“Alien: Earth” created by Noah Hawley, is the newest installment of the "Alien" franchise, which premiered on FX on Hulu Aug. 12. Its eight-episode season run ended Tuesday, Sept. 23. It is actually the first series to be produced that takes place within the “Alien” franchise and timeline.
The series serves as a prequel set in the year 2120, two years before the events of the original “Alien” film directed by Ridley Scott. “Alien: Earth” follows a spaceship named the USCSS Maginot, a Weyland-Yutani deep-space research vessel. It crash-lands on Earth after a 65-year expedition to obtain extraterrestrial specimens, some of which are facehuggers.
In this universe, five companies control Earth and the colonized solar system, including the recently founded Prodigy Corporation. The corporation is responsible for creating hybrids, which is the consciousness of children who are placed in adult synthetic bodies. Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), the CEO of Prodigy Corporation, instructs Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant) and a group of hybrids to inspect the crash site and bring back any noteworthy materials.
Little do the hybrids know the crash site includes Xenomorph eggs ready to hatch at any moment. The leader of the hybrid group, a woman named Wendy (Sydney Chandler), wants to reconnect with her brother, Joe Hermit (Alex Lawther), who works as a medic for the Prodigy Corporation Security Service.
The specimens are soon brought back to Prodigy’s main laboratory, and it doesn’t take long for a new adult Xenomorph to bring havoc to all those at the corporation.
Right off the bat, what “Alien: Earth” does very well is in its exceptional set design and use of alien creatures. With areportedbudget of $250 million for its first season, the care put into the show's filmmaking is palpable.
Whenever the audience is aboard the USCSS Maginot or spending time with Wendy and Joe, the environments are well-designed and realistic enough for anyone to believe they could be an actual location.
However, this does come with one downfall. Everything is a little too polished compared to Scott’s “Alien” and even James Cameron’s “Aliens Similar to “Alien: Earth,” those films did an amazing job capturing the worlds it took place in.
Where they differ is, despite its high production, “Alien: Earth” doesn’t have the same raw feeling that “Alien” or “Aliens” had. On behalf of the Xenomorph itself, it isn’t properly utilized when on screen.
Scott and Cameron understood the basic rule of featuring a monster in a film. To make the Xenomorphs scarier, the filmmakers would show them as little as possible. The goal was to leave it to audience imagination to figure out what the creature looks like.
Although the Xenomorph costume is top-notch, it’s shown way too much to the point where the audience could get easily bored with it. This leads to another problem: there is a lack of urgency in the characters and little to no tension in the show.
There are moments where characters will randomly walk around a section of the crashed ship and seemingly not care that a Xenomorph is stalking them and waiting for the right moment to kill them. In the last 20 minutes of the first “Alien” film, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) is constantly paranoid that the Xenomorph could be anywhere near her as she’s trying to escape the USCSS Nostromo.
To their credit, the actors still try to play the roles to the best of their abilities, even with the inconsistent writing. Highlights are Chandler as Wendy and Babou Ceesay as Morrow, a cyborg security chief determined to bring specimens to Ms. Yutani (Sandra Yi Sencindiver).
“Alien: Earth” is far from being the worst of the “Alien” franchise, but it doesn’t do enough to bring it into a new light creator Hawley intended for it to be.
Rating: 2.5/5
