In Alien: Earth, Everyone Will Hear You Screaming: Review

Sometimes, a TV show’s title can be considered misleading, or even downright dishonest. That’s not the case for Alien: Earth, creator Noah Hawley’s big-budget effort to bring the iconic sci-fi horror franchise planetside. This show’s got aliens in it, including the long-feared creatures best known as Xenomorphs, and they are on Earth. You even see them in the daylight sometimes!

They get to Earth relatively quickly, too, as Hawley uses the eight episodes of Season 1 to set up a wild new pocket of the Alien universe, one with a deeply felt interest in exploring what it means to be human. In many cases, thanks to the magic of science fiction, that question ends up becoming a quite literal one for some of these characters. All while, thanks to the magic of horror, these characters find themselves struggling to survive some truly gnarly human-killing creatures from outer space.

The series begins with a very familiar scene: A crew on board the Weyland-Yutani deep-space vessel Maginot, emerging from cryosleep after a decades-long journey through space. Much like the crew of the Nostromo from Ridley Scott’s 1979 thriller, we know nothing good is about to happen to them, thanks to the many wild biological samples they’ve brought on board, including some familiar-looking fleshy eggs, ready to hatch.

But then we head back to Earth, where the world is largely controlled by five different corporations, a group that includes Weyland-Yutani as well as The Prodigy Corporation, founded by a young genius who’s dubbed himself Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). All of these companies are exploring the realm of trans-humanism in the quest for immortality, with Boy Kavalier in particular setting out to discover what happens when you transfer human consciousnesses into synthetic bodies.

Turns out it’s not really possible to put an adult mind in a robot body. The minds of children, on the other hand, are a lot more pliable. So when Boy Kavalier offers a terminally ill little girl the chance to escape her fate, she becomes the newly-named Wendy (played by Sydney Chandler), first to join Boy Kavalier’s new team of Lost Boys (a group which does include two other girls, neither of whom love their new J. M. Barrie-inspired names).

The Peter Pan analogy is not a subtle one, implemented as a sharp contrast to the grim reality of the scenario the children find themselves in: Occupying new adult bodies they don’t quite understand (bodies that don’t function exaclty like human bodies do), and unable to connect with their families due to the extreme secrecy of the procedure. This is hardest for Wendy, because she very much misses her older brother Hermit (Alex Lawther), who happens to work for Prodigy’s security services operation as a field medic. But fate — and a crashing spaceship — will soon intervene on their behalf.

The above captures what feels like just a fraction of the full scope of the series, one that at times does feel a little overloaded with big concepts Hawley’s interested in exploring. The ruthless bureaucracy of a corporation-ruled world, the existential questions surrounding the nature of being alive, the lines that divide us from the animals — all of these themes are pretty fascinating, but they do lead to some episodes feeling like particularly dense viewing.

That’s on top of the vast numbers of characters to track, from the Lost Boys to the staff that cares for them to Hermit’s military unit to the Maginot crew, all of whom bring new dimensions to understanding this series. While this show has many big ideas, a touch more focus might have helped the show get a little deeper into them. Still, it’s a credit to Hawley that he’s able to balance everything relatively well, while creating a vision of the future that feels like an equal mix of the pre-established universe and his own imagination.

One thing fans of this franchise know is that while the Alien films have revealed a fair bit of information about what happens to humanity over the next few centuries, none of them have ever gone into much detail about what life is like on our home planet, beyond how Ron Perlman’s Johner puts it in Alien: Resurrection: “Earth, man. What a shithole.”

Resurrection takes place in the year 2381, centuries from Alien: Earth’s setting in 2120. The original 1979 Alien took place in 2122, which makes this series a bit of a prequel, except because of that aforementioned lack of knowledge about life on Earth, the show is set in a grey area of the franchise, where Hawley technically has a lot of room to play without disrupting canon.

You can tell Hawley’s approach to adaptation, in Fargo as well as this, involves identifying key production elements from the original to carry forward in a clear and obvious manner, while also finding new ways to explore the project’s essential themes. Visually, the 1979 movie is the core touchstone for this series, especially when it comes to the show’s production designers making sure the Maginot looks like it was made on the same factory floor as the poor doomed Nostromo.

There’s real “spared no expense” energy to this production — largely shot in Thailand, the show makes exquisite use of its jungle locations as well as its constructed sets. In terms of the depiction of its most terrifying creatures (well, secondary to the humans of course)… This review could spoil details about them, but it’s far more fun to figure out on your own exactly what some of these sci-fi horrors are, and how exactly they’ll end up killing you. There is one standalone episode focusing on what happened to the Maginot, directed by Hawley, that is pure Ridley Scott homage and might be the very best episode of the series, at least on a horror level.

While the ensemble is, as mentioned, pretty massive, a few do manage to seize the spotlight. Sydney Chandler (daughter of Kyle) proves pretty remarkable as Wendy, clearly cast for the childlike wonder she brings to the character, while still delivering moments that prove how quickly and fiercely Wendy has to grow up. Meanwhile, the always great Timothy Olyphant commits fully to the role of Kirsh, the android guardian of the Lost Boy hybrids, and Babou Ceesay’s Morrow ends up becoming one of the show’s most fascinating characters — a Weyland-Yutani operative torn between multiple worlds and multiple motivations.

As the full scope of what Hawley’s assembling comes into focus, Alien: Earth does start to feel like it falls into the Surf Dracula trap, where the entire first season essentially serves as a pilot. However, that’s largely due to how many huge concepts the series is trying to incorporate into the narrative, all while the plotting keeps the viewer aggressively on their toes. It’s a remarkable ride, as this show keeps such a tight lid on where it’s going that you only understand its full scope towards the very end.

When you reach that ending… Well, it’s hard to be sure about where future seasons would go. But the finale’s energy makes it feel like the answer to that question could be literally anywhere, and that’s exciting to behold — especially given the way this show remains true to one important theme: Alien movies have always been about how human systems crush the vulnerable, but in a quiet way. Alien: Earth screams about that — in a way that reminds us how cathartic a good scream can be.

FX’s Alien: Earth premieres August 12th at 8:00 p.m. ET on Hulu. New episodes premiere on Tuesday evenings. Check out the trailer below.