Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth Trailer Is Dark, Haunting, and Violent

FX and Hulu have not been giving fans much to look forward to with the coming-of-age prequel Alien: Earth, but tomorrow will mark the last of their mysteries. The sci-fi horror series that adapts the mythology of Ridley Scott’s original Alien for the year 2120 arrives Aug. 12, and has already had a short teaser released, plus a longer trailer. Now, one final trailer has been released, and it harkens back to the series’ forebear by giving off the vibe of its very first shot.

The peaceful, lunar landscape hangs in limbo while the gazebo-like spacecraft of alien origin begins a silent descent from the cosmos. Its shadow is a looming, sightless giant before it lands. The enigmatic monoliths of Enterprise arrive, with Earth in the background. And then, across its skeletal surface, it lumbers.

The trailer follows an ominously meditative, near-existential thread common to the first two trailers: long-distance shots in space of quiet, aimless exploration and the drifting of an unmarked alien craft; discarded bodies and dead crewmates in dimly lit hallway corridors; desperate humanoids covered in blood running from shadows; and finally, amid flickering sparks from an electrical explosion, an icon in the distance: a xenomorph, moving through shadows, returning to the franchise.

The star showrunner behind this new series is, if anything, a slow builder, and Hawley has stated the direction of Alien: Earth will be more in line with the original Alien from 1979 than the more action-oriented prequels Prometheus (2012) and Alien: Covenant (2017). While, like the prior prequels, Alien: Earth will tell the direct story of what came before the events of Scott’s film, it will do so in an eight-episode series that expands the lore and philosophy of the Xenomorphs and the Earth of 2120.

This future is one run not by governments but by corporations, as seen through the five major mega-corporations at the beginning of 2120: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. But instead of corporations working in fields common to us now—retail, services, and entertainment—Earth in 2120 is in the Corporate Era, where artificial, machine intelligence and hybridized synthetics run operations and corporate warlords fight to seize power. This will make humanity’s prize all the more vital: control over life itself, or perhaps, eternal life.

The hybrids begin to tip the scales of the corporate arms race. In the Alien: Earth story, the young, eccentric Founder and CEO of the Prodigy Corporation makes a breakthrough in the form of the hybrids: humanoid robots that are constructed using real human consciousness.

The first hybrid is an android prototype called “Wendy.” A child in a young woman’s body, Wendy is “a humanoid robot with the body of an adult and the consciousness of a child” (played by Sydney Chandler). Her programming and moral compass are a clean slate: easily influenced and impressionable, she will be at the center of a series of events that will alter the human race forever.

Prodigy City is idyllic as it is when Wendy arrives in 2120—until an unfamiliar Weyland-Yutani spaceship careens out of control and crashes nearby. There, Wendy and other hybrids are exposed to alien organisms and possibly the deadly xenomorph that, when it discovers these mortal creatures, brings humanity into a new, more terrifying war for survival.

Chandler’s Wendy is the only part of the full cast announced so far, but this group will also include Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, Wendy’s synthetic trainer and mentor; Alex Lawther as the soldier CJ; Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier, the Weyland-Yutani CEO; Essie Davis as Dame Silvia; Adarsh Gourav as Slightly; Kit Young as Tootles; David Rysdahl as Arthur; Babou Ceesay as Morrow; Jonathan Ajayi as Smee; Erana James as Curly; Lily Newmark as Nibs; Diem Camille as Siberian; and Adrian Edmondson as Atom Eins.

Following a stinger trailer from February, Hawley, Olyphant, and the team dropped an initial, surprise teaser during last year’s AFC Championship NFL game in January. No other context, FX simply released a short clip shot entirely from the point-of-view of the xenomorph from a door frame on the length of the corridor it’s sprinting across to reach the airlock hatch. As it closes behind her tail, the spacecraft of Enterprise above Earth is shown in mid-flight before the camera suddenly lurches and goes blank, the xenomorph having taken control of the vessel on its crash course for Earth.

If the first trailer gave a sense of a complete story, it did so through omission rather than context, and the short teaser dropped just last month. It was much clearer: it opened with the creation of Wendy on 2120 Earth at a high-tech research and development island called Neverland, as she and other synthetic hybrids were put in place and standing by in case of emergency. An alien spacecraft crash-lands not far from where they are, and Wendy volunteers to go get it.

But instead of a wonder of scientific discovery, the destroyed alien ship is filled with the carnage of five alien organisms, dead but all unknown species—deadlier in true Alien fashion, than any other human research can match, and it only takes the sample specimen of one for the xenomorph to return with revenge.

FX and Hulu’s Alien: Earth premieres on FX and Hulu Aug. 12.