Michael Pantozzi’s “Off The Face of the Earth” opens with a reclusive photographer, Tim (Pantozzi), who struggles to find the courage to delete his social media account. Once he does that, will he truly be alone and perhaps freer? Or is he trying to take a stand against being a product that exists only to feed bots and algorithms? Whatever the case, it’s a monumental choice, and his mother (Kimmy Robertson from “Twin Peaks”) cannot fathom how he will exist in the world with no friends, especially when she relies on social media to keep in touch with hers, seeing as how her physical limitations keep her confined to the house. 

Then something weird happens. Tim takes the dog for a walk on the beach and, while trying to take a photograph for work, he sees a woman about to jump to her death. The weird thing is, he can only see her through his phone camera and not in real life. He eventually learns that she might be a missing person who has been gone a long time, but this does not answer why he can only see her on his phone. Did she somehow “delete” herself as well?

Pantozzi’s premise remains intriguing throughout, even if we’re not exactly rooting for Tim in any capacity. He’s not always likable or charitable, and the way he treats his mother will put some viewers off. Still, Pantozzi builds the tension nicely and knows how to slowly reveal the nuts and bolts of the mystery at hand. Robertson is especially good as his poor mother, who only has the best intentions for her son and cannot wrap her head around his depression. Her final moment in the film is truly heartbreaking. 

In the end, viewers will come away thinking about, among other things, their own social media presence and what it says about them, and the need to keep adding to it. What if you just disappeared from it all? Most people over a certain age who are reading this remember a time before Facebook and the like, but could you bring yourself to go back to that existence if you had to? If you’re already there, congratulations to you. Tim, for whatever reason, has that same need. Perhaps, just perhaps, his ending is actually a happy one. 

Q&A with director Michael Pantozzi

How did this come about?

At a glacial pace. I had the initial idea for it maybe 10 years ago. One day, my now-wife (Kathleen Littlefield, who plays Ellen in the film) and I were trying to meet up after running some errands and could not find each other, even though we were on the phone and able to determine from our surroundings that we were in the same place at the same time. It was an unsettling, uncanny sort of feeling that later struck me as a good starting point for a high-concept short. 

During the pandemic, I decided to completely get off social media. I did this for all the reasons that social media can be so horrible, but there was also an impulse to just withdraw from everything and not participate in this often very harrowing world anymore. I think it’s something many of us still feel these days. Like, why am I trying so hard to take up meaningful space in this nightmarish society? I can just stay home and get by doing very little with the people I really know and love, and nobody out there will see the difference.

But the feelings that followed once I did were somewhat unexpected. The first thing I realized was that this was the main way that I had crossed other people’s minds, and without it, I felt like I was in hiding. Like no one knew I was here anymore. I also suddenly felt much more in control of who had access to the time and energy I’d rather be spending at home with my wife. My next thought was: Wait a minute, I think I might want this.

But then this finally brought about what I needed to finish the script. Making art is, ideally, an act of communication, I think, and my inability to resist the urge to try to accomplish this led me to understand that simply vanishing wasn’t going to work for me.

Tell me about the casting. A lot of “Twin Peaks” fans are excited about seeing Kimmy Robertson again.

One of my earliest and fondest memories of moving to Los Angeles from the New York area, where I grew up, is watching “Twin Peaks” for the first time. I was living in a Park La Brea two-bedroom with three other people and subsisting on dollar-store deli meat and Trader Joe’s Simpler Times beer, and I remember feeling what, of course, the same thing so many of us have felt about it. It was just so formative and foundational. I had seen all of Lynch’s movies in college, and it felt like a major missing piece of the spiritual puzzle of the artist I hoped to become someday. That’s going to sound however it sounds, but it’s true.

And so when I set out to cast Margo, my own character’s mother in the script, that was where I started from, the on-screen place I perhaps loved most. Kimmy made by far the most sense, given that my own mother inspires the character. What she looks like, what she sounds like, the way she behaves. So I felt insanely fortunate when I sent the script to her manager cold and heard back that she was interested.

That said, I didn’t understand how fortunate I really was until the day she arrived on set. It was 105 degrees in September at this house in Glendale, the first of two days we shot there with her, and this was just nothing to her. “I’m a California girl, I shot in 125 degrees in the desert once,” she said. She was also an exceedingly smart, sophisticated, and generous actor. I couldn’t believe I was acting alongside this person who played such an iconic character, and it goes without saying that she’s as responsible for the film’s success as anyone.

The film touches on a wide range of issues involving the current climate of social interaction, or lack thereof. What do you ultimately think is at the heart of the loneliness Tim feels and wants to embrace?

Tim is in his mid-30s, which I think is a time when many people start to feel they see the writing on the wall about what the rest of their life is or isn’t going to include. I’ve hoped that it’s kind of easy to gather from Tim’s behavior that he probably hasn’t come away from most interactions with other people throughout his life feeling terribly good about them. I think in Tim’s head it’s: “OK, something about me just doesn’t really work for other people, and to be honest, the feeling is generally mutual, so I’m going to stop torturing myself, and letting other people torture me. This is much easier.” 

The fact that we can never truly know what’s in each other’s heads, and that we’re essentially trapped in our own, even though life is this unique and incredible thing we all experience, is perhaps a fundamental tragedy of humanity. Some of us navigate this way better than others, but Tim is definitely not one of these people. That said, especially now, I don’t think anyone is immune to this sense that if we’re not widely observed, we may as well not exist. The tree in the forest that makes no sound when it falls. And Tim is no different: “Hell is other people” is still going to give way to “Hey, where is everybody and what are they doing without me?” particularly when the answer to that question is something as intriguing as his experience with Ellen.

There are many ways to interpret the film’s ending and its relation to digital erasure. Were there any other ideas for the ending that you thought about?

The disappearance in the final moment was the very last revision to the story, made in post after we shot it. I showed my parents an early rough assembly in which the final shot is just the two of them sitting on the bench. Tim has successfully made his way from the wider physical world into this strange liminal pocket of it that Ellen has slipped into, and we know they’re together now and are going to have to deal with each other, so we’re in this with them and able to perceive them as they perceive each other and themselves. Then, my father said something like, “Oh, huh, I thought they were both going to disappear from our view of them now after that.” So I really have him to thank for that final stroke there.

But the story was always: He’s looking for her, and then he finds her … one interpretation of which I imagine could be that digital erasure is not death, as much as it might feel that way. There’s been a fair number of responses I’ve heard that equate what happens in the end to a kind of suicide, which I thought was interesting. But I also think there’s perhaps an implicit hope that we can still find each other outside of all this. 

Have you had any other interesting reactions to the film in terms of how it resonates with people?

Yes, one thing I’ve been thrilled about, in terms of both intention and result, is the space I wanted to leave for viewers’ own stories as they’re experiencing the film. There’s been a surprising amount of personal history shared that, on the surface, doesn’t seem to have much to do with anything I was thinking about when writing it. But the unifying pattern has been this sentiment: Relationships with others—let alone with the rest of the world via the internet—can feel so unnatural and just so, so hard. For some more than others, and indeed what about those of us who are among those some?

I’ve also been very pleased (though not surprised) by the vocal appreciation for not just Kimmy’s performance but also for the work of our DP Laela Kilbourn, who has deservedly won an Emmy, and our production designer Jenny Melendez. They are likewise among the authors of this film.

What’s next for you?

Everything else I have going on is at the writing stage. I’m writing a feature with the editor and associate producer of this short, Josh Bernhard, who is not the director of this short. However, I’ve also been getting started on something that could be a proof of concept for a feature. Either way, I’m still very slow, so these will probably take some time, but hopefully not nearly as much. Finally, I’m also helping (“The Nanny” star) Renée Taylor with some further work on her play “Dying Is No Excuse.” I appeared in it as an actor at the Berkshire Theatre Group over the summer and had the extraordinary opportunity to participate in its earlier development under the direction of Elaine May. Now it’s onto its next stage of life.

My first brush with the Alien franchise was to see Aliens on VHS when I was a kid. I still believe that it’s one of the greatest action movies of all time. It definitely put its stamp on military science fiction, that’s for sure. Only after seeing the sequel did I go back to the original Alien, which delivered on the horror and suspense incredibly well, and it gets better each time I see it.  

These were two movies of very different genres, each helmed by visionary directors at the top of their game. They both had the disturbing body horror and existential dread that came from the xenomorphs.

Aliens 3 came out, and I did not care for it. (Killing off Hicks and Newt in the opening moments of the movie was unforgivable.) Alien: Resurrection didn’t quite do the job either. The Alien vs. Predator series came and went. I watched them, and while it was cool to see Predators and Aliens in the same movie, the whole thing just rang hollow. For me, I’ve been chasing the high of those first two movies for so long.

Prometheus kinda sorta got us back there. It certainly delivered on the mystery and dread, but the story had some…issues, shall we say. I did not see Alien: Covenant, and from all accounts, I can be glad of that. I may still see Alien: Romulus at some point, but it’s not necessarily at the top of my watchlist.

All that was to give you a starting point of where I was when Alien: Earth began to air — essentially on a downward trend with occasional ups here and there. Strangely enough, this new series on Hulu became something of a microcosm for my fandom of the whole. That is, a great start that begins to stair-step downward with occasional up spikes here and there. It should go without saying (though I’ll say it anyway) that there will be major spoilers for Alien: Earth here. Consider yourself warned.

The Ups were Upping

I want to give credit where credit is due. First, this series looks gorgeous, from its cinematography to its set design. The production values on this show don’t look like they are from a streaming show at all. It feels like we just got a series of Alien movies with Season 1 that are highly rewatchable for the details.

Second, the acting is equal to or greater than the visual quality. I have to give great props to Babou Ceesay, Timothy Olyphant, and Samuel Blenkin for handing in stellar performances. My favorite scenes were those that featured Morrow and Kirsh, and I really hated Boy Kavalier. Talk about a character that put all their points into Intelligence and used Wisdom as their dump stat, it’s him!

But, I want to be clear that creating a character that audiences will hate takes incredible acting skill, and Blenkin delivered that in droves. Kudos to him.

The other actors inhabit their roles incredibly well, too. The Lost Boys really do seem like kids trapped in adult bodies. We get frickin’ Essie Davis here (of Phryne Fisher fame), though I wish she’d had more to do.

Beyond that, we get to see more into the megacorporations on Earth. In most other installments, Weyland-Yutani is the prime mover of events. Here, they are largely in the background. We find out that Earth’s governments have effectively gone away and now there are five megacorporations that rule various territories on Earth, essentially a feudalistic technocracy with a nearly all-powerful dictator/CEO at the head of each one — a dystopian fate that we definitely aren’t rushing towards ourselves. Ahem.

The Alien franchise has always had synthetics, or artificial persons, but here we also get cyborgs like Morrow, and hybrids. The hybrids in particular are something that seem like a natural extension of the idea of a synthetic. (I wish the Institute in Fallout 4 would take a cue from this.) If you have synth bodies that are resilient, immune to disease, and potentially ageless, you might look at trying to download human consciousness into one. Such a thing raises about as many moral and ethical questions as the transporter in Star Trek, but it makes total sense: Boy Kavalier is attempting to monetize immortality.

And what Alien story would be complete without a healthy dose of corporate hubris, once again personified by Kavalier. There’s always someone who thinks that they can control the ineffable. Generally, it’s just trying to control the xenomorphs, but Prodigy is trying to control multiple species at the same time in addition to the xenomorph.

Speaking of which, the MVP of the new aliens has to be the T. Ocellus (eye midge). I found I was more interested in what was going on with it than the xenomorph for most of the series. Here’s a creature that’s equally as terrifying as the xenomorphs, and one that might be truly sentient. As one YouTuber put it: “The xenomorph is the perfect killer; the eye midge is the perfect nightmare.”

More than anything, I want to know where the show will go with that little critter if we get more seasons.

The Downs were Downing

As much as the sets and acting were spot on, along with many of the concepts, the story was uneven. Certain scenes and bits of dialogue felt like they knocked it out of the park. Within the same episode, sometimes within the same scenes, there are non-sequiturs and weirdness that make it seem like either the script was between drafts when they shot it, there was some weirdness with the editing, or some sort of static in the line.

Two examples of this really stand out. The first is when Nibs has her memory erased. Dame Sylvia wants to keep her in isolation so that it’s not immediately apparent that her memories have been altered. And yet, Wendy is in the room when Nibs wakes up and the alteration becomes immediately apparent. Whoopsie!

The second is when Wendy decides to leave the island and resolves to take the other Lost boys with her. We get a line from Boy Kavalier that says something to the effect of “Oh shit! We better get to them (the Lost Boys) before she does!” But, Wendy is able to get to them without issue immediately afterward. No security guards challenge her or get in her way at all.

And that speaks to one of the greater issues: Security on the island is a joke. At no point does the security feel like it’s able to do anything of value. There are no static guards posted anywhere. They occasionally roam the halls, but anytime someone wants to avoid them, it’s pretty easy to do so. There are cameras and listening devices everywhere, including those built into the hybrids, but it seems that Prodigy leadership is always clueless as to what’s really going on.

You might could explain it away as Kirsh trying to manipulate things from the inside, but it seems to happen one too many times for my tastes. The scene of Slightly and Smee awkwardly carrying a face-huggered victim through the halls was just kind of it for me. I couldn’t suspend my disbelief beyond that.

Speaking of incompetent leadership, it strikes me as weird that Prodigy continually forgets about the remote shutdown failsafe for the hybrids hybrid in case something went wrong. They also should have installed some sort of tracking beacon that can’t be shut off remotely. In the case of Nibs, she proves the point that maybe your first-generation hybrids shouldn’t come standard with super strength and speed in case they become mentally unstable. Maybe leave the super powers for later generations when you have perfected the process instead of handing that to a bunch of children.

But all that pales in comparison to one of the story beats that kicks off the series. Even though Boy Kavalier is months, perhaps weeks, away from unveiling his crowning achievement, something that will reshape what it means to be human, for some reason he agrees to send all of his hybrids into an incredibly dangerous and uncertain situation. Not just one or two, but all of them.

The hybrids literally have the minds of children, they have no combat training, and no weapons other than the handle of a paper cutter that Wendy picks up and magnetizes to her back. Absolutely none of that makes sense. The final episode attempts to say that Kavalier has extremely poor impulse control, which would definitely explain some of his poorly thought out decisions, but this feels like a total cop out.

I think the worst sin of the show, however, was having Wendy be able to turn the xenomorph into a pet or, at best, a minion. A big theme of many movies in the Alien franchise is that you simply can’t control something like the xenomorphs. It’s sheer folly to even attempt to do so, and what success that is possible is fleeting. The xenomorphs always get out, and they are virtually unstoppable when they do.

Wendy having one that will kill on command really sinks the whole deal for me. Also, showing a xenomorph during the day really degrades its menace. It’s meant to be a thing that leaps from the shadows or attacks when you least expect it, so showing it in broad daylight really takes away the impact.

I don’t want to just rag on the show, but a few other honorable mentions include:

• Several security guards, all armed with tasers, waiting patiently on the dock as Nibs brutally kills one of their own in plain view. They have a clear line of fire, but they do nothing.
• Morrow should have the recovered file from the Maginot that shows that Kavalier had paid off the chief engineer. It feels like that would at least be mentioned during the arbitration scene, but it isn’t at all.
• The xenomorph being hyper-lethal in some scenes but slow and ponderous in others, depending on the level of plot armor.
• The inconsistency of physical strength shown by the hybrids, particularly Tootles/Isaac when opening a door and Slightly and Smee when carrying a body. Are they super strong or aren’t they?
• Dame Sylvia not being terribly bothered that her husband is missing during a crisis of aliens getting out of containment and an attack by Weyland-Yutani operatives.
• The T. Ocellus passing over any number of living and dead Prodigy personnel to go to the beach to insert itself into a dead body. I guess this little alien can reanimate dead tissue.
• Boy Kavalier writing “3.14” on his hand and expecting T. Ocellus to understand what that means. Yeah, I’m not sure it understands English. While it might understand the concept of pi, I highly doubt it would express it in Arabic numerals.
• A nitpick, but what is going on with Yutani’s personal guard? They look cool in a cyberpunk-ninja kind of way, but what’s with the golden-wing accents on their helmets? How do they get through doorways?  

Final Thoughts

Let me just say that I hope this show gets a Season 2. I can’t say I’m happy about them leaving much of the story unresolved (particularly a fleet of attack craft from Yutani already at the island). It also seems that Wendy’s transformation from series protagonist to series antagonist happens awfully fast. She never mentioned anything about wanting to lead or rule, but that’s where we leave her. We don’t hear anything about her or Prodigy in the later lore, so it doesn’t seem like she’s destined to be successful.

Like much of the show, I don’t know where they’re going to go with it. Despite all of my criticisms, it finally felt like we were back in the Alien universe again, and I tuned in every week for it. Still, I think that there’s great potential here if they smooth over the rougher edges from Season 1. If they do, this show could turn into something great. Here’s hoping, anyway.

Thanks for reading!

Each episode of Noah Hawley’s brilliant “Alien: Earth” opens with what could be called an overture. As the title takes shape (much like the original, groundbreaking Ridley Scott film), images flash across the screen as a sort of twisted “Previously On.” But they also sometimes contain new data, much like a composer integrating previous themes while also previewing what’s to come. Set to an atonal, unsettling score, these overtures are designed to get your attention. Put the phone down. Settle in for something that’s not what you’re used to watching on TV or streaming services. Something that feels a bit alien.

Hawley, the creator of “Fargo” and “Legion,” has done what only a few creators before have been capable of doing: expanding on a well-known property in a way that makes it feel new again while also not betraying what fans already know and love. Tony Gilroy’s work on “Andor” feels like a logical comparison, and that’s the quality tier on which this show resides as well. Working with a razor-sharp team of writers and craftspeople, Hawley delivers an 8-episode first season that somehow marries the philosophical depth that fans of “Prometheus” admired with the intense action and bone-chilling imagery of James Cameron’s “Aliens.” He takes the essence of three art forms—the film world of one of the biggest sci-fi franchises of all time, the structure of episodic television, and even the literary foundation of, believe it or not, Peter Pan—and makes something that feels like nothing else on television. This is a show that takes such massive swings that the first few hours are almost disorienting. But once you get on its wavelength, you won’t want it to end.

The Peter Pan connection comes in the form of a young girl named Marci, who agrees to be a part of a breakthrough program in which a human’s consciousness can be put in a synthetic lifeform. Before she dies of cancer, she is “transferred” into the form of Wendy (Sydney Chandler), joined by a group of other kids given the same treatment, each named after members of the Lost Boys from the J.M. Barrie classic. After all, these kids will truly never grow up.

The hybrids include Slightly (Adarsh Gourav), Tootles (Kit Young), Smee (Jonathan Ajayi), Curly (Erana James), and Nibs (Lily Newmark), most of them given great arcs in the first season (especially Nibs). However, the CEO of the corporation in charge of the program has a favorite, a smirking tech bro named Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin). His right-hand man is a synthetic named Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), while the kind Dame Silvia (Essie Davis) and her husband Arthur (David Rysdahl) help manage the technical and emotional difficulties of the project.

Into this technological breakthrough drops aliens. Literally. The season opens with scenes that feel very much of a piece with Scott’s original, depicting what feel like working-class space travelers on a ship in deep space as they emerge from hyper-sleep. Hawley disposes of them mostly off-screen (until mid-season, when he circles back and delivers what is basically a standalone short “Alien” movie that stands among the best single episodes of TV in years). Still, we learn that the ship is on a trajectory to crash into Earth when a cyborg named Morrow (Babou Ceesay) locks himself in a safe compartment just before impact. He survives the collision, as does his cargo, including aliens familiar and new. Before you know it, soldiers are investigating the crash scene, including Hermit (Alex Lawther), the brother of, you guessed it, Marci/Wendy. Sensing a way for his company to one-up the competition in Weyland-Yutani, Boy Kavalier sends his Lost Boys in to retrieve the cargo themselves. And that’s just the first two hours. You’ll have no way to predict where the next six go. Trust me.

“Alien: Earth” alternates the deeply philosophical undercurrents one would expect from Hawley with intense action and gore that may not be seen coming. Let’s just say that you’ll get more actual Xenomorph action in these eight hours than the last several movies combined, alleviating any concern that a TV version of a massive franchise would feel small by comparison. Hawley uses limited sets—don’t expect the “Earth” to mean a lot of aliens wandering through a crowded mall—to significant effect, delivering a show that somehow feels both claustrophobic and sprawling at the same time. He introduces new alien lifeforms, including an unforgettable little monster that treats the eye like John Hurt’s stomach. Still, he never loses sight of the human and human variations at the center of his story. He’s constantly taking risks in terms of visual language, whether it’s double exposure, split diopter, canted angles, pacing shifts, or other tricks to amplify tension. It’s a show that’s consistently off-center in a manner that increases atmosphere, blending Hawley’s weird sense of humor with some of the most gnarly sci-fi imagery TV has ever seen.

Importantly, Hawley doesn’t let the creatures steal the show. There are standout performances all over “Alien: Earth,” but standouts include Chandler’s ascension from naïve girl to Ripley-esque heroine, Ceesay’s drive to complete his mission at any cost, and, most of all, Blenkin’s ability to make his pajama-wearing tech jerk into someone who’s somehow both captivating and chilling at the same time. Most of all, it’s an ensemble that all seems to be invigorated by the production around them, diving into the deep ends and trusting Hawley won’t let them drown.

“Alien: Earth” is “about” too many things to recap in a review, but the heart of the show to this viewer is something that the series has been exploring for a half-century: What happens when human beings are no longer the top of the predatory food chain? And, in subsequent films as well as here, what does it mean to be something in between human and alien? Wendy is not flesh and blood nor a robot; not a child or an adult. She’s nothing and everything at the same time.

The “Alien” films have also long explored the logical extremes of evolution and how technology can distort it, prioritizing corporate interests over human ones. Making the heroes of this tale children in grown-up bodies amplifies many of the franchise’s themes, making the adults around them feel even more predatory, as soldiers of the business world who are willing to sell out the next generation to further their own interests. Hawley twists and turns his captivating tale in a manner designed to make you question who the real enemy is in this story, and who it’s been all along. Maybe the monsters are already here.

Whole series screened for review. Starts on FX on August 12^th.