"containment breached" Alien: Earth will bring the horror home The prequel series is set a couple of years before the events of the original 1979 film, Alien. Jennifer Ouellette Jan 27, 2025 2:56 pm | 11 Credit: YouTube/FX/Hulu Credit: YouTube/FX/Hulu Story textSizeSmallStandardLargeWidth *StandardWideLinksStandardOrange* Subscribers only Learn moreAlien: Earth, an all-new original series, premieres this summer on Hulu and with Hulu On Disney+. 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 planets 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. "Theres something about that that doesnt really compute for me. I prefer the retro-futurism of the first two films, and so thats the choice Ive madetheres no holograms. The convenience of that beautiful Apple Store technology is not available to me.Chandler's character is named Wendy, and apparently she has "the body of an adult and the consciousness of a child." The eminently watchable Timothy Olyphant plays her synth mentor and trainer, Kirsh, and here's hoping he brings some space cowboy vibes to the role. The cast also includes Alex Lawther as the soldier named CJ; Samuel Blenkin as a CEO named Boy Kavalier; Essie Davis as Dame Silvia; Adarsh Gouray as Slightly; Kit Young as Tootles; and Sandra Yi Sencindiver as a senior member of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. I think we can expect at least some cast members to end up as xenomorph fodder.Alien: Romulus was a welcome return to the franchise's horror roots, and Alien: Earth will bring the horror to our home planet. Theres something about seeing a Xenomorph in the wilds of Earth with your own eyes, Hawley told Deadline Hollywood in September. I cant tell you under what circumstances youll see that, but youll see it and youre going to lock your door that night.As for creature design, "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 thats sacrosanct," he said. "But some of the elements as we know, whatever the host is informs what the final creature is. I just wanted to play around a little bit to make it as scary as it should be.Alien: Earth premieres on FX/Hulu this summer. Credit: FX/Hulu Jennifer OuelletteSenior WriterJennifer OuelletteSenior Writer Jennifer is a senior writer at Ars Technica with a particular focus on where science meets culture, covering everything from physics and related interdisciplinary topics to her favorite films and TV series. Jennifer lives in Baltimore with her spouse, physicist Sean M. Carroll, and their two cats, Ariel and Caliban. 11 Comments