XENOMORPHS of SIAM

Megacorporations? Space travel? Juxtaposed tech? Bangkok 'is the future' in Alien: Earth

- STORY: TATAT BUNNAG

The Alien franchise has always been about survival in the most inhospitable places imaginable, from derelict space freighters to hostile alien planets. But in Alien: Earth, the inhospitable terrain isn't light-years away. It's right here at home.

For the first time in the franchise's history, the nightmare spills onto our planet, and showrunner Noah Hawley has chosen Thailand as the unlikely - yet eerily perfect stand-in for Earth in the year 2120.

Now streaming exclusively on Disney+ Hotstar Thailand, Alien: Earth promises a fresh, television-first take on the Xenomorph saga across eight episodes. It's both a love letter to Ridley Scott's 1979 classic and a bold expansion of the story into a new frontier - the humid, high-tech and hauntingly beautiful landscapes of near-future Bangkok and beyond.

During the height of what the series dubs the "Corporate Era", Earth is governed by five megacorporations - Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic and Threshold. Humanity, cyborgs and synthetics coexist uneasily, until Prodigy's brilliant CEO engineers the first "hybrids" - robots with human consciousness.

The inaugural prototype Wendy (Sydney Chandler) becomes the reluctant leader of a tactical team investigating the crash of the Weyland-Yutani space vessel USCSS Maginot. What begins as containment quickly escalates as Xenomorphs and other alien horrors are unleashed across Bangkok's future-shimmering skyline and Thailand's dramatic landscapes.

For Living Films, the Chiang Mai-based production company tasked with bringing Hawley's vision to life, the project was nothing short of a dream - and a challenge of galactic proportions. Speaking with producers Chris Lowenstein and Apinat "Obb" Siricharoenjit, it's clear that the making of Alien: Earth was as epic as the story itself.

"Well, first of all, our showrunner for the TV series is Noah Hawley, so the series is really his vision," Lowenstein told