Alien: Earth — a wild ride that both soars and stumbles

By Noelle Adams

15 Aug 2025

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style="font-weight: 400;">Alien: Romulus managed to course correct by going back to the basics: deeply unsettling body horror paired with the nightmare scenario of being hunted from the shadows by an unstoppable monster, in a claustrophobic space to boot.

FX’s Alien: Earth, the first live-action television production in the franchise, also goes back to nostalgic basics, although it’s clearly less locked to retreading familiar beats than Romulus – as indicated by an upsetting Episode 2 moment featuring a cat. 

With Fargo and Legion’s Noah Hawley serving as showrunner (while Scott is still around as an executive producer), Alien: Earth has its own slightly off-kilter identity, and isn’t afraid to add to the greater Alien mythos. 

It’s just inconsistent in the execution of its ambitions.

As some context, Alien: Earth is set in 2120, two years before the events in Alien, and almost 30 years after Prometheus’s expedition. The series takes place predominantly on our Earth for a change, and a century from now national governments have given way to corporate control. Five companies have divvied up the planet, with the two most important for Alien: Earth’s narrative purposes being Weyland-Yutani and Prodigy Corporation.

While Weyland-Yutani has pioneered synthetic beings (AKA androids) and continues to look to the stars to extend human life and its own power, Prodigy, under techbro genius Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), is experimenting with hybrids: transplanting human consciousness into powerful synthetic bodies. 

Just as Prodigy’s first batch of hybrids are starting to explore their capabilities, a Weyland-Yutani deep-space research vessel crashes out of the sky, straight into Prodigy’s South East Asian territory. Onboard is a dangerous cargo.  

Alien: Earth is clearly an expensive production and it shows. 

Shot over six months in Thailand, the series has a distinct tropical dystopian aesthetic, which it cleverly marries with the grubbier fashions, analogue tech and general stylings of the original film to fit with the franchise timeline. Meanwhile, the special effects are rock-solid, convincing as flesh-and-blood, practical creations even when they’re CGI – and making sure to consistently tick the requisite body horror boxes.

Adding to this, Alien: Earth’s greatest selling point is its fifth episode, In Space, No One…, which offers everything fans could want from an Alien project, dialled up to the maximum due to the introduction of something that won’t be spoiled here. 

It’s an armrest-clawing, skin-crawling thrill fest that splashes on the gore, but also manages to add layers to the show’s most compelling character, robotically enhanced Security Officer and loyal company man Morrow (Babou Ceesay).

The problem, though, is that Alien: Earth doesn’t maintain this tautness. More correctly, as nothing can or should sustain tension for hours, it continually loses focus in its quieter, supposedly cerebral moments. 

It spotlights interesting concepts – like the indentured labour of employee citizens (admittedly seen before in the franchise) – sets the stage for their exploration, and then abandons the ideas to bound elsewhere. 

Time and time again, Alien: Earth squanders its potential as meatier sci-fi to go with the scares. The result is a string of half-baked ideas dragged over eight episodes, and you end up feeling like the series would have benefited from being half that length.

In turn, unable to immerse yourself intellectually, it becomes easier to identify how much just doesn’t ring true as the story crawls along. 

It’s a tradition in the Alien franchise by now that the higher a character’s IQ, the stupider their behaviour. So you can kind of forgive sending the product of a trillion-dollar investment, untested and unprepared, to the scene of a disaster. 

What is harder to overlook, though, are things like only moderate upset within a crashed spacecraft; confident use of still-functioning elevators in a structurally unsound building; how characters’ enhanced physical abilities are evidently forgotten when they would be extremely useful; and the jarring appearance of 20th-century media and pop culture references. If some kids today haven’t seen a movie from before the Noughties, it’s hard to believe that 100 years from now they’ll be watching Ice Age and name-dropping Agatha Christie.

Then there’s Alien: Earth’s most aggravating creative choice: the first hybrids are terminally ill children, aged about 10 to 12, due to their young adolescent minds being more malleable and receptive to the transfer process. 

This introduces curiosity and compassion to the series, especially in the form of primary character Wendy, played by likeable Sydney Chandler. With Wendy, Hawley and his fellow writers get the balance right, but the other hybrids typically behave like sulky, immature five-year-olds, squandering the young international cast who play the other Lost Boys. This includes Shadow and Bone’s Kit Young, The White Tiger’s Adarsh Gourav and Sex Education’s Lily Newmark.

After a while you wish that their mentor, Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), a synthetic in the mould of Ian Holm’s Ash and Michael Fassbender’s David, would slap them when they start their nonsense. Kirsh is another series highlight, for the record, with a detached biologist’s mind and potentially a lot of seething resentment at being in service to base human animals.

For the record, this review is based on provided access to the first six of eight Alien: Earth episodes. 

With just two parts to go, the series is teetering on the brink of a grisly, corpse-strewn payoff expected of anything Alien. However, given that it’s taken so long to reach this point it feels safe to stick to the assessment that the show is slow-burn, staggers its scary pleasures, but is far from smart. 

We’ll be back for the finale though, to see if it repeats the impact of its fifth episode – and can escape the shadow of foregone conclusion that looms over every prequel. DM

FX’s Alien: Earth debuts on Disney+ in South Africa on 13 August with two episodes. Thereafter, the series will run through to 23 September with weekly episode drops.

This article was first published on PFangirl.