The first two episodes of Alien: Earth premiere Tuesday, August 12 on Hulu and FX.
Alien: Earth is the latest entry into the long running franchise that all at once pays homage to its source material while breaking some entirely new ground with a thought experiment worthy of the best kind of proper science fiction. It’s an evolution, it’s slick and scary just like every good little Xenomorph should be.
Ridley Scott’s original Alien in 1979 is one of science fiction’s biggest pairs of shoes to fill. In fact, I’d say the best the franchise has been since the original was James Cameron’s sequel which was a completely different genre. Going to toe-to-toe with the original as a claustrophobic monster movie has been proven to be a bad idea for decades. So when Alien: Earth’s first episode opens with a beat for beat recreation of some of the original Alien’s early moments, best case scenario, you call that “confident.” Get it wrong, though, and it’s “pandering fan fic.”
The good news is, Noah Hawley and the writers and directors behind Alien: Earth’s first season have no intentions of pandering to anybody for anything. More so than 2024’s Romulus, this series is going back to the roots of the franchise in some really effective ways. Alien: Earth is clearly set in the same universe and of course has all the nods and winks and Easter eggs one would expect with a legacy prequel series. But by Hawley and FX’s own admission, they’re also pretty clearly unconcerned with how Earth actually ‘fits’ into the established Alien canon.
This series of course acknowledges the roots of the franchise in a number of ways. The production design is straight out of the 1979 original, as is the wardrobe. The languid edits and slow cross dissolves will also feel familiar, as will the class struggle playing out between characters eager to remind others of their rank. The music does a lot of heavy nostalgic lifting as well, because Hawley and series composer Jeff Russo are very much not shy about pulling some of those Jerry Goldsmith sounds from the original film. Most importantly, all of those nods to fan service buy Alien: Earth the credibility it needs to start caring less about the “official timeline” of the franchise. It proves the creative team understand what world this show is stepping into and affords them more latitude to make some different choices.
But what do we really need out of a TV series set in this universe if not great creature design? Thanks to Earth, the Alien franchise introduces us to some brand new aliens. The design of these new creatures is very good, maybe not great. Even so, they help Alien: Earth scratch that scared-of-the-dark itch – perhaps better than any entry in the franchise outside of the first movie. This show taps into that caveman part of your brain, where you know something is not right, that there’s danger lurking out there just out of view.
There is one exception though, that I won’t dig into because it’s best just to put your own eyes on it. I will only say that in episode four, this particular creature stars in one of the gnarliest scenes I’ve seen on any screen in some time. I feel like it will be the unexpected star of this season, like the Alien franchise has found it’s Grogu. Just, you know, terrifying instead of adorable.
Still, when it comes to sheer extraterrestrial horror, there’s no beating the Xenomorph. H.R. Giger’s original design is acid-etched into the movie monster Mount Rushmore, and it casts a long shadow – I wouldn’t be alone in arguing that it’s the main reason the franchise has had such staying power. That’s an important thing to keep in mind when you look at how this show deals with its newly acquired deep space specimens. Alien: Earth doesn’t want to remix, reheat, or replace the Xenomorph. It seems like an effort was made to keep “the perfect organism” separate and special, in a non-competitive space with the new creatures.
There are some truly nerve wracking scenes where this alien menagerie is all in a room together just… watching – observing their environment and the people keeping them captive and studying them. But, weirdly enough, Hawley lets most of the cast do this. There’s a similar eeriness happening between humans and synths and cyborgs as well. The nonverbal communication deployed in Alien: Earth is next level – which brings me to what I think is the smartest thing about this show.
Beyond all the connections to the movies and the creature design (gnarly and otherwise), you can’t sleep on the ways this show is expanding Alien as a franchise. The films have grown increasingly fascinated with the synthetics. From Ash’s monster-in-hiding to Bishop’s face turn to David getting top-billing in Prometheus, Alien has always dealt with the artificial alongside the pure evolutionary machine of the Xenomorph. Alien: Earth’s addition to this lineage comes in the form of the Hybrid, a human consciousness ported over to a synthetic body. More specifically, it’s terminally ill children being moved from their failing human bodies into new, robotic, supercomputer models.
The ramification of that, the moral questions very rightly raised by experimenting like that with children are dealt with at length, as a central conceit of the season, so I won’t dwell on that here. What I will say though, is that it offers a sort of one-to-one dynamic between the kids and the Xenomorph. They’re all organisms moved to a new host body to be studied and exploited by corporations.
That’s what I found to be the most interesting thread to pull on and, to be fair, there’s a moment in this season where it’s pulled so hard, the entire sweater almost comes unravelled. It didn’t for me, but there’s a tipping point where the story of this season might lean a little too weird. Were it not for the impeccable groundwork laid in the first half of the season, and the pace with which the connection is revealed, it might not have worked. Either way, that the experience these children are having is so tied to the life cycle of a Xenomorph is an interesting place to take Alien, one that honestly feels like the natural next step on the path they’ve been on since Ridley Scott ditched space truckers for billionaires who want to meet God.
I’ve come all this way without mentioning one of the show’s biggest strengths. This cast is great. Mostly new faces and a few old reliables, there’s not a weak link among them. All the kids played by adults do a truly remarkable job with a sort of childlike wonder that’s perfectly incongruous with their physical appearance. Boy Kavelier, played by Samuel Blenkin, is infinitely hateable as head of the megacorporation, Prodigy.
I also have to mention Babou Ceesay as Morrow, a Weyland-Yutani security officer and extremely determined cyborg. The fine line he walks between villainous and sympathetic is so much fun to watch. He starts as a cold and ruthless company man, and while he never really shakes that, there’s a tragic sense that he’s aware of how thoroughly he’s being used that creeps into his story as the season goes on.
Timothy Olyphant is the one for sure recognizable member of this cast. (With genuine apologies to Essie Davis and Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries fans everywhere, my wife included.) Olyphant is at his best when he’s doing less-is-more. He’s the ideal kind of “still waters run deep” performer to cast as a synthetic with an unthinkable breadth of knowledge and wisdom and scheming mixed in with his subroutines. His character, Kirsh, is a melting pot of influences as well, with a look that’s clearly giving Roy Batty and a performance, as he told us at Comic-Con, peppered with Natasha McElhone from Steven Soderbergh’s remake of Tarkovsky’s Solaris. And he’s clearly having a blast doing all of it.
Sydney Chandler though, is hands down the star of this thing. In every closeup of her as the first Hybrid, Wendy, you can see she’s processing a million things at a million miles an hour, all with the bright and brave eyes of the little girl living inside this synthetic husk. Her journey in this season is the one you really need to buy into if you’re going to get everything on offer with Alien: Earth. That thread that gets pulled to its breaking point works in large part thanks to Chandler’s performance. If you don’t like that part of the series, it’s certainly not on her.
As the show narrows it’s focus in the final episodes, it does start to feel a little rushed, ending in a less satisfying place than it could have, but not by much. Frankly, I’m just ready for everybody to see this show so I can start talking about it in spoilery detail, which is it’s own kind of endorsement. For now, in this non-spoiler review, I get to close by talking about vibes.
The vibes in this show are unreal. The slow edits and the languid cross dissolves, the double exposure transitions and the way the title sequence plays out like an eerie previously on montage of some of the more disturbing images Alien: Earth has offered to that point. There are super fun little bits of technique like when characters talk to each other over radio, the sound isn’t filtered the way we normally hear phone calls or radio transmissions. It sounds like the voice is right there in the room. It’s just cool. It offers nothing to the proceedings other than me sitting here thinking “well that’s cool.”
To be clear, I’m not a “cool for the sake of cool” guy. Generally I find myself having zero patience for that sort of thing, but then Noah Hawley decides to end every episode of Alien: Earth with a very loud hard rock track. There’s nothing narratively in the show that begs for booming needle drops as soon as the credits roll. There’s no character with an affinity for music or any Guardians of the Galaxy style built-in excuse for a soundtrack. The songs don’t even necessarily match the tone of the last scene as a sort of emotional transition out of the episode, and you have to dig around in the lyrics to find any kind of connection. But the choice to find those connections in hard rock tracks, tracks which I won’t name because they’re each such pleasant surprises, I think is mostly just to remind you that this show fucks.
I love it.
