My spiney alien queen in Alien: Earth

What makes us human? Is it our organic bodies, failing all around us; is it our memories, the building blocks of identity; or is it our heart, that intangible, metaphysical je ne sai quoi that allows us to love, to grieve, to fear, to hope? The greatest science fiction asks questions like these, probing who we are now with stories of who we might be then, a tradition Alien: Earth honors as much as it does the tradition of gross alien drool and jump scares. The latest in the Alien franchise, Alien: Earth comes from creator Noah Hawley, who has a knack for effectively translating film to television, which he does excellently here.

Alien: Earth has all the Alien things: spaceships, evil space conglomerates, xenomorphs, face huggers, chest bursters, body horror, robots of various description, plus a grunge soundtrack and a healthy dose of Jurassic Park things, too. Set two years before the events of the original film Alien, Alien: Earth does not require homework. If you haven’t seen Alien, or it’s been a minute, that’s okay. It’s monsters in space, what more do you need to know? Or rather, this time, the space monsters come to Earth, as a Weyland-Yutani research vessel crashes into “New Siam”, a city run by the rival conglomerate Prodigy. In this world, democracy is dead, and the world is ordered along corporate lines. People don’t live in nations, they work for corporations, human life has largely been reduced to drudgery wherein people sign away lifetimes on the chance they might make some money for their descendants—assuming they survive their jobs, that is.

Life in the Alien universe SUCKS, it always has, but between this and Fede Alvarez’s Alien: Romulus, it feels like filmmakers are really embracing how harrowing this future vision really is. To that end, Noah Hawley goes full “f-ck it, xenomorphs ride at dawn” mode, doing the thing this franchise has tacitly promised from the beginning: pitting aliens against humans on Earth. When the Weyland-Yutani ship crashes into Prodigy territory, the Prodigy CEO, a former child prodigy dubbed the “boy wonder” and literally named Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), sends his corporate troops in to seize the material aboard the ship. This includes medic Hermit (Alex Lawther), and his sister, Marcy, reborn under Boy Kavalier’s technological expertise as Wendy (Sydney Chandler), the first “hybrid”, a merging of human consciousness and synthetic body. 

The metaphors in Alien: Earth are not subtle. Boy names his hybrids after Peter Pan’s Lost Boys, he calls his research facility “Neverland”, Wendy-Marcy studies a scorpion inside a terrarium and is asked if she wants to kill it, on which she wavers, measuring the scorpion’s potential threat against its captive state. This is not a series interested in subtlety, all of its philosophical musings are right out in the open, and the scorpion/xenomorph/hybrid analog is so simple it’s practically drawn in crayon. But you know what? It all works. Alien: Earth has a solid grasp on the weight of its narrative and Hawley, and his team of fellow writers and directors, are clear about their priorities, which is to serve eight hours of alien mayhem and body horror and a wish fulfillment fantasy of getting one back on the technocrats running the world into the ground. 

To that end, xenomorphs are unleashed on an unsuspecting human population. I have never looked upon the xenomorph as a hero, but then she ate a bunch of rich pricks literally dressed like pre-revolution French aristocrats, and now like…I think I love her? My gooey alien queen? Let her live! The world of Alien sucks anyway, capitalism won, and life is corporate indentured servitude for all but a select few, why not let the xenomorph—a tall spiney goddess!—roam the world and level the playing field a bit? Just let her eat a FEW capitalists, as a treat. 

It's basically Jurassic Park rules, and the xenomorph is the T-rex. A monster, yes, but also a leveler of playing fields. Weirdly, Alien: Earth does Jurassic Park better than any recent Jurassic Park films. There’s an island containing That Which Should Not Be, scientists playing god, scrappy humans just trying to survive. There are even TWO “clever girls”! One is Kersh (Timothy Olyphant), a preternaturally still, unblinking “synth” (artificial intelligence in a synthetic body), the other is the creepiest cinematic sheep since Black Phillip. One of the most unsettling scenes in the series is just these two beings staring each other down. Between them lies the entire folly of man. 

Alien: Earth is superbly made, with outstanding visuals, a seamless blend of digital and practical effects, and excellent acting. Olyphant gets to play on his own screen persona, subverting everything that makes him Cool On Screen to make Kersh into a menace, while Sydney Chandler ably anchors the ensemble. She is simply incredible as Wendy-Marcy, embodying the wide-eyed innocence of a child and an adult’s steely resolve in turns. There is a touch of Whedonesque baby-brained sexy lady about her that I thought we all agreed to leave in 2009, but it fades as Wendy-Marcy matures into her new reality. The only real issue with Alien: Earth is the sound mix, which is out of balance between dialogue and everything else. It’s like a Christopher Nolan mix in which the dialogue track is buried underneath the score. 

Other than that, though, Alien: Earth is a hugely entertaining monster mash, an excellent addition to Alien lore, and also somehow the best Jurassic Park movie since Jurassic Park. It’s also refreshing that the story includes classic sci-fi philosophical musings about the nature of humanity without losing sight of the sh-tty in-world reality that these characters are living. There is no “better” within the existing status quo, and as much as the humans in the series hold themselves above the aliens and the various robots peopling their world, in reality, so much of their humanity has been stripped by technofascism that you can’t help but think the xenomorph—drooling champion of the proletariat!—is the one making the best point: just eat the trillionaires. 

Alien: Earth is now streaming episodes 1-3 exclusively on Hulu (Disney Plus in Canada), with new episodes arriving every Tuesday through September.