Is ‘Alien: Earth’ swarmed with good reviews?
Is ‘Alien: Earth’ swarmed with good reviews?
The new series is available to stream on Hulu now. What are critics saying?
Hulu is bringing the monsters of the 1980s back in a big way. First, it was the “Predator” franchise, with titles like “Prey” and the animated film “Predator: Killer of Killers” hitting Hulu’s catalog in recent years.
Now, it’s time for “Alien” to enter the fray. The new FX and Hulu series “Alien: Earth” premiered on Tuesday, Aug. 12, and will continue to air episodes both on the streamer and cable channel through the Season 1 finale on Sept. 23.
“Alien: Earth” transports viewers to the year 2120, a time in which control of the planet is split between five mega-corporations. One of those — the Prodigy Corporation — seemingly experiences a breakthrough in biotechnology, creating the first humanoid robots with human consciousness embedded. But when a Weyland-Yutani spaceship makes an unexpected landfall in Prodigy City, Prodigy’s first hybrids must face a terrifying lifeform from the most mysterious reaches of the galaxy.
So far, critics are fairly enthusiastic about “Alien: Earth.” The series has a 93% average Tomatometer on Rotten Tomatoes, and an 84 score on Metacritic, which denotes “universal acclaim.” Find out more about what specific critics are loving about the series below!
Watch a trailer for ‘Alien: Earth’:
Alien: Earth
When the mysterious deep space research vessel USCSS Maginot crash-lands on Earth, Wendy and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet’s greatest threat.
What do the critics think of ‘Alien: Earth’?
Eric Deggans | NPR
Since the Alien franchise encompasses a lot of storytelling, science fiction nerds will spend time wondering about the implications of Hawley’s series. Why, for example, haven’t we seen hybrid people in Alien movies before? And why did people in early Alien movies act as if they had never heard of the xenomorphs, when Hawley’s series shows they crash landed on Earth years before the events of the first film? The science fiction geek in me is hoping these are questions Hawley gets to answer in subsequent seasons of Alien: Earth, which manages the slick feat of offering a story that feels new, builds on the past and offers loads of tantalizing possibilities for the future.
Nicholas Quah | Vulture
With Alien: Earth, Hawley builds out the familiar franchise hook by nesting several Alien-esque scenarios within the season’s eight-episode run…These flourishes highlight Hawley’s talent for adaptation as already demonstrated in Fargo, where he wasn’t just paying homage to a single film but remixing motifs from across the Coen brothers’ oeuvre in the service of his own narrative ends. He attempts something similar here, reassembling familiar Alien elements to explore his core thematic interests around personhood, consciousness, and the revolt of the created against the creator, but the result doesn’t quite land with the same clarity or impact.
Jack Seale | The Guardian
What Alien: Earth lacks in its opening two instalments is a propulsive, linear narrative or clarity of thematic vision, to the point where it sometimes approaches Westworld levels of making us ask the gloomy screen what in the blazes is happening. But whether it’s a padded corridor filmed at a 10-degree angle, a landscape of jagged concrete and raining sparks, a wriggling creepy-crawly from space or just the look in someone’s jaded eye, the series always has a way of making us feel like helpless prey being circled. Something gloriously horrific is just around the corner.
Clint Gage | IGN
The good news is, Noah Hawley and the writers and directors behind Alien: Earth’s first season have no intentions of pandering to anybody for anything. More so than 2024’s Romulus, this series is going back to the roots of the franchise in some really effective ways. Alien: Earth is clearly set in the same universe and of course has all the nods and winks and Easter eggs one would expect with a legacy prequel series. But by Hawley and FX’s own admission, they’re also pretty clearly unconcerned with how Earth actually ‘fits’ into the established Alien canon.
Kelly Lawler | USA Today
Hawley’s scripts and deft direction create a near-constant tension and apprehension in each episode, jam-packed with action and violence. Its opening installments even find a way to cram in some exposition amid all the terror and mayhem, but by the end of the season, the ceaseless adrenaline and motion of the plot are something to behold. But lest you think all that action leaves little time for something more intellectual, “Earth” is deeply philosophical, sometimes so overtly so it’s a bit too on the nose… But anyone who has seen Hawley’s “Legion” will easily spot his penchant for asking questions about what makes us human and why. And fans of his five seasons of “Fargo” adaptations will see his penchant for sprawling casts full of idiosyncratic characters that are lovable in odd and surprising ways.
Ross Bonaime | Collider
While the Alien films have largely centered around a group attempting to survive the attack of a xenomorph, Hawley’s series has much larger ambitions. Usually, as the murders are happening, often on a ship of some form, we see brief glimpses of these larger ideas peeking around the corner. It’s rarely the focus of an Alien story, despite it always being compelling to learn more about what’s going on in this universe. Yet Alien: Earth has the opportunity to take these larger details of its futuristic world and make them the focal point… Hawley, who writes or co-writes every installment and also directs two, beautifully melds all the different forms of the Alien franchise into one cohesive narrative.
James Dyer | Empire
The question of whether the Alien movie formula can sustain an eight episode series is answered early on — it doesn’t need to. Over five core films, two regrettable crossovers, and 46 years of cultural saturation, the Xenomorph isn’t the mystery it once was — something showrunner Noah Hawley knows all too well. Which is why the Xenomorph is just one of five specimens the Maginot has dredged up from the deepest reaches of space. From a parasitic eyeball to vampire termites, every one of these ornery ETs is concentrated nightmare fuel, with twisted life-cycles that provide a rich canvas for gnarly body horror — the zombie cat will live long in the memory, and you won’t look at either sheep or water bottles in quite the same way.
Alison Herman | Variety
“Earth” follows the lavish epic “Shōgun” as a massive investment on the part of FX, which now balances period pieces and genre fare with smaller projects like, say, “Dying for Sex.” That expenditure is evident on the screen; production designer Andy Nicholson crafts evocative images like the clunky Maginot wedged into a high-end shopping center, while the new aliens are convincingly rendered enough to induce entirely new fears, including a parasitic eyeball that hijacks the nervous system. But aliens do not have the inner lives — that we know of, at least — to propel the plot of a show over hours or even seasons, a length that “Earth” is explicitly aiming for. For that, Hawley turns to Wendy and her fellow synthetics, thrilled and terrified and in some cases destabilized by their new lease on life. They’re not as flashy as the voracious monsters, but they prove a richer vein to mine.
Judy Berman | Time
Fargo’s most haunting image comes at the very end of Season 3, written around the time of the 2016 election. An avatar for good and an embodiment of evil sit face-to-face, locked in an eternal clash of wills. “There is a sense to which this year’s Fargo is really a mirror reflecting our reality back to us at this moment in time, but we don’t know how it’s gonna end,” Hawley said when it aired. If that show suggests he’s a moralist—one caught between optimism and pessimism about not just whether humanity will prevail, but about whether we should—Alien: Earth confirms it. And in this four-way staring contest that pits people against corporations, AI, and aliens, the permeable mammalian eye faces stiff competition indeed.
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