Hulu released a brief announcement teaser for Alien: Earth earlier this year, but it only featured the show's title logo along with a quick first glimpse of a Xenomorph. Now, we have a first look at some footage from Noah Hawley's highly-anticipated series thanks to a new Disney+ promo.
It's only a few seconds worth of footage, but we do get another shot of what has been described as a "new breed" of Xenomorph, along with our first look at Sydney Chandler as the show's unnamed lead.
Though we only have a vague plot outline for Alien: Earth (see below), we do know that the series will be set three decades before the events of Ridley Scott's original Alien, and will focus on the people of Earth's first ever encounter with the acid-blooded ETs (seemingly confirming that the Alien Vs. Predator movies are not canon).
While speaking to Deadline on the red carped of this year's Emmy Awards, Hawley teased a "chilling" new take on the Alien.
“There’s something about seeing a Xenomorph in the wilds of Earth with your own eyes. That is truly chilling to think of it moving here among us, and so I can’t tell you under what circumstances you’ll see that, but you’ll see it — and you’re going to lock your door that night. What was really fun for me was to really engage with the creature, bring some of my own thoughts to the design while not touching the silhouette, because that’s sacrosanct.”
“But some of the elements as we know, whatever the host is, informs what the final creature is,” he added. “I just wanted to play around a little bit to make it as scary as it should be.”
It doesn't sound like this new creature design will deviate too much from the original, but Hawley's comments definitely suggest that we will see a Face-hugger attach itself to a non-human host.
This has only happened once before in the franchise (unless you count the Proto-Xeno that hatched from the Engineer in Prometheus), when Alien 3 introduced the divisive "dog-buster" (though it was an ox in the Assembly Cut), so it'll be very interesting to find out what Hawley has in store here.
"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."
Along with Chandler, the series' expansive international cast includes Alex Lawther, Timothy Olyphant, Essie Davis, Samuel Blenkin, Babou Ceesay, David Rysdahl, Adrian Edmondson, Adarsh Gourav, Jonathan Ajayi, Erana James, Lily Newmark, Diem Camille, and Moe Bar-El.