’s exactly where Resurrection leaves off, down to the underlying tapestry of the series: What is our planet like, hundreds of years in the future? Hawley clearly veers off in his own direction, but you could also argue that his clarity of vision – he is showrunner for the series, as well as writer, co-writer, and/or director for every episode in Season 1 – is what makes Alien: Earth successful, versus the clash of Whedon and Jeunet that negatively impacted Resurrection.
“It wasn’t a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending, it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong,” Whedon harshly explained in a 2006 interview with Bullz-eye. “They said the lines…mostly…but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There’s actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script…but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable.”
Jeunet, for his part, couldn’t care less. “I know Joss Whedon said some bad things about me,” responded the director in the Independent interview. “I don’t care. I know if Joss Whedon had made the film himself, it probably would have been a big success. He’s very good at making films for American geeks – something for morons. Because he’s very good at making Marvel films. I hate this kind of movie. It’s so silly, so stupid.”
There’s a long-held maxim that there are no bad ideas, only bad execution. Whatever you think about Resurrection, the execution of the ideas wasn’t quite there, at least for the full running time of the film; some worked, some didn’t. But Hawley and company are picking up those ideas and running with them in a way that is thrilling, particularly if you came out of that theater in 1997 bummed about how everything turned out. It may have taken 28 years, and it may technically be drawing from what Hawley and Alien: Earth consider non-canon events, but perhaps if Alien: Earth does stick the landing, it’ll – sorry – resurrect some of the good will and appreciation for one of the most maligned movies in the franchise…even if Jeunet and Whedon will never see eye to eye.
