Africa as an alien planet in Settlers and Raised by Wolves

Both HBOMax’s smash-hit sci-fi series Raised by Wolves and the fantasy thriller movie Settlers were filmed in South Africa – Raised by Wolves in the Western Cape and Settlers in the Northern Cape, close to the Namibian border – but the alien planets depicted by these landscapes ended up with quite different aesthetics. Who did it best?

Watch Settlers and Raised by Wolves, both set on other planets (one real, one imagined), and both streaming exclusively on Showmax, to make up your mind.

Settlers

This sci-fi movie is set on Mars – you know, the planet that SA-born tech genius Elon Musk is trying to visit? But it was filmed close to Namibia, in a desolated desert town called Vioolsdrift in the Northern Cape. It certainly looks the part – the soil is red, there’s no plant life for as far as the eye can see, and there’s the wind.

Here’s the low-down on the movie. It stars Jonny Lee Miller as Reza, a settler patriarch who has helped to colonise Mars. His family – his wife and daughter – are the only people on the planet. Or so they think. But then one day an ominous warning is painted across their pod window: “LEAVE!” Since no one else lives there, the group fear for their lives… but at least they have an arsenal of high-powered automatic guns to shoot any possible enemies to pieces. But what they’re not expecting is that there are other people on Mars, too, and they want Reza and his family to, well, leave.

Settlers looks flashy and fancy on the outside, but there are one or two things that’ll have you scratching your head. Like why the characters can breathe the Martian air as though they were on Earth. And why there’s wind on a planet that supposedly has no atmosphere. Don’t worry – while it’s a sci-fi movie, you don’t really need to expect actual scientific reasoning for it to be entertaining.

What you should take away from Settlers is how dead the set and location feel. And that’s pretty much how Mars is, says director Wyatt Rockefeller. “We wanted to create a vivid feeling of minimalist world-building – constructing an overwhelmingly desolate Martian farmstead in South Africa’s Namaqualand desert, in which avenues of exploration feel infinite, and escape impossible.” The more the main characters try to escape their would-be attackers, the more you feel they’re going to be gunned down in the very next scene.

Africa as an alien world rating: 7/10 – restricted use of CGI means the filming location is as close to the Mars landscape as you’re gonna find in Mzansi.

Raised by Wolves S1-2

This Ridley Scott-produced and directed sci-fi series is filmed entirely on set in Cape Town at the Cape Town Film Studio complex at Film City Boulevard, Dreamworld. The brand-new Season 2 was also filmed there, in mid 2021, at the Film Afrika Studios, as well as other locations in the Western Cape, and you can stream both seasons in one shot.

The story is set on Kepler-22b, an Earth-like planet that is home to mankind’s future. Two androids, creatively named Father and Mother (Abubakar Salim and Amanda Collin), have been sent to this new world after Earth was destroyed in The Great War, and their singular mission is to establish an atheist colony of humans. They’ve been programmed to gestate using implanted human foetuses and raise “their children” like normal kids – they need to be taught how to survive, but not to believe in religion.

The element that separates Raised By Wolves from Settlers is that it’s CGI heavy and has that alien vibe – Mother, Father and the children are all wearing skin-tight PVC-like bodysuits. The technology is slick and polished – tools are shiny polished chrome. It’s meant to feel alien and the landscape is very different. Instead of Martian red, there are loads more hues – greens and greys, black and even sunsets and sunrises along the mountains that are unmistakably from the Cape. There are also rivers and fauna and flora giving colour to scenes and an almost “this is possible, there are planets out there capable of sustaining life” vibe.

And that’s exactly what Ridley wanted, revealing that “we found a range of mountains that were in your face for about a kilometre, and every morning, this tablecloth of cloud would come in, it would just roll over them, and I went, ‘Oh my God!’ It was surreal, it was otherworldly, so half the work was done, just by the location.”

Local plants like kokerboom trees added to the alien landscape feel. “What I loved in the desert were the trees, which were something in the aloe/cactus family. I said, ‘I have to have those trees.’ We got permission to transplant some onto a piece of terrain less than a kilometre from the foot of this beautiful mountain range,” adds Ridley.

Africa as an alien world rating: 9/10 – the CGI is obvious but knowing that the plant life and nature looks exactly like it is in real life makes this a little more “personal” for local viewers.