Alien Resurrection?

8 episodes, Disney+

Alien: Earth sets out to expand the Xenomorph’s universe beyond that of the classic Ridley Scott and James Cameron movies. Reassuringly, the show is no reboot, and the showrunners take us to literal eye-popping new territory.

2024’s awful Alien: Romulus was the series’ greatest hits rehashed for Gen Z and a clear nadir. Moving to the small screen seems the only credible option remaining for the franchise as TV is where once great movie IPs go to die. So, is Alien: Earth M*A*S*H or Lethal Weapon?

Noah Hawley’s series starts with a specimen-gathering starship, the USCSS Maginot, crashing onto the Earth of 2120, with the property of one evil mega-corporation falling into the hands of its rival. The illegal biological cargo remains intact and isn’t exactly friendly. The first episode opening plays as a recreation of Ridley Scott’s original film. After the Alien slaughters its way around a condo complex during the second, it quickly becomes clear why the franchise stalled – it has little beyond Alien = death.

The filmmakers rightly confine the animal in a lab at the Prodigy corporation, one of five that run a post-democracy Earth. In the same location, its robotics division produces androids, cyborgs and experimental hybrids, prototypes for marketable immortality. Several dying children have their minds transplanted into synthetic bodies during Beta-testing. It isn’t an act of charity.

After decades in deep space, the crashed ship’s security officer Morrow (Babou Ceesay) sets out to return the stolen cargo. Newly created hybrid Wendy (Sydney Chandler) shines as an uncertain entity struggling to come to terms with who/what she is. Samuel Blenkin is rightly hateable as Boy Kavalier, the Zuckerberg-like genius behind the Prodigy corporation. He’s happy to risk humanity’s extinction just because he is trying to find a like-mind to talk to.

The real stars, of course, are the menagerie of delightful new aliens – including blood-sucking leeches and corrosive-venom spewing insects. The highlight is a squid-like creature that burrows into the eye-sockets of the living and the dead, taking control of the body. The filmmakers’ joy at what they created is obvious as they’ve realised the novelty of the original creature made the movie series. Recognising the Alien long since exhausted its novelty value, the show embraces original exotic body horror elements, killing off characters in pleasantly gross ways. Viewers will never trust a flask of water again.

Still, not everyone within the fanbase is happy with the result. The 8-episode series has been criticized for sidelining the Alien. While there is some validity to this, the terrible Alien vs Predator movies show how iconography alone isn’t enough; a long form show demands story and character. The audience needs to care who is being mutilated.

Many wanted a return to the action of Aliens with a climax where the Earth goes to parasite-infested hell. Hopefully the writers are saving that for later. Others object to Wendy’s ‘the girl-that’s-the-key-to-everything’ character and seemingly mysterious godlike powers.

The series’ relatively low budget is obvious, and it would benefit aesthetically with better cinematography and a more vivid colour palette. Its current genre rival is Apple’s visually stunning Foundation, and by comparison, Alien: Earth feels like a 1990s TV movie. The money was clearly spent on the opening episodes and the flashback to what happened aboard the Maginot – a masterful fifth episode that expertly twists everything the series has established up to that point. Yet, the final episode stops rather than concludes, making the show a build up to a resolution it fails to deliver.

The question is where will the writers take all of this? Three globe-dominating corporations have yet to be even named, so obviously the makers have confidence in a further season. It can only be hoped that confirmation brings a higher budget, dystopian vistas and street-level views of a for-profit future world that fits the story better than the remote Thai setting. Overall, Noah Hawley’s series is recognisably Alien, thankfully absent characters running down endless corridors awash in genre clichés. The show successfully brings many new story elements into a played-out film series, giving it a new setting for hostile creatures to lurk in. While the show might alienate those wanting a familiar retread, anyone willing to take a chance on something expansive and unpredictable will find much to enjoy.

Hawley and Disney’s Alien resurrection series offers fresh creatures and topical ideas about AGI, undercut by a drab look, an anticlimactic finale and budgetary limitations. It starts strong but delivers about half of what it promises.