Nerdist: Alien: EarthOpens in a new tab has been an amazing ride so far, doing justice to the franchise and expanding its lore. But one of the secret weapons of the series is its production design. It’s reverential to the world created by Ridley Scott in 1979, while also working as a series for 2025 audiences.
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I had never thought of the different eras of popular genres such as sci-fi. Specific to spaceships, the difference between the 70s and now seems negligible in terms of media design, and yet I can immediately tell that Andy Nicholson’s set designs are a reference to these older aesthetics. From the monotone colors of the walls and furniture, to the geometric and futuristic structures, the spaceship looks like it came right from a 70s scifi movie. This older style of spaceships relies a lot on the common predictions of what space travel might look like, but with interviews of astronauts and even NASA engineers, modern media has a lot more concrete evidence to base its designs on. Such a difference in time period is also where people such as dramaturgs become super important, because they often think of these differences in time periods. I recently got a book from a friend about media styles from different eras, which I am super excited to reference for future designs, as I feel that can take them to the next level.
The first Alien movie is the best hard sci-fi there is, full stop. I think one of the driving factors behind that, besides Ridley Scott’s incredible direction, the haunting score, or Sigourney Weaver’s great performance, is the insane amount of detail that goes into the technical aspects of every shot in that movie. The helmets have valves that open to shoot exhaled breath into the air, the alien drips acid from its shining jaws, and, in the most horrifying prediction of the movie, all of the computers have CRT displays and terrible clunky UI. Truly terrifying. All of this goes to reinforce Scott’s aesthetic of “truckers in space” as it were, with everything being utilitarian and dirty- an aesthetic taken to its extremes in following movies such as Aliens and Alien 3. A lot of Sci-Fi in modern pop culture is about the flashiest thing possible. It’s about lasers and strange new worlds and what I appreciate about the Alien franchise is that it never really tries to be what it’s not. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of duds in the series, but Alien Earth’s adherence to the tradition of the franchise while still pushing it forward is what makes the Alien universe so interesting to keep exploring. They have people who have grown up with the old movies making the new ones, and trying to utilize these old tools to tell new stories in the modern day. Alien Earth isn’t bad and I hope to see more of this great work coming from them in the future.
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