Noah Hawley’s 'Alien: Earth'​ Is Not Such a Tight Ship

FX’s Alien: Earth shreds. In making the first-ever television show based on the Alien film franchise, creator Noah Hawley seems to have had one insight that overwhelmed all the rest: that Alien’s got kind of a heavy metal vibe. This sounds like a criticism, but I don’t necessarily mean it that way. Hawley’s televisual take on the Alien universe is faithful and unfaithful to the canon by turns. It sticks to the basic idea—a 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’d laugh if you weren’t being eviscerated—while 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 aesthetic. Emerging from H.R. Giger’s perverse, byzantine, industrial Goth artwork, the Alien franchise is full of complex and malevolent piping, snaking alloys, machinelike humans, and humanlike machines.