One of the surprising joys of Alien: Earth has been how unencumbered the whole thing feels within the scope of blockbuster, franchise filmmaking. For decades now, the Alien franchise has been trapped in a loop of sorts, where it seems to keep coming back to the same well, despite the fact that it is running increasingly dry.
In the aftermath of James Cameron’s Aliens in 1986, executives and filmmakers alike struggled with how to follow it up, resulting in films like Alien 3, Alien: Resurrection, Alien vs. Predator, or even more recently Alien: Romulus, that act as retreads of the familiar ground so innovatively covered in the first two films.
There were certainly outliers, such as franchise creator Ridley Scott’s own delightfully strange and idiosyncratic prequels, Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, but those were met with decidedly mixed reception from fans who seemingly wanted something more straightforward and full of Xenomorph-related action.
Noah Hawley's approach is working
This is what makes Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth such a unique delight, in that it is managing to simultaneously craft a wholly new venture while still featuring the iconic creatures so prominently within the work. One of the ideas underpinning this achievement was to have multiple new creatures featured in the series, not just the iconic facehuggers and Xenomorphs.
While the first four episodes of the series have introduced a good many of these new critters, one has definitely stood out thus far, and that is a creature referred to only as The Eye. The Eye has played a small but highly impactful role in numerous episodes now, and Hawley recently opened up to The Hollywood Reporter about how this new creature was engineered for maximum terror.
“To me, there’s a relentlessness to this that is similar to the face hugger,” Hawley shared. “Certainly in James Cameron’s movie [Aliens] where Ripley [Sigourney Weaver] and Newt [Rebecca Jordan] are trying to get away from these things, and they just keep coming, and they’re fast, and they’re scrambling, and they’re spider like a crab. [The suckers] was a really great upgrade for the original conceit where before, it just had to run as fast as it could at you. Now it can fly.”
The Eye is a disembodied eyeball that crawls around and flings itself via the use of sucker-aided tentacles. When it finds a suitable host, like a cat, a sheep, or a human being, it flings itself at them, pulls out one of their eyes, and takes its own place within the empty eye socket, now capable of controlling the being’s actions.
With regard to its appearance in the fourth episode, “Observation,” in which The Eye gruesomely claimed a sheep as its new victim, Hawley said:
“It’s one of the most disturbing things you’ll watch all year, I think. Every five percent of improvement in the visual effects made that sequence one-hundred percent worse, in terms of its effectiveness. And by worse, I mean better. I told director Ugla Hauksdóttir in London, ‘For me, the fact that you got the live sheep to back away from the camera made the whole sequence right. Because if it had been a CG sheep, there’s something about the sheep, like us, going ‘uh-huh!’ and backing away from the camera that really sold the gag.”
The Eye is only one of the several new creatures featured in Alien: Earth, and it is a testament to just how ruthlessly effective and thought-provoking the series truly is. New episodes release every Tuesday night on FX and Hulu.