Hawley sets up a number of dualities like this in the story. Two others are the hard-liner Atom Eins (played by Adrian Edmondson, the Star Destroyer
Hawley sets up a number of dualities like this in the story. Two others are the hard-liner Atom Eins (played by Adrian Edmondson, the Star Destroyer captain from The Last Jedi), who is the fixer and first lieutenant for Boy Kavalier, and the technician Arthur Sylvia (David Rysdahl, the hapless husband on Fargo, season five), the husband of Dame who starts to have misgivings about the Hybrid program he has helped create.
“David Rysdahl is maybe the most human person I know,” Hawley says. “He’s so accessible and kind, and he is, in many ways, the moral conscience of this exercise. [His character] is the one who will always raise his hand and go, ‘This is not just science, this is people.’”
The CEO doesn’t always see it that way, but he has Edmondson’s character to get his hands sullied. “Atom, as Boy Kavalier’s right-hand adviser and enforcer, is a much more impenetrable character, who is basically there in that corporate mindset: ‘There is no morality, there’s just what the boss wants,’” Hawley says.
Just like AI, the humans Kavalier surrounds himself with tend to tell him exactly what he wants to hear.
The Maginot and Weyland-Yutani
While it explores the meaning of being human, Alien: Earth is also about the destructive nature of an arms race for fresh technology.
Kavalier’s company’s principal adversary is Weyland-Yutani, a familiar corporation from Alien lore. “I thought about 1900, when you had Tesla and Edison and Westinghouse, and they were all battling to see who was going to control electricity,” Hawley says. “So I thought, What if this is a moment like that, where you basically have this battle between these corporations for the future?”
Previous films in the franchise, such as 2004’s dubiously received Alien vs. Predator and 2012’s Prometheus, have featured characters who are early scions of the Weyland family. In Alien: Earth, fans will meet another trillionaire power broker from that dynasty’s partner, known now only by her last name. “We’ve never seen the Yutani side of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation,” Hawley says.
Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver, who played the stealthy adviser to the queen in Apple TV’s sci-fi show Foundation) controls an old-money fortune along with about a fifth of the planet’s industry. “The Yutani side is a matriarchal corporation,” Hawley says. “Her grandmother ran the company, and then her mother ran it, and somewhere there was a merger with Weyland. Now Yutani is trying to navigate being the second name in the corporation, holding on to power and managing the geopolitics on a planet where there’s five corporations that control everything. In the end, they all just want to be a monopoly.”
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