FX/Hulu dropped a surprise short teaser for its upcoming spinoff series, Alien: Earth, during the AFC Championship game last night. What makes it intriguing is the way it’s shot entirely from a xenomorph’s point of view as the creature races through a spaceship’s corridor while a “containment breached!” warning repeats. The final shot said the spaceship is headed on a crash course toward Earth.
The official premise is short and sweet: “When a mysterious space vessel crash-lands on Earth, a young woman (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.” We know very little yet about the specifics of the series, other than that it is set two years before the events of the first film, Alien (1979).
It’s promising that showrunner Noah Hawley has said that the style and mythology will be closer to that film, rather than Prometheus (2012) or Alien: Covenant, both of which were also prequels. “In the prequels, Ridley [Scott] made the technology thousands of years more advanced than the technology of Alien, which is supposed to take place in those movies’ future,” he said last January. “There’s something about that that doesn’t really compute for me. I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films, and so that’s the choice I’ve made—there’s no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple Store technology is not available to me.”