#alien-earth

#alien-earth

In Alien: Earth, set two years before the 1979 sci-fi classic Alien, the mega-corporation Prodigy is on the brink of achievingand profiting fromimmortality. The first batch of "immortal" humans are the Lost Boys: terminally ill children whose consciousness are uploaded into artificial, adult-sized bodies. These powerful, literally overgrown kids wind up on the frontlines of humanity's first contact with aliens after a ship containing unknown specimens crashes in southeast Asia.

Noah Hawley set some big challenges for himself when he signed on to run Alien: Earth. To begin with, it takes nerve, bordering on arrogance, even to try putting any personal stamp on a franchise as well known as Alien. Then Hawley's decision to introduce "hybrids" with synthetic bodies and human minds - and to make the human component of those androids children - amped up the difficulty level. It's hard to write dialogue for kids, even when they're part robot.

I'm currently visiting my sister, who moved out here a little over two years agoright around when The Bear sent Marcus the pastry chef (Lionel Boyce) to travel around the city and learn about fancy pastries. After I interviewed Boyce that season, he pointed me to a hole-in-the-wall fried chicken joint called Poulette that he filmed a scene in for the showand it's somehow still a hidden gem in the city.

There was a time when nothing in cinema was more frightening than a xenomorph. HR Giger's nightmarish biomechanical hellspawn, dripping with fluids and Freudian discharge, was the gruesome, undisputed apex predator of movie monsters. It burst from your chest; it dissolved your face with acid; it splintered your ribcage like a pinata filled with blood and screams. It was unstoppable, unknowable, the kind of thing you'd expect to find at the bottom of your dishwasher after leaving it closed for 36 centuries.

Babou Ceesay commands attention with his performance as Morrow, a predatory cyborg in Alien: Earth, contrasting with the chaotic creatures around him. His portrayal reflects a thrilling blend of menace and charisma within a sci-fi horror context.

The eight-episode series is set in 2120, where corporate interests are competing to unlock the key to human longevity, possibly even immortality.