Alien: Earth Crash-Lands on FX and Hulu This August

FX and Hulu’s Alien: Earth have some intriguing mysteries they still want to share, including a final teaser trailer for the series before its arrival later this year. In addition to that premiere trailer, the streamers have also revealed a bit more detail of the story, which mixes both slow, philosophical moments with high-energy science-fiction horror.

FX and Hulu first released a short teaser trailer for Alien: Earth last January. That trailer surprised viewers while the AFC Championship was airing, revealing a xenomorph hurtling down a corridor on a spaceship destined to crash into Earth. After the premiere trailer for Alien: Earth was released, this second teaser trailer didn’t feature any recognizable characters or give away any details about its story. In a story told through the xenomorph’s eyes and without a recognizable character, this teaser trailer was less about setting up its story and more about world-building and a mood piece.

In the following month, the first full trailer for Alien: Earth was released, offering new details about the story, characters, and world while building off of the mystery and style of the shorter trailer. The first episode of Alien: Earth takes place in 2120 on Neverland Research Island, where Wendy, a “hybrid” capable of adult human strength and dexterity but without human understanding, will be the first of its kind. As the trailer shows, Wendy is getting put together in 2120, and aliens from an outside ship crash onto the island. Wendy is brave enough to venture into the debris of the spacecraft to fetch the alien mystery stowed in the ship, but what she finds in the wreckage isn’t scientific advancement—it’s human and alien corpses. Inside the alien ship, five unknown species are found on board, each more terrifying than the last. The worst of the species isn’t their unknown physiology and speed—it’s what they take back to the lab on board the Neverland Research Island to be investigated, the classic move from curiosity to catastrophe.

The new trailer offers a new scene and a recap of the previous trailer, including new information about the story, characters, and the stakes of this franchise. Showrunner Noah Hawley says this prequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien (1979) will be more in line with the mythology, themes, and aesthetic of the original Alien than any other films or shows in the Alien or Predator series. He’s especially going for an aesthetic that evokes something more thoughtful, quiet, and atmospheric compared to Prometheus or Alien: Covenant.

Alien: Earth Trailer 2 Recap: Monsters, Mayhem, and Mystery in the Year 2120

The trailer we already saw for Alien: Earth set up the story in a few distinct beats. The first of those moments was the recreation of Wendy, the humanoid “adult” with the mind and awareness of a young child, built to investigate the ship and other areas of research for humanity in the year 2120. A young woman, Sydney Chandler, plays Wendy in Alien: Earth, and her adult physique with the understanding of a child is one of the first mysteries we’ll be introduced to in Alien: Earth.

Alien: Earth also has the major beats of a mystery movie. The island crew investigates the crash, and Wendy is told to report to the investigation, where she is going to have a great leap forward in humanity’s understanding of life in the universe, a life that could potentially lead to long life or even immortality for humanity. But the new trailer also establishes how bad the results of such curiosity are in the Alien franchise. The trailer cuts between the rebuilding of Wendy, Wendy and her “trainer” reporting to the alien wreckage in the hull of the ship, and her gawking in awe of the advanced technology before a series of horrified shrieks and then shots of bodies and death.

The larger picture we see of the familiar Alien iconography also cuts to more abstract shots of power at work, including mechanical arms bandaging a worker’s injured hand and voiceless scenes of human workers subsumed by industry in their tooling, machinery, and the power and might of numbers. All of these things are the exploration of setting and story for what is going to happen in Alien: Earth, a chance for Hawley and his team to explain the story as much as the mythos, an early look at Wendy, a synthetic character with genuine consciousness, and the later establishing shot of a giant alien beast emerging from the darkness with an iconic black shape on its back, ready to hunt.

Alien: Earth will premiere on August 12 on FX and Hulu.