"Alien: Earth" Trailer: The Xenomorph Arrives on Earth in Noah Hawley’s New FX Series Starring Sydney Chandler and Timothy Olyphant
The terror of the Xenomorph hits Earth in this new FX series, where humanity’s curiosity and corporate greed set the stage for horror!
Alien, the classic claustrophobic sci-fi horror about a spaceship’s stranded crew facing a deadly extraterrestrial monster, wasn’t just a box-office phenomenon when it opened in 1979. It seeped deep into the cultural zeitgeist. Directed by visionary filmmaker Ridley Scott, the film featured one of the most iconic taglines in cinema history: “In space, no one can hear you scream.”
Since then, it has spawned a long-running franchise with various interpretations of the Xenomorph, an alien creature so terrifying, so primal, it redefined horror in space. Now, with seven films in the Alien saga (including last year’s hit Alien: Romulus, which seemed to spark new interest and momentum in the franchise), the Xenomorph is proving it’s far from extinct.
But after so many variations on the same basic setup, the question now is how to present a new Alien story in a way that feels fresh and exciting while still packing the same punch of terror. That was exactly the puzzle Emmy-winning Fargo creator Noah Hawley had to solve before taking on this upcoming FX series set two years before the events of the original 1979 film. His solution? Bring the Xenomorph to a setting we haven’t yet seen in the franchise: a place with less space and a lot more gravity… Earth! And while in space, no one can hear you scream… on Earth, everyone can... but it might already be too late.
Check out the official full-length trailer for Noah Hawley’s upcoming FX series Alien: Earth, which offers a look at a show that not only takes the franchise in a new direction but also returns to its basic horror roots. This time, it’s set on a futuristic Earth (the year 2120) where corporate power, artificial intelligence, and humanity’s insatiable curiosity come to a head, creating the perfect storm for the Xenomorph to do horrific damage on our world, and our psyche, yet again.
And first thoughts from judging this detailed look at the new series: Hawley may have created a new, enticing Alien universe that feels comparable to its effects-heavy predecessors, but also leans more into grounded, slow-burn suspense that very much channels the original’s claustrophobic terror. Dare we say, this might be the best Alien take yet in recent memory. Color us excited.
Actress Sydney Chandler leads the cast of this new series. She plays Wendy, the first human person to have her consciousness transferred into a synthetic body. In the trailer, we see a very young, sick Wendy, likely dying from an illness of some kind, being explained the experimental procedure she is about to undergo. You’re a “very, very special” girl, she is told. After the transfer, she wakes up in her new synthetic body, now played by Chandler.
Sydney Chandler is the daughter of actor Kyle Chandler. She is known for co-starring in the film Don’t Worry Darling and recently co-starred in the Colin Farrell-starring Apple original series Sugar. However, her breakout role was portraying young rocker Chrissie Hynde in Danny Boyle’s Sex Pistols biopic miniseries Pistol, which premiered in 2022 on FX and Hulu.
The rest of the cast includes Timothy Olyphant, Alex Lawther, Babou Ceesay, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis, Adarsh Gourav, Kit Young, and David Rysdahl, among others.
The series centers around a mysterious deep-space research vessel, the USCSS Maginot, that crash-lands in the middle of a metropolis called Prodigy City. With that part of the city walled off and quarantined, the mission is to go in and recover whatever secrets the ship brought back. What they find is horrifying: the entire crew has been massacred, and the ship’s logs reveal that it had “collected five different life forms from the darkest corners of the universe.” Among them: one deadly, unmistakable Xenomorph specimen that’s now loose and unaccounted for. Obviously, it needs to be destroyed before it can escape into the city. Easier said than done.
Wendy, now being trained as a tactical soldier, volunteers to accompany a corporate-sponsored special unit of recovery operatives. They have no idea what they’re walking into. And even if they did, they probably still wouldn’t be prepared for the nightmare that awaits inside.
Executive produced by Ridley Scott, with series creator Noah Hawley directing the premiere episode and either writing or co-writing the entire season, Alien: Earth is set to land this summer, starting on August 12th on FX on Hulu. Watch the trailer, above.
Official Synopsis:
When the mysterious deep space research vessel USCSS Maginot crash-lands on Earth, “Wendy” (Sydney Chandler) and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet’s greatest threat. FX’s Alien: Earth is created for television and executive produced by Noah Hawley.
The human race may so desperately need a unifying fate-determining common existential cause, that a vicious extraterrestrial attack is what we have to collectively brutally endure in order to survive the longer term from ourselves.
Humanity would all unite for the first time ever to defend against, attack and defeat the humanicidal multi-tentacled ETs, the latter needing to be an even greater nemesis than our own formidably divisive politics and perceptions of differences, both real and perceived — especially those involving race and nationality.
During this much-needed human alliance, we’d be forced to work closely side-by-side together and experience thus witness just how humanly similar we are in the ways that really count. [Then again, I was told that one or more human parties might actually attempt to forge an alliance with the ETs to better their own chances for survival, thus indicating that our deficient human condition may be even worse than I had originally thought.]
Yet, maybe some five or more decades later when all traces of the nightmarish ET invasion are gone, we'll inevitably revert to those same politics to which we humans seem so collectively hopelessly prone — including those of scale: the intercontinental, international, national, provincial or state, regional and municipal. And again we slide downwards.