Flasz On Film

 

It didn’t take long for what started as a singular science-fiction horror movie to grow into a massive multimedia franchise. Much like Star Wars, Alien invited multidirectional world-building and hence a flurry of sequels, comic books, novels and later video games and franchise crossovers found their place in the ever-expanding cultural landscape. This franchise fertility was in no small part owed to H.R. Giger’s iconic elements of production design that informed the entire aesthetic of the series and introduced to our collective consciousness one of the most recognizable and equally terrifying genre icons, the Xenomorph.   

However, the series itself has mostly been revolving around one central question. Just like George Lucas’s iconic space opera has circled back to its main Skywalker storyline, Alien movies have similarly sought the safety and familiarity of the original in that they persistently referred to the events aboard the Nostromo, and more specifically, the fate of its sole survivor Ellen Ripley. Naturally, the expanded universe stories have gone on to use what was found in the original movie and its official sequels as springboards to muse about other elements of the Alien universe with relative ease. After all, the original films have religiously strayed from the idea of explaining the world too much, thus leaving plenty of room for others to come in and fill in the blanks.  

The problem is that a good chunk of what fans would typically come up with is, charitably speaking, not that original or interesting. Stories would sprout out of Easter eggs and winks left behind by filmmakers, like the Xenomorph skull found aboard the spaceship in Predator 2, or entire plots would emerge that attempted to put some context behind the mysterious fossilized character commonly referred to as The Space Jockey. Even the simple fact that the planet inspected in the original movie was called LV426 suggested that there might be multiple other worlds, potentially with other alien races present on them. But it all invariably and inescapably reverted to Xenomorph biology, their interactions with other fan-made races and other musings on bits of tangential nuance. Meanwhile, the movie canon consistently circled back to Ripley because familiarity breeds interest and interest brings revenue.  

One other big idea, thus far unexplored, had to do with the notion of bringing the franchise to Earth. Although the original drafts of what later became Alien³, including a teaser trailer as well, did suggest we’d see an Alien movie set on Earth in the ‘90s, it was abandoned and after multiple rewrites, fits and starts, the movie took place elsewhere. With the small exceptions of Alien v Predator films and what I can only imagine is a stack of fan-fiction slop, we have never seen a serious attempt at bringing the Alien franchise to Earth until Disney greenlit the Noah Hawley-run series conspicuously titled Alien: Earth.  

What I find particularly interesting about how this short TV series (with clear ambitions to run for longer than one season) is created and positioned is that it looks as though it wanted to untangle itself from its longstanding association with the Ripley saga in addition to resisting the low-hanging fruit of “what if Xenomorphs landed on Earth and we had to like go to war with them and stuff.” Fascinatingly, the series the manner in which Alien: Earth establishes its connection to the preceding body of work is less about milking that nostalgia gland the way Alien: Romulus did last year and more about paying homage to the vibes of the original movie, its aesthetic and tone while launching off somewhere else entirely.

Consequently, the interior set design of the USCSS Maginot, the ship that crash-lands on Earth and kickstarts the narrative, looks strikingly close to Ridley Scott’s. In fact, I have it on good authority that the cantankerous Sandancer was apparently gobsmacked at how well Hawley’s creation ripped him off. In a good way, I take it. From the clickity-clack of retro-looking keyboards and musical cues winking at Jerry Goldsmith to minor nuances of weapon design and usage of color filters and strobe lights, the aim of the series was to acknowledge Alien, Aliens and Prometheus without having to handle the unwieldy mass of preceding world-building or fan expectations.  

Instead, the series creators chose to tell their own story that happens to have Xenomorphs in it and almost completely disregards the existence of the series at large. Though, in the final episode someone does say “Stay frosty” in a clear acknowledgement of the iconic Cameronian banter found in Aliens, and we do get to peek into the corporate structure of the insidious Weyland-Yutani corporation fans have wondered about for decades; but that’s mostly it.  

Instead, Alien: Earth chooses to weave its tale that looks beyond the parameters of what anyone would expect an Alien story to do and launches in a direction clearly intended to evoke the spirit of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which Ridley Scott famously adapted into Blade Runner. Even though over the course of its eight episodes we do get a few interesting glimpses that shed some light on the Xenomorph biology—much to the expectations and amusement of hardcore fans who live and breathe this stuff—and a chunk of the plotting relies heavily on the introduction of new alien species into the equation, Alien: Earth has more in common with something Alex Garland would have written and directed, like Ex Machina, Annihilation, or Devs, in addition to other Dickian works like Blade Runner 2049 and Ghost in the Shell. Instead of introducing a cast of characters and setting them against a Xenomorph threat, the series—until it generates sufficient momentum—is less an action-packed and set piece-laden spectacle and more a musing on the nature of human identity, consciousness and limits thereof.  

Under the guise of once again tickling fans who love new elements of worldbuilding that could end up as action figures on their shelves, the series introduces its central character, Wendy (Sydney Chandler), as the first person whose consciousness is transplanted from her dying body into a synthetic one. She becomes a child trapped in an adult-looking synthetic construct and along with a number of other children in the same predicament, she becomes a tool in the hands of a clearly unhinged yet nonetheless prodigious billionaire (Samuel Blenkin). Thus, a central conversation about what it is to be human, what “real” humans are capable of doing to advance their nefarious goals and how it all unravels when a simple, prey-driven species is allowed to interact with these next-gen humans unfolds over the course of the series. And it’s all wrapped up in a broadly metaphorical—yet still eminently accessible—language leaning on Peter Pan as a fundamental tether. Put simply, Alien: Earth happens to be smart without, pun intended, alienating its core viewership and being obnoxiously smarty-pants about its own smartness.  

It is still very much a linear plot-driven narrative rooted in cultural references most viewers should easily identify and comprehend and yet it is just about cerebral enough to engage the audience intellectually if they choose to follow down the rabbit hole. You don’t need to spend too much time thinking about the more metaphysical themes embedded in the unfolding story, especially when they are frequently spelled out. Conveniently, it also happens that Wendy has those thoughts herself, so nobody unloads this conversation about what makes a human unceremoniously in bouts of expository verbiage, but rather it’s the characters who attempt to understand their own place in the world. It’s Wendy who struggles with who she is. It’s her brother (Alex Lawther) who must come to terms with the realization that who he once recognized as his kid sister now looks like an adult woman but still behaves very much like a young child.  

And if you want to go further down the spiral, the series affords you such opportunities as well. Because its relationship with the franchise remains mostly confined to aesthetics and the storytellers are simply not held hostage by whatever backstories have been cooked up over the years to explain what the world looks like beyond the stories told on the screen, it also serves as a reflection of our own times. With tech-bro billionaires running the world, promises of superintelligence and fundamental questions regarding sentience featuring prominently in the cultural conversation, it’s hard not to see the movie itself as an allegorical commentary on the rise of AI startups, their eventual evolution into global empires and the frightening prospect of the world’s fate being decided in boardrooms by college dropouts without shoes.  

However, it is not immediately necessary to read this far into the narrative context as the same conversations could be held if Blade Runner 2049 and Ex Machina were released today. It nonetheless adds a layer of interpretation that a viewer looking for something more to chew on might find useful and enjoyable. And at this point it most assuredly has become veritable fodder for clickbait content capitalizing on the show’s remarkable (yet likely coincidental) prescience or timeliness. 

Thus, I find Alien: Earth refreshing, entertaining and incredibly compelling. With its visual language, occasional languid sequences evoking the spirit of Andrei Tarkovsky complete with partial dissolves and visual juxtapositions, it offers an alternative to what TV has mostly been for decades. It’s more ambitious than a piece of content aimed to keep the viewer from unsubscribing from Disney Plus and a de facto departure from the franchise tradition of keeping things familiar and reliant on dopaminergic nostalgia hits. Not only is it the answer to that long-standing question of “what it would be like if Xenomorphs came to Earth and Predators weren’t around to fight them” but rather a way more inspired example of what happens when an iconic franchise is handled by people whose ambition is to appeal to more than base emotions. Which in a way is a tip of the hat not to the series itself but to the filmmaker who put it together and also attempted to reinvigorate it himself, Ridley Scott.  

Alien: Earth is a bridge between Alien, Blade Runner and Prometheus that uses genre tropes and recognizable icons of the series as backdrop to societally relevant conversations. In 1979 we wondered if we were alone in the universe and Alien offered an answer that was as inventive as it was frightening. In 2025 we keep wondering what makes us human, if we can replicate it artificially and how consciousness works. Alien: Earth happens to be a conversation on the matter that also has a Xenomorph in it and vibes like a love letter to Ridley Scott’s inner monologue. Which means it has a good chance to appeal both to fans of the franchise and those who are after something a little bit more challenging.