I don’t know what would happen if Xenomorphs finally made their way to Earth and let loose on the entire population. How would alien creatures who tend to thrive in cramped ships and prison facilities fare in wide open fields and city environments basked in sunlight? Surely it’d be easy enough to shoot them on sight and stop Facehuggers before they had any chance of spreading their evil seed? That’s the assumption I’ve always held, and why films seldom step foot on home turf.
Obviously, there are non-canon occurrences like the mediocre duo of Alien vs Predator films and an assortment of comics and video games, but when it comes to the films we know and (mostly) love, Alien has always taken place far away from our trusty home planet. Confined to derelict ships, colonies, prisons, or any other place where a cast of characters can be summarily dispatched in epic fashion. When you take that concept and let it unfold on Earth across a whole series, it needs to be executed in a fundamentally different way.
Alien: Earth Will Be Xenomorphs Like We’ve Never Seen Them Before
Earlier this week saw yet another teaser for Alien: Earth release, a TV series aiming to debut on FX and Hulu this coming summer. Right now we know very little about it beyond its main premise of a ship carrying Xenomorphs landing on Earth and hurls the world into chaos.
It will be helmed by writer and director Noah Hawley, who in recent years has been involved in Legion and the critically acclaimed Fargo revival. He has the pedigree to make a show like this work, although it remains unclear if the aliens arriving on Earth will result in a mostly confined slasher-esque caper or bring about the eventual apocalypse.
We also don’t see a Xenomorph in the trailer, nor do I think we are meant to. Instead, we go through the teaser from the first-person perspective of a large, panicked insect while it flies across a spaceship currently hurtling through the atmosphere. It seems angry, buzzing with desperation as it crashes against walls and windows as classic sirens bellow out around it. We then transition outside a window it bumps into to catch a view of the entire ship as it draws closer to Earth.
What this creature is and the role it will play remains unclear, but it’s clear everyone on board is either dead, infected, or given birth to alien creatures. My bet is this insect is some sort of airborne Facehugger hybrid capable of impregnating humans, but being able to go airborne makes them a much bigger and more immediate threat.
Facehugger eggs are always hidden, waiting to hatch and taking advantage of isolated bits of space to sneak around and launch onto a person’s face when they least expect it. That’s not something you can accomplish as easily in this new setting, so changing the form factor and evolving what it means to become a Xenomorph is something Alien: Earth has to do.
But how the planet is going to be depicted in the show is also going to influence that, especially given recent films like Alien: Romulus have painted it as a dystopian pit ravaged by climate change where younger generations are willing to risk their lives off-world to make a living.
What Is Our Planet Going To Look Like In Alien: Earth?
Perhaps Weyland-Yutani will turn the unmitigated disaster of a Xenomorph crash landing on Earth as an opportunity. First they will seek to quarantine, research, and send Marines over to the crash site to investigate and receive. Plot details are thin on the ground right now, but part of me doubts Alien Earth is going to take place on a version of our planet that is simply a paradise waiting to be ravaged.
A narrative point I’d love to see the series explore is why Earth has slowly been left behind in favour of off-world colonies, and how corporations helped to facilitate that for all the wrong reasons.
It’s going to be a place where corporations are already calling the shots and most people are struggling to make ends meet amidst a landscape where resources are few and far between. Capitalism has already won the day, while companies like Weyland-Yutani will be unphased by letting millions of innocents die if it furthers their corporate interests.
If aliens happen to be on Earth, it only makes their mission to procure them and develop the ultimate superweapon that much easier. But now, more and more people are going to be caught in the crossfire.
Alien: Earth would benefit from following a closely-knit cast of characters trying to deal with a Xenomorph threat that will ultimately prove impossible to prevent, but whether they will wind up causing damage to an already broken world or finally bring it to its knees is a question we will only see answered with time.
- Released
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October 7, 2014
- ESRB
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M for Mature: Blood, Strong Language, Violence