Alien Earth (the First 2 Episodes) Review

Alien fans, we are so back!

SPOILERS AHEAD

Alien Earth took light-years to arrive on Hulu, but the first two episodes show us the wait was worth it. When Ridley Scott announced he was executive producing you could hear the collective groans of a million fans. Ridley is known for helming trash after trash, and personally shooting down a really great idea in the process. His name holds next to no weight with the community. Why Disney allows him around Alien sets is beyond me. But, he was around for Alien: Romulus and he pushed his way into Alien Earth. And here we are.

Showrunner Noah Hawley's (Fargo, Legion) best move was using Alien and Aliens as canon, and nothing else. A vast majority of fans would agree this creates the best path to film success. Alien 3 was universally hated for how they treated Newt and Hicks. Killing off Ripley didn't sit well either. Alien Resurrection? We don't have to go there.

Skip back to the year 2019, close your mouth and don't touch anything through 2020-2021 and you'll find pre-production on Alien: Earth in 2023. Principal photography didn't end until July 2024. That's a long time to cook, but is it worth it? To your casual Alien fan yes. We've been subjected to enough illogical compost to wait patiently for something good. What started with Romulus continues with Alien:Earth.

Written and directed by Noah Hawley, who wrote all eight episodes of the series and directed the first half of the two-part premiere, the show ejects Ridley's much-maligned iterations and expands the Alien mythos. He builds out the corporate hellscape of Earth 95 years from now, showing us, for the first time, the companies that sent the Nostromo to collect the facehugger. But instead of the Nostromo, we meet what could be its sibling ship, the Maginot, for all intents and purposes.

Our time with the Maginot is for exposition, primarily. After awakening from a dreamy, cross-fade heavy hypersleep, we meet an assortment of Alien archetypes (we've all seen before) sitting around the breakfast table, reciting conversations we’ve also heard before. Complaints about the food and questions about the mission are mixed in with helpful exposition about which corporation owns which continents and planets and the differences between synthetics and cyborgs. Blah, blah, blah.

Hawley takes great pains in re-establishing that sterile, business-like Nostromo atmosphere. Composer Jeff Ruso hits Jerry Goldsmith’s familiar strings. Production designer Andy Nicholson faithfully recreates the spacecraft with practical sets that look direct from 1979. As they did in 1979, the slow cross-fades between moments elicit the feeling of waking up from a heavy sleep, recentering us in the world and settling the audience back into the original atmosphere. Yet the smartest thing about it is that we don’t spend time here. Hawley does an Alien remake in the edit, showing us flashes of the inevitable containment breach of the mission’s precious cargo and subsequent bloodbath. The cuts reminds us of Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and 28 Years Later. The unsettled viewing is magnificent.

We're not supposed to become too comfortable aboard the Maginot. Morrow, the ship’s cyborg security officer is hiding in the MU/TH/UR room and setting a collision course for Earth, specifically Prodigy City. He sounds like it cannot be avoided, but we get the feeling this is something else.

The other half of the episode lets us know what’s happening on Prodigy through the eyes of a “hybrid” named Wendy (played by Sydney Chandler). Here’s why Hawley worried about making the wrong Ridley Scott movie. Led by a young tech virtuoso named Boy Kavalier (played by Samuel Belkin), Prodigy runs the southern half of Africa, Australia, and South East Asia. Prodigy City is where Boy does his work, which concerns taking sick children, like Wendy, and transferring their consciousness into synthetic adult bodies. The episode’s opening text tells us that whoever cracks how hybrid humans will win the robotic arm race. That sounds familiar right? Science Fiction is never too far ahead of reality.

We are treated to a humane-looking transference of a sick child’s brain into the body of a 30-year-old woman. The cartoons atop the ceiling was a nice touch. But transferring consciousness leaves the hybrids feeling empty because Wendy doesn’t understand her adult body upon wakening. Wendy can leap from great heights and attach a paper cutter to her magnetic spine, but she misses eating and watching Ice Age with her brother, Hermit (played by Alex Lawther). Her hybrid body doesn’t come with an owner’s manual, so she’s guided by the cold synthetic Kirsh (played Timothy Olyphant doing his best stilted Hitman impression) and Dame Sylvia (played by Essie Davis), who’s presumably a human or, at least, a synthetic with more advanced bedside-manner programming. We don't know yet.

Much of the run time between of the first two episodes is spent developing characters, something Ridley Scott forgot to do ages ago. By the time the Maginot crash lands in Prodigy City we have a firm grasp of everyone's character, and yes, you can empathize with a hybrid. This is key to what begins to transpire.

While we did alert you of spoilers, we will skip the rest since this is where the preverbal boots hit the ground, and you'll enjoy the change in gears as rifles are raised and rooms are cleared and bodies are torn asunder. We will touch on the actual alien, our titular reason to tuning in, for a bit. Cameron Brown uncredited for his work with the alien, but from what we saw it's mostly CGI. The technology is needed to create its quick, violent actions there seems to be a missing texture about it, almost like its too smooth. Almost video gamey in appearance. By contrast Eddie Powell's turn in the alien suit is brimming with layers and textures and mucus. A man in a suit does limit what the alien can do since we're talking about human movements, but we're in this for the close-up terror, not the acrobatics. We want to feel the alien's presence as much as we want to see him.

All told, we couldn't ask for a better start to the Alien franchise's first foray into television. This show checks all the boxes while creating new ones and checking those off as well. While light on scares Noah Hawley successfully created a world we can marvel and loathe simultaneously. The season only packs 8 episodes so we expect the pacing to remain at a nice clip. Tune into Hulu on August 19th for episode 3.