Movie Review: OSIRIS
Instead, the aliens take the message of Earth's diverse life and cultures as a 'come and get us' invitation. Osiris 's story begins when they abduct a Special Forces unit led by Max Martini's Kelly. When the unit is inexplicably released from their stasis gel on board the alien ship, the fight is on to survive and escape. Image Credit: Samuel Birdsong Osiris
The film's title references the Egyptian god of the afterlife, the underworld, and the dead. He also symbolizes resurrection. Kelly and his team members are as good as dead after their abduction, but get an unexplained second chance at life. (Arguably, it's a third as they were about to call in a strike on their own site when the aliens abducted them.)
RELATED: Movie Review: The Fantastic Four: First Steps
It's a battle-heavy film, beginning with the unit mid-operation in a firefight with unspecified Middle Eastern-looking combatants in a decimated setting. With Martini, Michael Irby, and LaMonica Garrett making up half the team, they're leaning into authentic tactical tradecraft gleaned from their military training on CBS's The Unit and Paramount+'s Lioness. Image Credit: David R. Gaynes
Once awake aboard the alien craft, it continues into a series of prolonged battle scenes, albeit in much tighter quarters. (It's not worth wondering whether or not it's smart to be shooting so many bullets aboard a spaceship.) Along the way, they come across Brianna Hildebrand's Ravi, who is less than forthcoming about their situation. Her fight face and skills quickly win their respect, if not their trust. The Sarah Connor Effect
A lot of the film's pedigree as an alien-adversary-action-adventure rests on Linda Hamilton's involvement. Her character, Anya, a seasoned soldier and strategist, has spent decades evading the aliens on their own ship. Repeat: on their own ship . (That's not worth thinking too hard about either.) While she doesn't appear on-screen until nearly an hour into the film, she's quickly in charge of the unit. Or what's left of it at that point. Hamilton delivers a solid, if predictable, performance — strong, smart, takes no sh*t.
RELATED: Superman Spoiler Review
The Osiris creative team invested a great deal of energy and talent into the practical effects for the aliens and the combat scenes. It's hard to learn more about the aliens since only one character can understand their language. And that's a shame. Not that we need to empathize with the predators, but I would've liked to know what their take on the Golden Record's contents was. What made Earth sound appealing and worth the trip?
On its most basic level, the plot may or may not have been inspired by the stinger scene in The Big Bang Theory Season 8 Episode 21, 'The Communication Deterioration,' but the added elements of the aliens' strategy for invasion and use of intermodal container shipping provide some interesting zest to the standard 'eat the people, take their stuff' playbook. With the final scene setting Osiris up as the first in a series, we can only assume Kelly and Ravi will find other survivors still fighting the aliens. It's by no means a safe assumption. Enjoy the Ride
Osiris leaves a lot of questions about the aliens, their invasion tactics, and their shipboard security painfully unanswered. The timeline of the film is still a little fuzzy, as is whether the aliens are just looking to hunt and gather or if they're colonizing to provide cattle for the homeworld. But if you're looking for a movie with very clear lines drawn between hunter and hunted, this is it. If throwing back to a time in sci-fi when resource management and hull integrity never even cross the mind turns your crank, you're in the zone. While it's not a movie that stands up to detailed scrutiny, Osiris is packed with solid action scenes, lots of alien conflict, and epitomizes the need to survive against all odds. Even when they're never in your favor.
Osiris premieres in select theaters and drops for streaming on Plex on July 25.
SDCC 2025: MIGHTY NEIN Gets Premiere Date; THE LEGEND OF VOX MACHINA Renewed for Season 5 Diana lives in Vancouver, BC, Canada, where she invests her time and energy in teaching, writing, parenting, and indulging her love of all Trek and a myriad of other fandoms. She is a lifelong fan of smart sci-fi and fantasy media, an upstanding citizen of the United Federation of Planets, and a supporter of AFC Richmond 'til she dies. Her guilty pleasures include female-led procedurals, old-school sitcoms, and Bluey. She teaches, knits, and dreams big. You can also find her writing at The Televixen, Women at Warp, TV Fanatic, and TV Goodness.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Geek Tyrant
an hour ago
- Geek Tyrant
ALIEN: EARTH Creator Teases Monsters Even More Terrifying Than Xenomorphs — GeekTyrant
As we get closer to the highly anticipated debut of the sci-fi horror series Alien: Earth , excitement among fans continues to build, and now, we've got some fresh details to share with you. The show's creator, Noah Hawley, recently teased that the upcoming series will unleash a brand-new breed of monsters, possibly even more terrifying than the iconic xenomorphs we've been hiding from since Ridley Scott's 1979 classic, Alien . In a conversation with ComicBook, Hawley was asked if the xenomorphs will remain the scariest threat in Alien: Earth ? His answer: 'That depends on what grosses you out the most. I think we're giving them a run for their money, certainly.' That's an interesting statement, especially considering how the xenomorphs have haunted the nightmares of audiences for decades. But fear not, classic Xonomorph fans, Hawley assures that these beloved aliens aren't taking a backseat: 'But their value is added. They are scary in the egg stage, the facehugger stage, and the chest burster stage. They got something for everyone, those xenomorphs.' Hawley also hinted at how the series' Earth-bound setting amplifies the terror, explaining: 'You bring these creatures into our natural environment. You introduce an apex predator to another balanced ecosystem. I'm really interested to see how that plays out. 'I think you saw it in the last trailer, the iconic shot of the xenomorph in the cave system. You got a visceral response to it, to feel like now they're here [on Earth].' It's clear that Alien: Earth is evolving the threat in new and horrific ways. With a the ecosystem of Earth now thrown into chaos by these apex predators, fans can expect a tension-filled narrative unlike anything we've seen before. The first two episodes of Alien: Earth will drop on August 12, 2025, with the remaining six episodes releasing weekly. Get ready to face your fears—because Earth is about to get a lot scarier. I've already watched the first episode of the series, and I loved it! I'm excited to see how the rest of the series!
Tom's Guide
3 hours ago
- Tom's Guide
‘Alien Earth' review: Hulu's sci-fi blockbuster is the best new show of the year
Truth be told, I approached 'Alien: Earth' with a degree of skepticism. That's not due to a lack of love for the iconic sci-fi universe. As a lifelong 'Alien' superfan, introduced to the Xenomorph at an impressionable (and far too young) age, my cautious approach was born out of concern as to how the cinematic world of 'Alien' would translate to the small screen. Turns out, I needn't have worried. In a word, 'Alien: Earth' is a triumph. After streaming the first six episodes, the show has already delivered on its promise to bring the thrills, chills and fear of its big-screen siblings to the TV world, and then some. Creator Noah Hawley has crafted an FX/Hulu original that serves as both a fantastic extension of the universe and a bold new frontier. Most impressively, 'Earth' isn't just an 'Alien' movie shrunk down and stretched across eight chapters. Its overall scale doesn't quite match its blockbuster counterpart, but the expansion of the 'Alien' world is guaranteed to delight longtime fans and draw in even those less familiar with this dark (but rich) universe of Xenomorphs and nefarious mega corporations. Beyond the rudimentary elevator pitch of 'the first 'Alien' TV show,' there is so much about 'Alien: Earth' worth praising, from the spectacular visual design (some ropey CGI aside) to a cast of well-written, and often complex, characters. And I can't neglect to call out the phenomenal pacing either. 'Alien: Earth' is pretty much the television show of my dreams. 'Alien: Earth' starts, as all good 'Alien' stories should, with a doomed crew of space explorers encountering the world's most lethal killer, and things immediately going south. But this time, the goal isn't to prevent the Xenomorph from finding its way back to Earth; it's too late for that. The space vessel Maginot — which fans will be delighted to know is a dead ringer for the Nostromo — is already on a collision course with our big blue planet. This spaceship, containing not just a clutch of Xenos eggs but also several other equally deadly extraterrestrial creatures, crash-lands in territory owned by Prodigy, one of five megacorporations that control the now resource-depleted Earth. And the ship's owner, another of the megacorps, Weyland-Yutani, very much wants it back. Alien eggs and all. This is where 'Alien: Earth' sets itself apart from the numerous Xenomorph-focused films before it. As a TV show, it has a greater ability to expand on the sci-fi universe and explore the state of this grim vision of the future. While you might come to see an Alien burst from the chest of an unfortunate victim, you'll likely stay for the highly engaging corporate pokliticing. The machinations of powerful and morally bankrupt businesses are hardly a new theme for 'Alien,' but 'Earth' has the time to truly develop this plot strand, making it so much more than a mere aside to the terror inflicted by the tooth-tongued creature on the poster. The excellent performance from Samuel Blenkin as Prodigy CEO Boy Kavalier goes some way to make the corporate-focused scenes, where the Alien isn't in the spotlight, just as compelling and unsettling. Trillion-dollar CEOs performing ethically questionable experiments in the name of fattening their bottom line is just one facet of 'Alien: Earth.' Ironically, humanity is found in the show's cast of (mostly) synthetic protagonists. The first episode introduces us to Marcy, a young girl dying of terminal cancer. She becomes the first human to have their consciousness transferred into a synthetic body, reborn as Wendy (Sydney Chandler). The 'Peter Pan' reference is intentional and pointed out a lot. There's also a surprisingly large amount of 'Ice Age 4' in the show's first two installments. Wendy is the first, but not the last, sick child to be given a new life via a white-blooded body, and soon, Prodigy has created a small family of former humans now synthetic. Another of the 'Alien' series' biggest questions is what it means to be human, and 'Alien: Earth' mines this territory more than any of the theatrical movies. It might even labor the point a little too much. Chandler herself is a fantastic lead. Wendy is a complex role, a child's mind stuffed inside a powerful robot body, and the actress brings a youthful naivety to the role, which offers viewers something to cling to in such a brutal setting. Alex Lawther plays her brother, a Prodigy worker and combat medic; their relationship is the show's beating (human) heart. The two actors noted their closeness on set during a Q&A event at the European premiere (which Tom's Guide attended), and it shows on screen. Greater star power comes in the form of Timothy Olyphant as Kirsh, Wendy's synthetic guardian. While Olyphant brings a necessary coolness to the unfeeling figure, it's a character archetype we've seen across the 'Alien' movies. So, yet another synthetic with grey motivations, feels routine and Olyphant has less to do than expected. The show's breakout star is likely to be Samuel Blenkin, who plays Morrow, a Weyland-Yutani cyborg (different from a synthetic, the opening credits give a quick explainer). Morrow is intensely threatening in stature and capable of manipulating the hybrid children as he seeks to reclaim the Alien artifacts that he views as his 'life's works.' He's more than a tough enforcer; we're also drip-fed clues that point to a tragic backstory. Morrow is also the star of one of the show's best very episodes (of the six seen for review), an extended flashback to the Maginot right before the crash that brought the Xenos to Earth. It plays out like an entire 'Alien' movie delivered in a single, adrenaline-spiking hour. OK, I'm aware that at this point, I've said very little about the Xenomorph in all this. Fans worried that the black-domed creature has been sidelined, fear not. There's a generous scoop of the Alien present throughout the show. Right from the drop, it's as deadly as ever. Much like last year's big-screen 'Alien: Romulus,' 'Earth' works hard to establish the Xenomorph as a serious threat. We see the savage intergalactic animal perform some truly horrific acts of violence, including a creative scene where one rips through a squad of soldiers while the camera focuses on Morrow's grim expression. We only see the blood-drenched aftermath, but it's chilling stuff. To add to the fear factor, 'Alien: Earth' delivers new creatures of nightmare, including a tentacle-creation that latches onto the eyes of its victim and takes over their mind. It's skin-crawling in the best way. And I've not even covered the various mutant insects on display, too. Rest assured, viewers simply looking for sweat-inducing scenes as doomed victims attempt to survive against a shrieking Xenomorph will be more than pleased with what's on offer. And I should also give a shout-out to the show's use of practical suits in many of these scenes. You can have all the expensive computer effects in the world, but sometimes you just can't beat a man in a rubber costume. 'Alien' movies typically ratchet up the tension until an explosion of chaos in the third act, but as a TV show, 'Earth' takes on a different structure. It thrives on moments of intensity, before dishing out meaty story beats between the numerous high-octane scenes. It helps to keep 'Alien: Earth' well-paced throughout, and viewers seeking Xenomorph carnage above all will be pleased to know you're never far from the next stomach-turning moment of violence. 'Alien: Earth' absolutely nails the look of the franchise. Its vision of the far future is grim, grotty and humid enough that you can see the cast sweating in almost every scene (the shooting location of Bangkok may be responsible for all the perspiration on display). While most of the show is set within a high-tech Prodigy compound, we also get to spend a generous amount of time on the Maginot. As noted, this spaceship is practically the Nostromo from 1979's 'Alien' under a different name. I felt jealous of the show's cast, such was my eagerness to leap onto these sets and explore every inch for myself. Much of the design aesthetic is inspired by the industrial sci-fi that dominated the original 'Alien' movies, but the more modern look of later efforts like 2012's 'Prometheus' is also present in various high-level boardroom scenes. This creates a nice contrast and is a not-so-subtle way of displaying the disparity in wealth between corporate executives and the average workers forced to come face-to-face with Xenomorphs in the name of profit. Because the vast majority of 'Alien: Earth' looks so good, and is so faithful to the design philosophy of the franchise, the moments where it doesn't stand out all the more. Green scenes are mostly kept to a minimum, with lots of physical sets in use, but one critical character beat barely connects because it's extremely obvious the actor is performing their lines not in a real location but instead in front of a vast green (or maybe blue) canvas. 'Alien: Earth' is better than even my most optimistic hopes. It's a show created with clear reverence to the source material — even if the lore implications of Xenos arriving on Earth two years before 'Alien' muddy the waters — and it spins an intriguing sci-fi story that asks some big questions. It's packed with moments that had my eyes glued to the screen, and some of the most wince-inducing kills in the 'Alien' canon to date, which is quite some achievement. Crucially, despite its name, it's not a show defined by the Xenomorph. Yes, the lethal creature is a vital component, but even in the stretches when there's no Aliens on screen, the show remains gripping thanks to strong performances across the cast and a well-paced narrative that escalates with each episode. I can't wait to see how it comes to an end. 'Alien: Earth' isn't just the clear frontrunner for my favorite TV show of 2025 so far (though this caveat is largely unnecessary, I can't see anything surpassing it), but one of the best pieces of 'Alien' media ever made. And that's the highest praise a fan like me can dish out.
Time Magazine
3 hours ago
- Time Magazine
'Alien: Earth' Reinvigorates a Flagging Franchise
A spacecraft hurtling through the cosmos. An indomitable female lead. Armed crew members creeping through dim, claustrophobic hallways where death could be lurking around any corner. A hostile alien that looks like a giant, bullet-headed scorpion in fetish gear and bleeds acid the color and consistency of infected snot. That ominous drip of extraterrestrial drool. These are the hallmarks of the Alien franchise, which have remained mostly consistent across the seven movies (plus two vacuous Alien vs. Predator crossovers) that have kept those terrifying Xenomorphs coming back to our screens every decade since the original premiered in 1979. Yet Alien has always been an elastic property. In 1986, James Cameron followed up Ridley Scott's minimal work of cosmic horror with Aliens, an action spectacle for a maximalist era. Hero Ellen Ripley's (Sigourney Weaver) lonely fight for survival gave way to a military mission to vanquish aliens ravaging a human colony; Cameron filled the frame with cocky Marines, boxy space tanks, and an adorable orphan who finds in Ripley a surrogate mother. Both films rank among the best in their respective genres. Subsequent features haven't been nearly as successful. In the '90s, David Fincher (Alien 3) and Amélie director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Alien Resurrection), working from a script by Joss Whedon, mishandled the intellectual property. Even Scott's intriguing but convoluted 2010s origin stories and 2024's adequate Alien: Romulus (soon to be followed by a sequel of its own) do little to dispel the impression that the franchise's heyday ended 39 years ago. Especially in light of this history, FX's fantastic Alien: Earth—a prequel to Scott's movie that is also the first live-action Alien series—is a remarkable achievement. But I wouldn't call it a surprise. With ambitious small-screen takes on the Coen brothers masterpiece Fargo and the Marvel superhero Legion under his belt, the show's creator, Noah Hawley, has built a reputation on reinvigorating hard-to-adapt IP in series fueled by profound insight into what makes a decades-old story relevant now. In the case of Earth, premiering Aug. 12, the subjects of artificial intelligence and corporate overreach provide more than enough fodder for cerebral sci-fi horror grounded in the anxieties of 2025. Set in 2120, two years before Scott's Alien, Earth opens with parallel storylines. In space, the crew of the Maginot (whose name forebodingly references France's expensive but futile World War II Nazi defense) awakens from years of cryogenic slumber in preparation for a return to Earth. Their precious cargo, to be delivered to the franchise's canonical evil megacorp, Weyland-Yutani, is a menagerie of novel life forms, including some familiar-looking eggs. Of course, things go sideways. The creatures kill everyone except cutthroat security officer Morrow (Babou Ceesay), a cyborg. Meanwhile, on a terrestrial island called Neverland, trillionaire wunderkind Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin) is using a secret technology he developed to transfer the consciousnesses of terminally ill children into synthetic, superhuman, theoretically immortal humanoid bodies. The first of these hybrids, our Ripley surrogate, christens herself Wendy (Sydney Chandler); in keeping with the Peter Pan theme, the kids she shepherds through the process will be named for Lost Boys. These plots literally collide when the Maginot falls to Earth, crash-landing in a city controlled by Kavalier's upstart company, Prodigy. (Viewers who remember the '90s may have intrusive thoughts of an AOL alternative with the same name.) Along with the many casualties, the accident has geopolitical as well as business implications. In the show's timeline, the world is ruled by a tenuous alliance of five massive companies, of which Yutani and Prodigy are two. Their rivalry in the race to immortality will ultimately decide the fate of the universe. A 22nd century disrupter in the mold of Uber or Airbnb, Prodigy is all-in on hybrids. Yutani may be plundering the wildlife of far-off planets in hopes they possess the secret to eternal life. Hawley uses this setup to reestablish the atmosphere Alien fans have come to expect: the tight corridors, the jump-scare attacks, the gross creatures, even the alien drool. Aesthetics have always been paramount to the franchise, particularly in Scott's movies; cybergoth artist H.R. Giger was famously instrumental in designing the look of the original, including the Xenomorph itself. Earth features similarly murky visuals and fearsome monsters, many original to the show. Just as eerie is its sound design, which evocatively captures, for instance, the squish of a scalpel slicing through alien flesh. Yet after a riveting first half of the premiere, too many slow-burn action and horror sequences all but arrest the development of the plot and characters until Episode 3. But the fourth episode is a revelation. Enthralling in its setup of a war between two psychopathic corporations that doubles as a battle for control of Earth, it's also rich with insight into the peculiar interiority of Wendy and the Lost Boys—who look like adults but see the world as kids, express emotions but reside in robotic bodies physically and mentally enhanced beyond the capacity of any mortal. ('What makes them geniuses is the fact that they're children,' Kavalier, now a young adult, theorizes. 'Because children have access to a world of infinite imagination.') Are they humans, robots, or both? 'We took the minds of children and put them in synthetic bodies,' a scientist overseeing the project, Arthur (David Rhysdahl), frets to his wife and colleague, Dame Sylvia (Essie Davis). 'If we did this wrong, we got a bunch of AIs running around thinking they're human. Worst case? We killed six kids.' From there, like a spaceship fleeing to the safety of its home solar system, Earth is firing on all cylinders: narrative, stylistic, psychological, philosophical. 'Science fiction has one main question,' Hawley argued in a recent interview, 'And that question is whether humanity deserves to survive—in all these stories of the first contact or going out into the universe and meeting species that are either smarter than us or more deadly than us.' This dilemma consumes what might be the most internationally influential sci-fi work of the current century, Chinese author Cixin Liu's The Three-Body Problem, which Netflix adapted last year as an English-language series. Even the new Superman movie flirts with the idea that our fractious species might be improved by an infusion of alien seed into the gene pool. As the climate crisis escalates, as deaths keep mounting in Gaza, Ukraine, and Sudan, as authoritarianism trends, it's not hard to see why storytellers are framing the prospect of extraterrestrials annihilating—or fundamentally altering—humanity as a potentially positive outcome for the planet, if not the universe. In Earth, that questioning takes the form of Hawley's critique of hypercapitalism and ambivalence toward AI. The Five, as the ruling syndicate is called, exerts unchecked financial and legal power over Earth's population. When Wendy's human brother Hermit (Alex Lawther), a Prodigy technical officer and medic, appeals to the company to release him from his contract so he can fulfill his dream of attending medical school, a synthetic arbitrator coldly rejects his request. Conceived before Donald Trump's return to Washington but rife with resonance about Elon Musk's stint there, the scene illustrates the dehumanizing potential of AI-abetted corporate supremacy. What, you may ask, does this all have to do with aliens? Well, you can't spell alien without AI; androids have always been part of the franchise, though the timely anxiety about human-synthetic hybrids is new. In Earth, the two are more thematically linked than ever. Both are superintelligent, lethal, existential threats to humanity—for which humanity has no one to blame but itself. Though one is a human innovation and the other hails from a distant world, neither would've posed a danger had greedy tech barons not released them from the Pandora's box of scientific progress. Some of the series' most subtly chilling scenes show aliens manipulating their captors with the ease of a person commanding a well-trained dog. So it makes sense that Wendy, who is at first fixated on reuniting with Hermit, comes to wonder whether she might feel more of an affinity with the specimens in the lab. By reframing aliens as a mirror of and metaphor for AI, while calling back to Aliens' villain, a murderously self-interested Weyland-Yutani employee (played by Paul Reiser as the archetypal '80s yuppie), Earth preserves the franchise's best tropes but also expands and updates its palette of ideas. Hawley has described his exploration of 'humanity and the terrible things that we do to each other' as a form of 'moral horror' layered beneath the 'body horror or creature horror.' The latter are still very much present, in new iterations of the movies' perennial pregnancy ick; one of the best episodes of the season could stand alone as a mini Alien feature. But it's the moral horror that makes Earth more than another goopy interplanetary melee. Hawley worked from a similar playbook with Legion, whose apparently schizophrenic superhero filtered a fast-evolving cultural conversation around mental illness through a psychedelic kaleidoscope, and especially Fargo. A quirky, darkly comedic crime anthology set, like the film, in a snowy Midwest, Fargo has cannily applied the Coens' good-vs.-evil framework to discourse around such fraught topics as gender and race. Hawley places infinite trust in his audience's intelligence and patience. Occasionally, as in the obscurity of Legion's later episodes or the plodding pace of some Fargo plots, this approach can verge on self-indulgence. But mostly, at a time when some streamers tailor their programs to avoid confusing viewers glued to their phones, it's refreshing to watch TV that treats you like an adult. Fargo's most haunting image comes at the very end of Season 3, written around the time of the 2016 election. An avatar for good and an embodiment of evil sit face-to-face, locked in an eternal clash of wills. 'There is a sense to which this year's Fargo is really a mirror reflecting our reality back to us at this moment in time, but we don't know how it's gonna end,' Hawley said when it aired. If that show suggests he's a moralist—one caught between optimism and pessimism about not just whether humanity will prevail, but about whether we should—Alien: Earth confirms it. And in this four-way staring contest that pits people against corporations, AI, and aliens, the permeable mammalian eye faces stiff competition indeed.
