Noah Hawley recently said of his plan for Alien: Earth, the first TV show based on the iconic science-fiction/action-horror film series, “Imagine if there were five movies about the White Walkers, and I went and made Game of Thrones.”
Hawley is a creator who has never lacked confidence in his own work, nor a shyness about expressing that confidence. Nevertheless, he was already being asked to clear a very high bar by making an Alien television series, since the first two movies in the franchise are universally beloved and have compelling arguments as the all-time greatest horror and action film, respectively. To invite Game of Thrones comparisons on top of the work of Ridley Scott and James Cameron should, on paper, be complete and utter folly — especially since the relentless, nearly indestructible nature of the famous Xenomorph from the movies wouldn’t seem to lend itself well to an ongoing TV show that’s not going to kill off most of its characters each week.
Yet as he did with Fargo, turning a classic and beloved movie into a long-running, award-winning anthology series, Hawley has taken a concept that has no business working for television and shaped it into something thrilling, strange, and surprising. Alien: Earth has its flaws, especially with that Xenomorph issue, but it manages to evoke the original movie without feeling slavishly imitative of it. And it finds fascinating ways to expand on concepts introduced in the background of the films, most of which couldn’t get enough narrative attention while Sigourney Weaver and company were running for their lives.
Alien: Earth takes place two years before the events of the first film in the series. It’s 2120, and governments are a thing of the distant past. Control of Earth is now divided among five mega-corporations. One of those is Weyland-Yutani, which is a key part of the movies, and in this show has commissioned the crew of the space ship Maginot to collect dangerous alien samples — including a Xenomorph — to return to Earth for further research. (The second movie, Aliens, introduced the idea that Weyland-Yutani wants to use the Xenomorphs to build unstoppable bioweapons.) But the Maginot instead crashes in a part of southeast Asia that’s the dominion of Prodigy, a corporation founded by Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), an overgrown child obsessed with Peter Pan, who struts around his research facility barefoot in pajamas.
At the time of the Maginot crash, Kavalier has created his own immortal version of the Lost Boys, by transplanting the minds of a group of terminally ill children into ageless synthetic bodies — much like Ash, Bishop, or, here, Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), but with memories of their childhoods, and personalities that don’t yet match their adult-looking bodies. The first and most impressive of this group renames herself Wendy (Sydney Chandler), and when she realizes that her older brother, Hermit (Alex Lawther) is part of the search-and-rescue team investigating the crash site, she convinces Kavalier to send her, the other Lost Boys, and Kersh in to investigate.
There are logic problems almost immediately, which continue across multiple episodes. How did a non-military crew capture and imprison a Xenomorph in the first place? Why would Boy Kavalier risk his multibillion-dollar prototypes — beta tests for a plan to allow the richest people on the planet to live forever in bodies like Wendy’s — on such a dangerous mission? Why, after Hermit survives an initial run-in with a Xenomorph, does he simply resume looking for other survivors, and not bother to tell anyone about the terrifying, phallic monster with multiple jaws that he just encountered? For that matter, how do multiple people manage to outrun and, in one sequence that happens largely off-camera, kill one of these things? There are also various events, and lessons learned about the creatures, that cause large swaths of Aliens to make substantially less sense.
To be fair, Alien writers Dan O’Bannon and Ronald Shusett made the Xenomorph such a potent and versatile threat that later storytellers have struggled at times not to just have all the humans die in the first 15 to 20 minutes of each film. But within the context of self-contained movies, which usually cover very finite periods of time, it’s largely worked, even when the movies, like Alien: Resurrection, have other problems. For a series with eight chapters in its first season, and more seasons potentially to come, it stands out more.
But Hawley flanks the familiar creature from the movies with a variety of new monsters that get unleashed in the Maginot crash. Each of them is nightmare-inducingly gross in different ways (with captions on, one creature’s movement is described with the words “[soft squishing]” which sums it up nicely) and each has their own macabre method of attacking the human body. One eyeball-themed alien is so creepy, and so creatively deployed, that I would gladly watch a standalone film about it terrorizing the crew of a mining ship.
Hawley’s also following a tradition of some of the later films of the series — including Ridley Scott’s own Prometheus — in using the Xenomorph and all the legacy of the franchise as a way to Trojan-horse bigger ideas into the show. In this case, Alien: Earth is about many of the problems we’re talking about daily on our version of Earth: the dehumanizing effects of late capitalism, the dangers of AI, tech bros run amok without safeguards in place, and the extreme methods that the super-rich are deploying to try to extend their lives past the limits of human biology. Some parts of this play more smoothly than others — a sequence where Hermit finds a debauched, Louis XIV-themed party where the billionaire guests refuse to evacuate the building, which a literal spaceship just crashed into, is so on the nose it’s inside the nose — but the show is clearly thoughtful even when it’s otherwise trying to scare the nanopants off of you. (And it usually does a good job at that, too.)
The Lost Boys in general, and Wendy in particular, prove so interesting that any hiccups elsewhere don’t matter that much, especially after the first handful of episodes. The idea of children’s minds operating superpowered adult bodies should feel silly, like a body swap comedy accidentally got cross-pollinated with a creature feature. But it works, which is largely a credit to Sydney Chandler. She was the best part of FX’s largely forgettable miniseries about the Sex Pistols, and she’s an extremely compelling central figure here, coming across as simultaneously childlike and adult, human and inhuman. At times, she’s the vulnerable heroine of the piece, and at others convincingly feels like an even bigger threat than the Xenomorphs or the eyeball monsters.
Timothy Olyphant in Alien: Earth.
Patrick Brown/FX
Timothy Olyphant, reuniting with Hawley after he played a supporting role in Fargo Season Four, is suitably off-kilter as the serenely confident Kirsh. The cast’s other breakout is British actor Babou Ceesay as Morrow, a cyborg who survives the Maginot crash and has his own agenda. He’s the main character of the season’s fifth episode, a flashback establishing what led to the Maginot crash. That one’s titled, “In Space, No One…” an allusion to the tag line from the original Alien, “In space, no one can hear you scream.” Between the title and the fact that so much of the Maginot resembles the designs of the Nostromo in the 1979 film, Hawley is really inviting comparisons. But Ceesay makes Morrow so complex — especially as a contrast to how he behaves in the series’ present-day action — and Hawley’s script and direction find enough new wrinkles to the familiar old beats, that it’s all riveting. Even if, again, the episode skips over the thorny question of how exactly this group of schmoes managed to cage a pure killing machine.
At a few points in that episode, Morrow listens to the Vera Lynn ballad “We’ll Meet Again,” which memorably plays over the climactic sequence of Stanley Kubrick’s Cold War classic Dr. Strangelove. So Hawley is inviting two seemingly impossible, unflattering comparisons in the space of one hour. There’s a line where confidence slides dangerously into hubris. There’s a lot of hubris on display within the story of Alien: Earth, especially as Boy Kavalier keeps putting his amazing new scientific breakthrough at risk because he’s fascinated by the dangerous cargo that crash landed in his backyard. But Hawley, like he did with Fargo, ultimately finds a way to make Alien: Earth feel like it belongs as part of this fictional universe.
The first two episodes of Alien: Earth debut Aug. 12 on FX and Hulu, with additional episodes releasing weekly. I’ve seen all eight episodes.
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