<\/p>\n
FX\u2019s Alien: Earth<\/i> shreds. In making the first-ever television show based on the Alien<\/i> film franchise, creator Noah Hawley seems to have had one insight that overwhelmed all the rest: that Alien<\/i>\u2019s got kind of a heavy metal vibe. This sounds like a criticism, but I don\u2019t necessarily mean it that way. Hawley\u2019s televisual take on the Alien<\/i> universe is faithful and unfaithful to the canon by turns. It sticks to the basic idea\u2014a group of hapless humans and a handful of charmingly malevolent androids come into contact with a Xenomorph, a parasitic, nigh-unkillable alien bioweapon with a head so overtly phallic that you\u2019d laugh if you weren\u2019t being eviscerated\u2014while ambitiously expanding the scope. It advances strong, strongly asserted ideas about where the most compelling corners of that universe are and how a television show, working at a different scale than film, might illuminate them. Hawley seems quite interested, for instance, in exploring unexplored aspects of the Alien <\/i>aesthetic. Emerging<\/a> from H.R. Giger\u2019s perverse, byzantine, industrial Goth artwork, the Alien<\/i> franchise is full of complex and malevolent piping, snaking alloys, machinelike humans, and humanlike machines.<\/p>\n Alien: Earth<\/i> obviously draws upon Giger\u2019s blueprint, but, in visual style and thematic spirit, Hawley trades in<\/a> the franchise\u2019s gloom and doom for something a bit more aligned with metal\u2019s more theatrical aesthetics. This is most evident in each episode\u2019s closing needle drop, many of which are heavy metal classics, including the pilot\u2019s eerily timed Black Sabbath cue. But those are only the most superficial nods. Like the musical genre that inspires the show, Alien: Earth<\/i> can be grisly and grim as well as occasionally ponderous and plodding\u2014Hawley\u2019s incessant dissolves wouldn\u2019t look out of place in a Metallica video. The show thinks about violence and death in ways that can be bleakly insightful and trite within the space of a scene. It\u2019s dead serious to the point of comedy, but its unembarrassed sincerity is also somehow admirable. And shooting the iconic Xenomorph at length in full light, as the show often has occasion to do, emphasizes the way these aliens look as if they\u2019re clad head-to-toe in black leather. Even from the moment they explode out of the poor human rib cages they\u2019ve been gestating in. Chestbursters and headbangers.<\/p>\n The latent thrash of Alien: Earth<\/i> is only one of several crannies of the Alien<\/i> cosmos into which Hawley extends a curious tentacle. The new show is more minutely interested, for instance, in the complex biology and reproductive cycle of the iconic Xenomorph alien than any film in the series, and it spends a tremendous amount of time explicitly explaining and clinically exploring that topic. It is fascinated by the franchise\u2019s depiction of androids, and it situates these beings within a kind of politicized class hierarchy of synthetic, humanoid AI on the planet of their manufacture. It wants to know way, way more about the Earthbound economic environment that led Weyland-Yutani Corp. to put Sigourney Weaver on that ill-fated spaceship<\/a> in the first place.<\/p>\n Alien: Earth<\/i>, in other words, has a lot of ideas. So, too, did Alien<\/i>, Aliens<\/i>, and all the rest, up through the recent reboots and reimaginings. But all of those films\u2014seven in the canon, along with two crossovers with the Predator<\/i> universe\u2014shared a kind of brutal simplicity and cutting restraint, the space of the ship serving as a literal representation of the movie\u2019s compulsory narrative economy. The pictures had lots to say about AI and humanity and God and science and bodies and machines, but the language they used was the bloody and direct language of a slasher set on an intergalactic submarine. Even the most philosophically minded of the films, like 2012\u2019s Prometheus<\/i>, work dirty. (When an enfeebled trillionaire finally meets his alien creator to ask the meaning of life, the giant alien just smacks him<\/a> so hard he dies.) Given an epic canvas, Hawley introduces new moods and modes to investigate Alien<\/i>\u2019s enduring themes and images, from boardrooms to futuristic cities to jungle laboratories. But the series often feels as though it\u2019s missing the ruthless, rigid organization of the tin can hurtling through space, its ruminations grander but, given new room to breathe, less urgent. In ways both good and bad, Alien: Earth<\/i> is not such a tight ship.<\/p>\n There\u2019s a scene in the fourth episode of Alien: Earth<\/i> when what\u2019s colloquially called a \u201cchestburster\u201d alien infant breaks out of its containment. The creature initially has no legs or arms, and it slithers on its tail like a cobra as it stands, making eye contact with one of our characters. Were chestbursters always snaky guys?<\/i> In the moment, as I ogled the slippery beast staring from the screen in front of me, I couldn\u2019t quite remember. And the reason for that is that the Alien<\/i> films have always been defined by speed and darkness. The original chestburster scampers away<\/a> before you really get a good look at him. The fully grown Xenomorphs dodge in and out of the shadows. In this show, the aliens are well-lit and fully featured. We see them closely, and at length. We probe their strange life cycle, ask and answer questions about them, even hear and try to understand their voices. Some of this makes for fascinating drama. It scratches an itch I have, as a fan, for answers. But part of what made the films so itchily brilliant was their mystery, their play with the dark, their slinking and scampering. Can an extended look at these creatures in the light match the experience of being sideswiped by them in the dark? Are greater mysteries to be found the deeper we go? Can the TV show\u2019s slaking our curiosity replace the visceral thrill of the Xenomorph on the hunt?<\/p>\n Noah Hawley wants to find out. The first moments of the premiere episode\u2014which we encounter in brief snippets and return to at length in a stand-alone episode later in the series\u2014set up our situation quite clearly. A gargantuan spaceship from the Weyland-Yutani Corp., which also chartered most of the vessels we\u2019ve encountered in the film series, has traveled to the far reaches of outer space to bring back five alien species for study and, presumably, profit. One of these fellas is obviously the Xenomorph\u2014contained, however briefly, in an oil-black egg\u2014but there is other compellingly murderous fauna as well, including a scene-stealing octopus monster that looks like a giant eyeball and threatens to become the show\u2019s breakout star.<\/p>\n