When you survey the biggest and most influential sci-fi series of all time, there's no way you can exclude Alien and its many sequels. While some people would argue it never got better than that taut first outing, the aesthetics and dread of the series have informed so many imitators.
While Romulus continued the movie series last year with a slightly pared-back vision, the franchise is getting its first TV series very soon, in the form of Alien: Earth. After months of waiting, we finally got a proper teaser trailer for the show this week, as brief as it is.
It shows a group of five ominous crates, while a voiceover informs us that each one contains a different vicious predator from an alien world. Then, we see that the ship carrying these threats seems to have a fully-grown Xenomorph loose in it, and that said vessel is about to crash-land on Earth itself.
That's quite the setup, and it's impressive for how simple and to-the-point it is, really. We get almost nothing to go on beyond what it shows, but it does end by confirming the series is coming out this summer, slightly narrowing down what was previously a "2025" release window.
To learn more, we have to turn to the Disney+ show's official blurb, which tells us that once the ship crashes, it'll become the problem of a young woman played by Sydney Chandler, who sounds like our main character. She'll be among a group of soldiers that discover it and have to deal with the insane threat that'll crawl out of its bowels.
The show is set in the year 2120, at the height of corporate powers, and it's not just the infamous Weyland-Yutani corp that'll be at large. Four massive rivals (Prodigy, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold) will also potentially be players trying to secure the biohazard aliens for their own needs.
The show's being run by Noah Hawley, best known for an extremely successful run in charge of the excellent Fargo show, which demonstrated his ability to adapt movie material into unique TV scripts. Genre-wise, this sci-fi horror show may prove a harder needle to thread, but it's thrilling to know how soon we'll be able to watch it.
