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Watch our exclusive first look at the new Raised By Wolves trailer below:
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The new trailer for Raised by Wolves is a natural, amped up escalation from the first trailer we saw. In addition to Ridley Scott’s name, the all-time great director’s stamp is squarely on the imagery as well. While he didn’t create the series, he did direct the first two episodes and reportedly created detailed storyboards to help determine the look and tone of the show. And that’s what’s most striking to this jaded film commenter: This trailer makes Raised by Wolves seem like a pretty rad cocktail of old Ridley Scott and new Ridley Scott. (Or young Ridley Scott and old Ridley Scott, which is the same thing but opposite.) Either way, Raised by Wolves might be the most Ridley Scott thing that ever Ridley Scotted.
Let me explain…
The opening shots of a spaceship arriving on a rugged, unpopulated planet are visually striking in the same way as Scott’s more recent work. The Martian portrayed a tiny and lonely Matt Damon in the midst of a vast Martian landscape. Prometheus and Alien: Covenant dealt with human expeditions into this sort of terrain as well; the undiscovered edges of humanity’s reach, where our ships are dwarfed by the planets, mountains, and landscapes we encounter, a visual metaphor for our tiny place in the universe. There’s some pretty serious sperm-and-egg imagery in this shot composition as well, tied to the VO about creating a new world. It’s the long odds of the miracle of life, and our attempts to create civilization out in the stars.
This is a far cry from Scott’s earlier work. Take Alien for example: the title sequence opens on a dark planet that gives way to an image of the Nostromo that’s similar in size.
But while visually the trailer feels like Scott’s more recent projects, thematically, Raised by Wolves seems to be posing similar questions to Scott’s earlier Blade Runner. What happens when AI – an android in the show’s case – longs to be human? It’s likely that showrunner Aaron Guzikowski’s writing aims to interrogate that friction through Mother and the more affable Father.
The tears Mother sheds at the sight of her children indicate that having offspring changes something in Mother, shown again when Father tells her she’s been more prone to erratic behavior.
She is an android, built, programmed, and given instructions by humans, who is now obeying those instructions to such a fanatical extent that she’ll use violence if necessary. It’s posing a version of the old AI paperclip thought experiment by Nick Bostrom: If you program an AI to create paper clips as efficiently as possible, it may end up destroying humanity to do so. Here, Mother has been charged with securing a future for humanity by protecting these children and is murdering lots of humans to accomplish her task.
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Where it treads into Blade Runner territory is the taste of humanity given to AI. Given a glimpse of life, the Replicants only wanted to live a little longer. And given the purpose of children, Mother is determined to protect them at all costs.
There’s a throughline of AI in Ridley Scott’s work – from Ash in the original Alien, to Roy Batty, to Fassbender’s David, and now Mother – that sees a progressively darker and more hostile intent at the center of the programming, but always with the question: where did that programming come from? What does it say about the programming’s creators? Guzikowski clearly wants us to ask those questions, given that Mother’s creator provides the first voiceover in the trailer.
“Ridley has been working with these sorts of themes for a good long time now, starting with Alien and then Blade Runner. So I think there’s a thematic connection,” Guzikowski recently told reporters at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, discussing the role of AI in the series. “He directed the first two episodes; he was intimately involved in the entire production. So there was a lot of exchange of DNA between a lot of the mythologies that Ridley has established in the past and this new story. But I think a lot of the rules that apply to these androids and a lot of the questions that they bring up, are similar to going as far back to Ash from Alien.”
Meanwhile, we haven’t even talked about middle-period Ridley Scott (or Mid Rids, as I call him).
There’s probably a reason why the three titles referenced on screen in this trailer are The Martian, Gladiator, and Alien. While The Martian represents a newer aesthetic and the theme of survival in a hostile new world, and Alien (in spite of the fact the first movie was about space truckers and the importance of quarantine) has come to represent the dangers of man’s own innovations – along with Scott’s more recent visits to the franchise, Gladiator’s influences are seen in the people that crash Mother’s party.
They’re scarred and barbaric, apparently not the humans “enlightened” enough to create and program Mother, a throwback to the ancient and superstitious religious beliefs which Mother’s creator cites as being the downfall of mankind. This focus on religious differences and the cost of blind faith also evokes Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven – indeed, the armor worn by the human warriors led by Vikings star Travis Fimmel seems designed to call to mind the armor of the Knights Templar during the Crusades.
“I think in some ways it continues on some aesthetics that Ridley’s established in some of his previous films. In this series, he’s evolved into just transmogrifying these ideas into things people haven’t necessarily seen yet,” Guzikowski explained. “But there is sort of a continuity, in terms of just the visuals in Alien and Blade Runner, Alien Covenant, in terms of the way they’ve imagined what an alien planet could look like, to the androids and even some of the H.R. Giger type of design stuff – all of that is in there. But in addition to that, it’s kind of evolved into a new stage of trying to look into the future. Now that we’re kind of already in a science fiction future, coming up with this stuff just takes on a different sort of process. I think it has the DNA of Ridley’s previous work, but he’s evolving into some new stuff that we haven’t seen yet.”
On the surface, Raised By Wolves looks like a cool, dystopian piece of science fiction with a dash or two of Ridley Scott’s hallmarks mixed in. But when you look at the specific dashes being added, and the origin of some of the themes and visuals at play in this trailer, it’s no surprise that Scott gravitated towards Guzikowski’s story and the complex moral questions the showrunner seems to be exploring here. Raised By Wolves could end up being the purest distillation of Ridley Scott’s themes we’ve ever seen.
Raised By Wolves releases its first three episodes on Thursday, September 3 on HBO Max. Keep it locked to IGN this week for much more from Raised By Wolves.
