Review: Quasi-Government Megacompanies Collide in Alien: Earth

The 1979 movie Alien was part deep-space monster movie, part dystopian extrapolation of the era’s economic concerns. The movie’s main antagonist was a chest-bursting alien with acid for blood, but an all-powerful corporation loomed in the background; an AI middleman prioritized dangerous specimen collection above the lives of put-upon blue collar workers.

So it’s no surprise that Alien: Earth, the tricky, clever first television series based on the movie, follows in the film’s footsteps. A direct prequel to Ridley Scott’s original, Alien: Earth takes place in a corporate-controlled future where five megacompanies run the planet as quasi-governments. One of these companies is working on a plan to let people—or at least the right people—live forever as synth-robot versions of themselves, their consciousnesses uploaded into battery-powered, superstrong, eternally youthful bodies. Another is trying to bring a cache of terrifying alien life forms back from deep space.

The two sinister corporations collide in a geopolitical showdown over advanced bioweapons and robotic life extension technology. The show asks the questions: Do human beings have souls? And do corporations—or murderous xenomorphs with acid for blood, which might be metaphorically the same—even care?