Tech bro’s encounters of the disturbed kind

Opinion

In the Alien movies, the basic drives are surviving and reproducing. Since Ridley Scott’s sci-fi horror classic burst onto the cinematic scene in 1979, the Alien franchise has itself survived and reproduced by being both simple and flexible.

The Alien canon requires an enclosed physical structure, some humans and some monsters. Within that basic template, there can be elements of the haunted-house film, the slasher flick, the prison movie, the war story, the coming-of-age tale.

Noah Hawley, the showrunner of the new series Alien: Earth (now streaming on Disney+, with new episodes dropping Tuesdays), is the guy behind the TV series Fargo, which riffed on the setting of the Coen brothers’ 1996 film and then kept going, using a kind of Coen-esque tone to stretch into five seasons.

The compression, the containment, the fatalistic sense of dread that give the Alien movies such a terrific, terrifying kick are hard to translate into longform television. Alien: Earth is unfocused and messy, with too many characters, too many variables, too many clamouring directions.

Still, the series is also intellectually intriguing, visually fabulous and — maybe most crucially — undeniably topical.

What Hawley has chosen to explore in this expanded form is less creature feature and more corporate satire. Forget those toothy Xenomorphs — the really horrifying thing in Alien: Earth is a pajama-wearing trillionaire tech bro.

In bringing the series literally down to Earth, Hawley gives more attention to the franchise’s corporate villains, in particular Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), a one-time child prodigy who has curdled into icky adulthood without actually growing up.

His mega-corporation, Prodigy, along with four others have carved up the globe, while democratic governments and civil society have withered away by the year 2120. These all-powerful companies are also competing in the race for immortality, developing cyborgs (humans with artificial modifications), synths (artificially intelligent beings) and hybrids (human consciousness in synthetic bodies).

Boy’s foray into this competition involves transplanting the consciousness of terminally ill children into grown-up, superpowered synth bodies, and the results are incredibly eerie and unsettling. The scientific reasons given for this choice are that children’s brains are more adaptable, making the transition easier, while the synthetic bodies need to be adult because they cannot grow and change.

But the deeper reason seems to be Boy’s creepy obsession with Peter Pan. His secretive research base, a remote island, is called Neverland. The first hybrid being is given the new name of Wendy (Sydney Chandler), with the kids who follow named after other Peter Pan characters. Boy Kavalier’s Lost Boys (and Girls), whom he treats not as human children but as proprietary tech, include Tootles, Nibs, Curly, Slightly and Smee.

There’s something defiantly odd about Hawley’s approach to the source material. This is a series that references Alien, Blade Runner, Jurassic Park, Frankenstein and The Shining, but its nastiest, scariest touchstone turns out to be Peter Pan.

J.M. Barrie’s 1904 play and 1911 children’s book have some very dark roots in the author’s biography. The Disney animated version — also referenced here, projected onto the walls and ceilings of Neverland — glossed over that darkness. Hawley brings it right back in, reminding us that the original Peter Pan character isn’t whimsical and carefree. He’s heartless and amoral.

Basically, he’s a sociopath.

Playing the world’s youngest trillionaire and the CEO who rules over much of Asia and Oceania, Blenkin channels that Peter Pan feel. His performance is by turns unpredictable, uncanny and deliberately irritating.

Blenkin is 29 but looks much younger, with a slight build and a pointed face, and you can picture him in the green suit and the boots. But it’s the fatal immaturity, the “boy who wouldn’t grow up” vibe, that really makes him sinister and strange.

Exploring the dangers of emotionally unformed masterminds with massive wealth and unchecked power, Alien: Earth’s corporate dystopia seems to be making pointed (though non-specific) references to our current spate of real-life tech overlords. Hawley is raising issues about the encroachment of corporate power and money into democratic institutions and the reckless expansion of technologies like AI.

Boy Kavalier is essentially a spoiled, easily bored child, risking the future of humanity because he can. This is why he ends up sending his hybrids — who may have adult bodies but are kids nonetheless — to retrieve alien specimens from a deep-space research vessel that has crashed into a luxury apartment building in New Siam.

This plot development brings us back to the OG Alien setup, the basic DNA of the movies. We get the dark, dank tunnels and halls, the exposed piping and dripping water, the smoke and steam, the blueish underwater light. We get the relentless mutating monsters, slithering through a labyrinthine space, lurking fears exploding suddenly into blood and screams.

And that’s scary. But Hawley is also suggesting that the Xenomorphs are just doing what Xenomorphs do to survive. The really frightening thing in Alien: Earth is knowing that Peter Pan is watching this all, with detached, inhuman glee.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca