The Alien franchise has always been deceptively auteur-driven. For as much as it is undeniably a monumental work of science fiction that has been franchised across the decades and turned into an established intellectual property in its own right, each installment has been singularly driven by the inspirations, aspirations, and ambitions of its own respective filmmaker.
The original 1979 film, Alien, is full of the kinds of heady themes and thoughtful craft that would come to define Ridley Scott’s work over the ensuing years. The 1986 sequel, Aliens, is about as James Cameron as a film can possibly be, full of bombastic military action and raucously satisfying storytelling. Even Alien 3, whose production has been publicly bemoaned by its director for decades now, is a potent encapsulation of the kinds of somber and harrowing tales of morality that David Fincher has made a career out of crafting.
More recently, Scott returned to the franchise with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant, each of which saw the franchise evolving and mutating alongside the storied filmmaker, giving way to far more lyrical and meditative works.
It is into this lineage of filmmaker-driven projects that Noah Hawley (the showrunner behind prestige genre projects such as Legion and Fargo) steps into with the latest entry into the overarching Alien franchise, the first television series, Alien: Earth. And wonderfully, the first episodes of the series see Hawley deliver an opening that is both quintessentially Alien and quintessentially his own.
Alien: Earth is notable in that it achieves a goal the franchise has been aspiring to for decades in the span of a few minutes; it brings the iconic Xenomorph to Earth. Earlier installments, such as Alien 3 and Alien: Resurrection, had each toyed with the idea of having portions of their respective stories set on Earth, but ultimately scrapped the idea.
However, within mere moments of runtime, Hawley’s series gets off to a high-octane start and thrusts the conflict directly onto the planet’s surface. Not only does this transplantation of setting bring with it much higher stakes, but also a wider sense of scale and scope than ever before. Fortunately, Hawley and his team are more than capable of living up to this challenge.
The sets and worlds of Alien: Earth are vast and expansive. The practical sets are massive and intricate in their own right, and then expanded further by digital augmentation and CGI. Production designers Andy Nicholson and Jason Knox-Johnston craft a fully fleshed-out world for the series that feels tactile and positively dripping with atmosphere.
The technical marriage between these elements is seamless, and leads to some genuinely jaw-dropping moments across the first two episodes, in which Hawley and Episode 2, “Mr. October” director Dana Gonzales’ (who is the showrunner’s longtime cinematographer) direction utilizes the camera to explore the kind of wide-scale panic and destruction this story brings on an unbelievably large canvas.
In a similar way to how these two formal techniques are blended together to form a more cohesive whole, Hawley tackles the storytelling of the Alien franchise with a philosophy that is equally holistic and progressive.
The first episode, “Neverland,” opens with a series of callbacks, both narratively and visually, to Scott’s original film, and there are references to many of the films peppered across its runtime. However, Alien: Earth is just as likely to completely upend and subvert the expectations it sets up as it is to deliver on them wholeheartedly. The result is a work that doesn’t feel beholden to the past, but rather buoyed by it. There are new oddities, creatures, locations, companies, and characters in this series, and it is all the better for it.
The opening minutes of the series see Hawley’s writing taking the seminal building blocks of the 1979 film and utilizing them to a very different end, in a fascinating style. For instance, following the debut episode’s opening minutes, the tone, pace, and kinetic flow of the series are well and truly established. Hawley and editor Regis Kimble utilize many of the same formal techniques that Scott and his editors, Terry Rawlings and Peter Weatherley, employed on the first film, but in service of very different means of expression.
Rather than seeking to recreate moments or rehash beats from the films, Alien: Earth sees Hawley and co. take the very bones of that original cinematic work and use it as inspiration for bold new ideas.
The cast of the series is a diverse assortment of performers, all of whom seem already deeply entrenched in this world and these characters. Special praise must be given to Timothy Olyphant, who is playing so against type that it is jarring in the best of ways, Alex Lawther, whose work as eternal optimist Nemik in Andor only serves to make his disillusioned and battered character all the more affecting here, and lead actress Sydney Chandler, who is giving such a nuanced and deeply layered performance that it is astounding.
Without giving too much away, Chandler’s character, Wendy, is at the center of the series’ boldest creative strokes and thematic interests, and it is the kind of role that could so easily go wrong and derail the entire endeavor. But in Chandler’s hands, what could have quickly become a caricature instead feels authentic and affecting.
The score by Jeff Russo is great and does a wonderful job of balancing the tight-rope act of thought-provoking science fiction and firing-on-all-cylinders horror. The incorporation of distinct sounds from the original score, but often recontextualized either by distortions or invasive interruptions, is also inspired and feels perfectly aligned with Hawley’s approach to the visual work.
The first two episodes of Alien: Earth, “Neverland” and “Mr. October,” are articulate and compelling works of science fiction in their own right. Hawley and his team have delivered a series that is not looking to sit comfortably within the confines of what an audience thinks an Alien TV show should be, but instead bulldozes through those boundaries in surprising and entrancing ways.
While “Neverland” gets things off to a fascinating formal start, the narrative itself can feel occasionally touch-and-go as Hawley’s script strives to set all the various threads in motion. However, by the episode’s end, as everything is already beginning to culminate and the sheer size of the showrunner’s ambition is revealed, he more than makes up for it.
Also, for anyone not sold on the more thoughtful construction of the first episode, “Mr. October” features some of the gnarliest horror setpieces in the franchise’s history. This is a great start for Alien: Earth; surprising, thought-provoking, and outright terrifying.
Alien: Earth premieres with its first two episodes on Aug. 12 on FX and FX on Hulu.
Grade: B+