‘Alien' Has Always Feared AI and Big Corporations. That's More Relevant Than Ever

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The new FX series 'Alien: Earth' traffics in familiar themes about greed, oligarchy and mysterious robots that tie into what's going on in the real world
The 'Alien' movies vary widely in quality — there arguably hasn't been a truly satisfying one since the first two in 1979 and 1986 — but a key thread has endured across the 46 years: However scary the xenomorphs are, 'Alien' has always feared AI and the greed of faceless corporations. And in that respect, its time has come.
The latest entry in the franchise, 'Alien: Earth,' which premieres on Tuesday, certainly exhibits those political undercurrents while bringing the threat home, both in the location and the shift from theaters to FX and Hulu, where only your neighbors can hear you scream.
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Granted, nobody comes to an 'Alien'-branded project — a franchise with one foot firmly planted in sci-fi and horror — for a lecture about the perils of unfettered capitalism. Still, the underlying apprehensions feel even timelier now, from the AI threat to the notion of corporations supplanting governments.
'Alien: Earth' lands at a moment of heightened unease about income inequality and the growing political clout wielded by billionaires like Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos — moguls who have become household names. Their companies, meanwhile, keep growing, with trillion-dollar valuations — which would have sounded like the stuff of science fiction a few decades ago — now a reality, with Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google among those cracking that barrier.
'The Trillion Dollar Stock Club Is Bigger — and Richer— Than Ever,' blared Barron's headline closing 2024.
Despite healthy profits, those same companies are also embracing AI in a way that both ignores potential unintended consequences and threatens the careers of its own employees. Several have explicitly stated as much, with Amazon CEO Andy Jassey issuing a memo in June spelling out that the technology will 'reduce our total corporate workforce as we get efficiency gains from using AI extensively across the company.'
The eight-episode series takes the real-world drift toward corporate oligarchy to its dystopian extreme, with Earth governed by five massive corporations, which, as usual, exhibit few compunctions about sacrificing human life to advance their objectives and enhance their profits.
In the broad strokes, though, this latest addition to the mythology — as conceived by showrunner Noah Hawley, who previously translated 'Fargo' to TV — very much contains the same core of distrusting those in charge, along with some new wrinkles that work more fitfully.
The end game of those corporate objectives as usual remains murky, but again involves using synthetic androids — whose actions and motivations prove suspect — and seeking the means to capitalize on the alien creatures. Naturally, that requires the customary hubris about attempting to cash in on something so uncontrollable, unpredictable and dangerous.
By adding a human face, in the form of a young technocrat (Samuel Blenkin) running a company appropriately named Prodigy Corp., 'Alien: Earth' does endeavor to make the story more contemporary. The self-proclaimed 'boy genius' feels like a composite inspired by any number of CEOs, which says something about this plutocratic moment given that the character would have seemed exaggerated or cartoonish before the modern tech explosion.
As Hawley said during a pre-launch press conference, 'If I had done the 1970s version of capitalism it wouldn't have felt right for the world we live in today,' adding that humanity is 'trapped between the AI future and the monsters of the past.'
The shock of the first 'Alien' — beyond wedding a haunted house to striking monster biology and set design — hinged in part on the cavalier attitude 'the company' harbored toward the lives of the crew. What they intended to do with the xenomorph was ill defined — something about the bio-weapons division — but the key point was treating the survival of those manning the ship as a secondary concern.
That aspect became even more pronounced in the brilliant sequel 'Aliens,' directed by James Cameron, which features Paul Reiser as Burke, a mid-level manager, and the kind of corporate suck-up everyone has encountered. Burke gradually reveals who he is, balking at eradicating the aliens because a space installation has a 'substantial dollar value,' before seeking to curry favor from his superiors by allowing Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and a young child to be 'impregnated' by the monster in order to bring specimens home.
As Ripley says whens he exposes the plot, 'You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.'
Their shortcomings aside, the subsequent films, up to last year's 'Alien: Romulus,' have continued playing with these themes. Even after it was given a name, the company, Weyland-Yutani, cares more about the research and development possibilities in that enticing alien DNA than preserving the humans in its employ.
Of course, there's some irony in that, since 'Alien' has itself become a title with a 'substantial dollar value,' spanning nine movies (including two crossovers with the 'Predator' franchise) totaling almost $2 billion in global box office. In an interview last year, original director Ridley Scott conceded the third and fourth films 'ran that firmly into the ground,' while more generously appraising the subsequent sequels, having directed two of them.
In later episodes, 'Alien: Earth' pointedly addresses some of the issues the franchise has contemplated, with a character discussing the irony of smart people who are 'too stupid to realize you don't bring parasites home with you.'
There's a possible lesson there regarding AI, where the lure of its potential might be blinding us to its dangers, and massive real-world companies appear either oblivious — or worse, indifferent — to the societal harm that it might do. That's evident in the commentary from the likes of Meta and OpenAI, who are pouring billions of dollars in an AI arms race against each other and China.
Even if the robots don't murder us, as envisioned in the sci-fi version of these scenarios, they appear more tangibly destined to replace us by killing off a lot of our jobs.
The employees in 'Alien: Earth' also recognize who's calling the shots, with one acknowledging that everything being done and the risks they're facing are 'always about power,' which includes exploring space to serve the company's ends.
'Alien' notably premiered at the close of the 1970s, a decade seen as a golden age for paranoid conspiracy thrillers — including those that reflected the callousness of corporate greed, like 'The China Syndrome' and 'Coma.'
In that sense, having five corporations run things, like the American Mafia's five families, hardly feels like an accident. Because in 'Alien,' then and now, 'the company' rules the world, and the rest of us just try to hang on working for them.
'Alien: Earth' premieres Aug. 12 on FX and Hulu.
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