Noah Hawley brings a classic sci-fi horror franchise to the small screen with the lavish-looking Alien: Earth. Here’s our spoiler-free review of episodes 1 and 2:
Television spin-offs from hit genre films haven’t always had a particularly good hit-rate. RoboCop, Highlander and Total Recall all got their own small-screen shows years ago, and while there was entertainment to be found in them, it’s probably fair to say that their meagre budgets meant they couldn’t always compare to the movies on which they were based.
This is the 21st century, though: an era in which TV shows are given a level of financing and visual polish that the makers of, say, Highlander: The Series could only have dreamed of. We’re also living through a period in which TV now attracts the kind of talent that would have been making mainstream movies in the 80s and 90s. In other words, 2025 is the perfect climate for a series like Alien: Earth to emerge, like a hideous monster from a pulsating egg.
It’s the long-trailed TV prequel to Ridley Scott’s 1979 masterpiece, Alien, created by writer-director Noah Hawley. He has form when it comes to adapting material for TV – Hawley previously brought us a grimly comic, longform interpretation of the Coen brothers’ Fargo as well as the Marvel comic book, Legion.
Alien: Earth, at least on the strength of these first two episodes, is another gripping piece of storytelling from the filmmaker.
The show’s opening seconds immerse us in the same retro-futuristic world that first haunted cinemas over 45 years ago. Some gliding camerawork takes us on a tour of the USS Maginot – a vessel remarkably like the doomed Nostromo from Alien. The doors are that distinct, Ron Cobb-designed shape that would allow a human to walk through while holding several long planks of wood. There’s the canteen room with its round table and overhead lighting; the long, starkly industrial corridors; the Mother computer room, twinkling like a Christmas decoration.
A brief sequence in which the Maginot’s crew slowly wake from their hypersleep chambers is even framed, lit and edited – with copious use of dissolves – to look just like the Alien opening Scott and his team devised in 1979. The production design, cinematography and lighting here are almost flawless, while the casting gives us a group of engagingly spiky, lived-in faces that echo the Nostromo’s crew. They smoke, they bicker, they good-naturedly trade insults.
There’s also a bit of exposition not-so-subtly woven into the conversation. By 2120, Earth and its nearby planets have been carved up between rival corporations, all racing to create their own versions of artificial life. The most familiar of these AI inventions are what the show calls Synths – the androids typified by Alien’s Ash and Aliens’ Bishop. The Maginot even has what appears to be its own cybernetic creation – Morrow, played with cold-eyed ambiguity by Babou Ceesay.
The newest corporation on the block is Prodigy, headed up by its mop-haired young CEO Kavalier (Sam Blenkin), “the world’s first trillionaire,” as one Maginot crewmember explains. (Kavalier’s company is conducting its own post-humanist research; we’ll return to that shortly.)
As Alien: Earth begins, the Maginot is on the return leg of a 65-year mission from distant planets, the ship filled with specimens of alien species collected on behalf of its employer, Weyland Yutani. You can probably guess what one of those specimens is, though as Alien: Earth’s trailers have already revealed, there are other strange lifeforms locked away in jars and glass chambers, too.
You can probably also guess that all does not go well aboard the Maginot – something the show itself confirms early on, with some Nicolas Roeg-like time-shifting edits. It’s the hallmark of a show that has both a fan’s eye for the details of the Alien universe and also an understanding of well-trodden sci-fi horror conventions: if there’s a monster on a ship, modern audiences know something’s going to go wrong eventually – so why be coy about it?
If Alien: Earth’s opening grounds us in the familiar, then the show’s second plot strand takes the story into pure cyberpunk territory. Back on Earth, the aforementioned Prodigy corporation is experimenting with a new post-human lifeform: Hybrids. These are uncannily lifelike androids which contain the consciousness of a human being.
On a lush island facility somewhere in the Pacific, the company has successfully created the first of these Hybrids. Calling herself Wendy, she was once a terminally ill 12 year-old girl, but now finds herself in the agile and incredibly strong body of a grown woman (Sydney Chandler). It’s a concept that recalls director Mamoru Oshiii’s anime, Ghost In The Shell, and one delicately explored by Chandler, who deftly brings out all the innocence, curiosity and inner resolve of a girl coming to terms with a strange new state of being.
In Neverland, the sleek yet prison-like science facility Wendy calls home, she’s surrounded by people who act as her surrogate family. Scientist Dame Silvia (Essie Davis) and cyborg Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant, with Roy Batty-like white hair) are mentors, of sorts, while continuing the persistent Peter Pan theme, Prodigy CEO Kavalier has an older-brother boyishness which almost certainly belies a streak of narcissistic ruthlessness.
In time, Wendy’s joined by other test subjects; all young and sick, and who, one by one, have their souls injected into human-looking machines. (There’s a reason why it’s children and not adults subjected to this experiment, which the episode quickly lays out.)
Hawley – who writes and directs these debut episodes – treats his characters with real tenderness. Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley is a true horror icon, and a less confident show might have tried to introduce a similar kind of heroine. Instead, Wendy’s vulnerability and obliviousness to the dehumanising way she’s treated makes her immediately sympathetic. The grownups may talk pleasantly to Wendy and her friends, but the reality’s plain to us: they’re so much company property.
Wendy’s one link to her old life is her brother, CJ (Alex Lawther), a paramedic who’s unaware that his sibling’s still alive; the way Hawley establishes this relationship with just a few well-chosen shots and cuts is quite delightful.
Fulfilling a scenario that first appeared in a run of 1990s Dark Horse comics and an infamously misleading Alien 3 trailer, Alien: Earth also promises to bring the xenomorph to terra firma (technically, the Alien V Predator movies already did this, but they’re no longer considered canon). Without spoiling things, Hawley ties up all these people and plot strands in a visually striking second episode (directed by Dana Gonzales) that manages to open up the possibilities of the Alien universe while still feeling recognisably of a piece with it.
(There’s also more than a few hints of Hawley’s offbeat sensibility here and there, including a moment straight out of Stanley Kubrick’s Barry Lyndon.)
It’s as respectful to the series as last year’s Alien: Romulus was, but so far, without that film’s need to add distracting call-backs and catchphrases. Alien: Earth also makes light work of introducing a complex universe of characters, corporate rivalries and unholy critters, all served up with production design and photography that, even at a time when we’re spoiled for this sort of thing, is often spectacular to look at.
If we were to nitpick, Hawley’s series is more tense than frightening, though that’s perhaps also a side effect of its franchise’s age. While the xenomorph itself may be a known quantity by now, the other beasts aboard the Maginot may present all kinds of other grotesque and scary possibilities.
Assuming Alien: Earth can maintain the quality of storytelling of these first two episodes, then we could be in for something truly special – and horrifying – over the next few weeks.
Alien: Earth’s first two episodes will stream from 13th August on Disney+. Subsequent episodes will follow weekly from the 19th August.
