Latest news with #Kavalier
NZ Herald
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- NZ Herald
Alien: Earth delivers Xenomorph terror with a Peter Pan twist
The first of these (and Kavalier's favourite) is a sprightly, charming synth named Wendy (Sydney Chandler), whom we first meet as Marcy (Florence Bensberg), a thoughtful 12-year-old girl losing her battle to cancer. As the 'eldest', she mentors and leads the other five: Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), Smee (Jonathan Ajayi), Curly (Erana James), Nibs (Lily Newmark) and Tootles (Kit Young). The micro-society these hybrid beings form is as appealing as the grim, merely human society portrayed on-screen is predictable, ugly and impoverished. Ajayi, Gourav and Chandler are particularly good at channeling their characters' childlike worldview, and the setting the synths inhabit is just plain fun. Fans of Hawley's show Legion know how much the writer-director loves a swanky supernatural training camp. The Lost Boys accordingly live on an idyllic Jurassic Park-style island called Neverland that feels aesthetically and tonally distinct from the dim, oppressive dystopias of the Alien franchise. There the six synths are tended, cosseted and monitored by a maternal psychiatrist of sorts named Dame Silvia (an underused Essie Davis), her husband Arthur (David Rysdahl), who handles most of the science, and Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), an older synthetic who manages the mission, the island's security, and – to the extent that he can – Kavalier's impulses and moods. You might be wondering how this story could productively intersect with the world we know from the other Alien films. Indeed, clocking in at only eight episodes, Alien: Earth does feel a tad overstuffed. It is also, however, philosophically interested in unnatural hybrids, whether those are cyborgs, synths or newer, more horrifying trans-species combinations. Sydney Chandler in "Alien Earth". Photo / FX It's fitting, therefore, that the character narratively linking these two plots – Marcy's (now Wendy's) older brother, working off his corporate debt as a lowly soldier-medic – is named Hermit (Alex Lawther). Known for climbing into vessels that are not theirs and operating from within, the hermit crab's modus operandi becomes a central metaphor for the series. That isn't new terrain for the franchise; in fact, it maps nicely on to that scene in Aliens where Sigourney Weaver's Ripley dons an armoured, body-shaped forklift to fight the alien queen. But it is a slightly different spin on the genre's usual kind of body horror. Hawley's series is less interested in predatory parasitism (or incubation, or rape) than in occupation – specifically, the proposition that consciousness and identity can remain unaffected by whichever body 'you' take on. That said, there's plenty of gore and the aliens certainly don't get short shrift. Alien: Earth is set in 2120, two years before the events of Ridley Scott's 1979 Alien, and the series opens much like the original, with a crew unhappily manning a (different) Weyland-Yutani spaceship called the USCSS Maginot. They're on a 65-year mission transporting a set of specimens for the Yutani Corporation (one of Prodigy's four corporate rivals). Production designer Andy Nicholson is eerily faithful to the look and style of the original; even the cryopods look the same. The vibe, too, is similar, with the worn-down crew members acting more like exhausted truck drivers than space officers as they wearily discuss fractions of shares. The pilot only delivers slivers of the story viewers will come to know, and I won't get into the alien plot to avoid spoilers, but there's plenty of Xenomorph carnage. There is, in any event, a crash. The Maginot lands on a building belonging to Boy Kavalier, and the plot really gets going when Hermit ends up at the crash site on a search-and-rescue mission. Alerted to the presence of alien species on board, Kavalier decides to try to contain them himself, rather than hand them over to Yutani. That bureaucratic spat between trillionaires is the official pretext for much that transpires on the series. The show isn't perfect. An initially promising rivalry between two of the show's more interesting and powerful characters – Morrow (Babou Ceesay), a cyborg working for Yutani, and Kavalier's deputy Kirsh – ends up feeling more arbitrary than cathartic. Ceesay's exceptional performance benefits from a script that gives him space to break down. Olyphant's character, by contrast, remains a tantalising cipher for much of the series. But because it isn't clear what a synthetic of his vintage feels or 'wants', his rare outbursts are more confusing than compelling. Chandler is the series MVP. As Wendy, her old attachment to her brother Hermit drives much of the action. That's hard to do without coming across as saccharine or cloying. Playing a kid-made-synth, Chandler needed to anchor and humanise a number of thought experiments: Does identity remain unaffected by the body it occupies? What will children do if given adult bodies and superhuman capabilities? How much does giftedness alienate (pun intended) the ordinary, and vice versa? She brings so much energy and charisma and curiosity and upstart authority to the role that she successfully camouflages some uglier features of her character's arc. In fact, if the series has a major flaw, it might be its failure to narratively temper Wendy's magnetism, which sometimes destabilises and decentres the franchise's usual focus on (and commitment to) corporate dystopias. I keep coming back to a tonally weird moment in the finale in which two minor characters, both workers and victims of the hyper-capitalistic hellscape the series otherwise critiques, die in a predictably terrible way. The moment lands as celebratory. It felt like the show itself had at that point been taken over by a perspective that wasn't quite its own. The first two episodes of Alien: Earth are now streaming on Disney+ with subsequent episodes airing weekly.
Time Magazine
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Time Magazine
How 'Alien: Earth' Fits Into the 'Alien' Universe
For the first time ever, the Alien universe is crash-landing onto the small screen. In the wake of 2024's Alien: Romulus, a seventh film entry in the storied franchise that began with Ridley Scott's 1979 sci-fi thriller classic Alien, Fargo creator Noah Hawley's new TV series Alien: Earth will see the long-running horror saga touch down on a world it's never explored before: our very own planet Earth. "The thing with Alien is that it's not just a great monster movie. It's the story of humanity trapped between its primordial parasitic past and its AI future, and they're both trying to kill us. So, there's nowhere to go," Hawley has said of the inspiration for Earth, which is also produced by Scott. "It's really a story of does humanity deserve to survive? Does humanity's arrogance in thinking that we're no longer food and its arrogance in creating these AI beings who we think will do what we tell them—but ultimately might lose their mind—is there a way out?" The first two episodes of Earth premiere Aug. 12 at 8 p.m. ET on FX, with subsequent installments releasing every Tuesday through Sept. 23. New episodes will be available to stream on Hulu in the U.S. and Disney+ internationally. Here's how Alien: Earth fits into the overall Alien timeline. How Alien: Earth connects to Alien While Romulus was set in the year 2142—right smack in between the events of Alien, which takes place in 2122, and the 1986 James Cameron-directed sequel Aliens, set in 2179—Earth serves as a prequel series that takes place in 2120, two years before the events of the original movie. The show unfolds in a not-so-distant future where five rival corporations—Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold—effectively govern the Earth. As we learn from an opening transmission in Episode 1, it's a moment in time when the race for immortality has evolved to take three different forms. There are cyborgs, biological humans enhanced with artificial parts; synths, humanoid robots infused with human consciousness (like the late Ian Holm's iconic android Ash from Alien); and hybrids, synthetic beings downloaded with human consciousness. Hybrids are the newest technological advancement of the three and come courtesy of trillionaire wunderkind Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) and his company Prodigy, which has developed a top-secret method for transferring the consciousnesses of terminally ill children into superhuman and theoretically immortal synthetic bodies. After bringing their first successful hybrid to life, so to speak, by transferring the consciousness of Marcy (Florence Bensberg), a 12-year-old girl dying from cancer, into an adult-bodied synthetic named Wendy (Sydney Chandler), the Prodigy team moves forward with creating a squad of childlike synths dubbed the Lost Boys. Kavalier obviously loves his Peter Pan references. It's clear from the start that the whole thing is an ethical minefield of epic proportions. But it's not until Kavalier sends Wendy and her Lost Boys to investigate the wreckage of a Weyland-Yutani spaceship that crash-landed in the Prodigy-controlled city of New Siam—and just so happens to contain not only a full-grown Xenomorph, but also a variety of other mysterious and highly predatory life forms—that the experiment begins to truly spiral out of control. Do Prometheus and Covenant come into play? For those wondering whether the somewhat convoluted backstory introduced in Scott's previous two prequel films, 2012's Prometheus and 2017's Alien: Covenant, will come into play considering the latter is set just 16 years before the events of Earth, the short answer is no. While Earth delves into some of the same existential themes concerning humanity's place in the universe as Scott's prequels, Hawley has said the Xenomorph lore established in Alien made more sense for Earth. "For me, and for a lot of people, this 'perfect life form'—as it was described in the first film—is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space," he told KCRW. "The idea that, on some level, it was a bioweapon created half an hour ago, that's just inherently less useful to me." The showrunner went on to explain that he also wanted to retain the "retro-futuristic technology" from the first two Alien movies. "[I]n the prequels, Ridley made the technology thousands of years more advanced than the technology of Alien, which is supposed to take place in those movies' future," he said. "There's something about that that doesn't really compute for me. I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films. And so that's the choice I've made—there's no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple store technology is not available to me."
Toronto Sun
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- Toronto Sun
‘Alien: Earth' delivers Xenomorph terror with a ‘Peter Pan' twist
Published Aug 12, 2025 • Last updated 4 minutes ago • 5 minute read Sydney Chandler in 'Alien: Earth'. Photo by FX This review contains mild spoilers for 'Alien: Earth,' Season 1. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. THIS CONTENT IS RESERVED FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. SUBSCRIBE TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Subscribe now to read the latest news in your city and across Canada. Unlimited online access to articles from across Canada with one account. Get exclusive access to the Toronto Sun ePaper, an electronic replica of the print edition that you can share, download and comment on. Enjoy insights and behind-the-scenes analysis from our award-winning journalists. Support local journalists and the next generation of journalists. Daily puzzles including the New York Times Crossword. REGISTER / SIGN IN TO UNLOCK MORE ARTICLES Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account. Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments. Enjoy additional articles per month. Get email updates from your favourite authors. THIS ARTICLE IS FREE TO READ REGISTER TO UNLOCK. Create an account or sign in to continue with your reading experience. Access articles from across Canada with one account Share your thoughts and join the conversation in the comments Enjoy additional articles per month Get email updates from your favourite authors Don't have an account? Create Account – – – FX's new 'Alien' prequel, 'Alien: Earth,' batters viewers expecting Xenomorph horror from an additional, less expected angle: The series is practically drowning in 'Peter Pan' metaphors that don't quite work. That's partly by design; this is a show about infelicitous hybrids. What happens when things combine that once couldn't, and perhaps shouldn't? The Pan references come mostly from a nefarious young trillionaire named Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) who founded Prodigy, one of the five major corporations controlling the globe. He relishes reading J.M. Barrie passages aloud to his 'Lost Boys,' a group of six powerful and virtually immortal synthetic creatures into whom Kavalier's company has transferred the consciousnesses of six dying children. A prodigy himself, Kavalier theorizes that children have greater flexibility and potential. So while the 'synths,' his prototype for this version of human immortality, look like adults, they behave and speak like the kids they once were. Your noon-hour look at what's happening in Toronto and beyond. By signing up you consent to receive the above newsletter from Postmedia Network Inc. Please try again This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. The first of these (and Kavalier's favorite) is a sprightly, charming synth named Wendy (Sydney Chandler), whom we first meet as Marcy (Florence Bensberg), a thoughtful 12-year-old girl losing her battle to cancer. As the 'eldest,' she mentors and leads the other five: Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), Smee (Jonathan Ajayi), Curly (Erana James), Nibs (Lily Newmark) and Tootles (Kit Young). The micro-society these hybrid beings form is as appealing as the grim, merely human society portrayed on-screen is predictable, ugly and impoverished. Ajayi, Gourav and Chandler are particularly good at channeling their characters' childlike worldview, and the setting the synths inhabit is just plain fun. Fans of Hawley's show 'Legion' know how much the writer-director loves a swanky supernatural training camp. The Lost Boys accordingly live on an idyllic Jurassic Park-style island called Neverland that feels aesthetically and tonally distinct from the dim, oppressive dystopias of the Alien franchise. There the six synths are tended, cosseted and monitored by a maternal psychiatrist of sorts named Dame Silvia (an underused Essie Davis), her husband Arthur (David Rysdahl), who handles most of the science, and Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), an older synthetic who manages the mission, the island's security, and – to the extent that he can – Kavalier's impulses and moods. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. You might be wondering how this story could productively intersect with the world we know from the other Alien films. Indeed, clocking in at only eight episodes, 'Alien: Earth' does feel a tad overstuffed. It is also, however, philosophically interested in unnatural hybrids, whether those are cyborgs, synths or newer, more horrifying trans-species combinations. It's fitting, therefore, that the character narratively linking these two plots – Marcy's (now Wendy's) older brother, working off his corporate debt as a lowly soldier-medic – is named Hermit (Alex Lawther). Known for climbing into vessels that are not theirs and operating from within, the hermit crab's modus operandi becomes a central metaphor for the series. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. That isn't new terrain for the franchise; in fact, it maps nicely onto that scene in 'Aliens' where Sigourney Weaver's Ripley dons an armored, body-shaped forklift to fight the alien queen. But it is a slightly different spin on the genre's usual kind of body horror. Hawley's series is less interested in predatory parasitism (or incubation, or rape) than in occupation – specifically, the proposition that consciousness and identity can remain unaffected by whichever body 'you' take on. That said, there's plenty of gore and the aliens certainly don't get short shrift. 'Alien: Earth' is set in 2120, two years before the events of Ridley Scott's 1979 'Alien,' and the series opens much like the original, with a crew unhappily manning a (different) Weyland-Yutani spaceship called the USCSS Maginot. They're on a 65-year mission transporting a set of specimens for the Yutani Corporation (one of Prodigy's four corporate rivals). Production designer Andy Nicholson is eerily faithful to the look and style of the original; even the cryopods look the same. The vibe, too, is similar, with the worn-down crew members acting more like exhausted truck drivers than space officers as they wearily discuss fractions of shares. The pilot only delivers slivers of the story viewers will come to know, and I won't get into the alien plot to avoid spoilers, but there's plenty of Xenomorph carnage. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. There is, in any event, a crash. The Maginot lands on a building belonging to Boy Kavalier, and the plot really gets going when Hermit ends up at the crash site on a search-and-rescue mission. Alerted to the presence of alien species on board, Kavalier decides to try to contain them himself, rather than hand them over to Yutani. That bureaucratic spat between trillionaires is the official pretext for much that transpires on the series. The show isn't perfect. An initially promising rivalry between two of the show's more interesting and powerful characters – Morrow (Babou Ceesay), a cyborg working for Yutani, and Kavalier's deputy Kirsh – ends up feeling more arbitrary than cathartic. Ceesay's exceptional performance benefits from a script that gives him space to break down. Olyphant's character, by contrast, remains a tantalizing cipher for much of the series. But because it isn't clear what a synthetic of his vintage feels or 'wants,' his rare outbursts are more confusing than compelling. This advertisement has not loaded yet, but your article continues below. Chandler is the series MVP. As Wendy, her old attachment to her brother Hermit drives much of the action. That's hard to do without coming across as saccharine or cloying. Playing a kid-made-synth, Chandler needed to anchor and humanize a number of thought experiments: Does identity remain unaffected by the body it occupies? What will children do if given adult bodies and superhuman capabilities? How much does giftedness alienate (pun intended) the ordinary, and vice versa? She brings so much energy and charisma and curiosity and upstart authority to the role that she successfully camouflages some uglier features of her character's arc. In fact, if the series has a major flaw, it might be its failure to narratively temper Wendy's magnetism, which sometimes destabilizes and decenters the franchise's usual focus on (and commitment to) corporate dystopias. I keep coming back to a tonally weird moment in the finale in which two minor characters, both workers and victims of the hyper-capitalistic hellscape the series otherwise critiques, die in a predictably terrible way. The moment lands as celebratory. It felt like show itself had at that point been taken over by a perspective that wasn't quite its own. – – – Alien: Earth premieres with two episodes Aug. 12 on Disney+ Columnists World Weird Opinion Toronto & GTA
Boston Globe
08-08-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
The tech bro is now the villain of the hour
The series takes place in 2120, which makes Kavalier a future tech bro. He has highly developed rapacious instincts, and a comically messianic self-image. 'Alien: Earth,' and Blenkin, wisely plays this for laughs. Kavalier prances around in what looks like a bathrobe, bouncing a rubber ball on the floor and off the walls of his private island laboratory compound. At an important business meeting he puts his bare feet up on the table. It helps that Blenkin, in his late twenties, looks a little like a teenager. He is the tech bro as spoiled, precocious child. Advertisement Kavalier has created a group of hybrids that have synthetic human form encasing the souls of dead children. He wants to bridge the gap between mortal and immortal, which is just such a tech bro ambition. Unable or unwilling to connect in a meaningful way with fellow humans, he sprints glibly, goofy smile on his face, toward the next frontier. Advertisement He is tech bro. Hear him roar. Chris Vognar can be reached at
