Alien: Earth is a brilliant and terrifying expansion of the franchise
FX’s Alien: Earth — Pictured: Sydney Chandler as Wendy. CR: Patrick Brown/FX | FX
While the monsters in each of the nine Alien movies have been a little bit different, the nefarious corporate forces have remained the same. Ridley Scott's original Alien didn't need to mention Weyland-Yutani by name for it to be clear that a singular mega-company had cornered the market on space exploration. But subsequent Alien films turned the franchise into a terrifying rumination on the violence baked into capitalism's DNA.
Though Weyland-Yutani has loomed larger and larger in various Alien projects over the years, FX's new Alien: Earth series is the first to explore what it looks like on the ground. Set two years before the original f …