The “extraterrestrial” films vary considerably in quality – there has undoubtedly not been really satisfactory since the first two in 1979 and 1986 – but a key thread lasted during the 46 years: also frightening the xenomorphs are, “Alien” has always feared AI and the greed of facial companies. And in this regard, his time has come.
The last entry of the franchise, “Alien: Earth”, which will be presented Tuesday, certainly presents these political currents while bringing the threat to the house, both on the spot and in the passage of theaters to FX and Hulu, where only your neighbors can hear you scream.
Admittedly, no one comes to an “extraterrestrial” brand project – a franchise with a firmly planted in science fiction and horror – for a conference on the dangers of unhindered capitalism. However, underlying apprehensions are even more shy now, from the threat of AI to the concept of companies that supplant governments.
“Alien: Earth” lands at a time of increased discomfort about the inequalities of income and the growing political influence exerted by billionaires such as Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos – Magnates who have become names of households. Their companies, on the other hand, continue to grow, with evaluations of billions of dollars – which would have looked like science fiction a few decades – now a reality, with Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Google among those who break this barrier.
“The billions of dollars stocks is larger – and richer – than ever,” Barron fence in 2024.
Despite healthy benefits, these same companies also adopt AI in a way that ignores the potential involuntary consequences and threatens the career of its own employees. Several have explicitly stated as much, with the CEO of Amazon, Andy Jassey, emitting a note in June, speaking that the technology “will reduce our total workforce of the company as we obtain efficiency gains by in depth the AI of the company”.
The series of eight episodes brings the drift of the real world to the corporate oligarchy to its extreme dystopian, with the earth governed by five massive societies, which, as usual, present some components on the sacrifice of human life to advance their objectives and improve their benefits.
In the broad blows, however, this last addition to mythology – as designed by the showrunner Noah Hawley, which previously translated “Fargo” on television – contains a lot of the same distrust core of those in charge, as well as new wrinkles that work more well.
The end of the game of these corporate objectives as usual remains troubled, but once again involves using synthetic androids – whose actions and motivations are suspect – and looking for the means to capitalize on extraterrestrial creatures. Naturally, this requires customary pride to try to take advantage of something so uncontrollable, unpredictable and dangerous.
By adding a human face, in the form of a young technocrat (Samuel Blenkin) who directs a company called Prodigy Corp., “Alien: Earth” strives to make history more contemporary. The self -proclaimed “Boy Genius” resembles a composite inspired by a certain number of CEOs, which says something about this moment rather than the character would have seemed exaggerated or caricatured before the modern technological explosion.
As Hawley said at a press conference before the launch, “if I had made the 1970s version of capitalism, that would not have seemed good for the world in which we live today”, adding that humanity is “trapped between the future of AI and the monsters of the past”.
The shock of the first “extraterrestrial” – beyond marriage, a house haunted with the biology of striking monsters and design – partly articulated on the cavalier attitude “The Company” is home to the life of the crew. What they intended to do with the xenomorphic were poorly defined – something about the division of bio -army weapons – but the key point was to treat the survival of those who manage the ship as a secondary concern.
This aspect has become even more pronounced in the brilliant suite “Aliens”, directed by James Cameron, who presents Paul Reiser as Burke, an intermediate level manager, and the kind of sucking of the company that everyone has encountered. Burke gradually reveals who he is, reluctant to eradicate the extraterrestrials because a space installation has a “substantial dollars value”, before seeking to create the favor of his superiors by allowing Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) and a young child to be “permeated” by the monster in order to bring the specimens.
As Ripley says when he exposes the plot, “you know, Burke, I don’t know what species is worse. You can’t see them fucking for a fucking percentage.”
Their shortcomings apart, the following films, to “Alien: Romulus” from last year, continued to play with these themes. Even after its name, the company, Weyland-Yutani, cares more about research and development possibilities in this foreign DNA which attracts humans to its employee.
Of course, there is a certain irony in this, since “Alien” himself became a title with a “value in substantial dollars”, covering nine films (including two multisgments with the “Predator” franchise) totaling nearly $ 2 billion at the world box-office. In an interview last year, the original director Ridley Scott conceded the third and fourth films “ran firmly in the ground”, while more generously evaluating the following consequences, having made two of them.
In the later episodes, “Alien: Earth” ostensible tackles some of the problems that the franchise has envisaged, with a character discussing the irony of intelligent people who are “too stupid to realize that you do not bring back the parasites at home with you”.
There is a possible lesson concerning AI, where the attraction of its potential could blind us to its dangers, and massive real companies appear either unconscious – or worse, indifferent – to the societal evil it could do. This is obvious in Meta and Openai’s comment, which pay billions of dollars in an AI and China’s arms race.
Even if the robots do not assassin us, as envisaged in the science fiction version of these scenarios, they seem more tangibly intended to replace us by killing a lot of our jobs.
The employees of “Alien: Earth” also recognize who calls for the shots, with one grateful that everything that is done and the risks they face are “always a question of power”, which includes the exploration of space to serve the end of the business.
“Alien” was notably presented in the late 1970s, a decade considered as a golden age for the thrillers of paranoid conspiracy – including those which reflected the terrible greed of companies, such as “Chinese syndrome” and “coma”.
In this sense, having five companies directing things, like the five families of the American mafia, hardly resembles an accident. Because in “Alien”, then and now, “the business” governs the world, and the rest of us simply try to hang on to work for them.
“Alien: Earth” will be presented on August 12 on FX and Hulu.
