Alien: Earth

I've just finished the first two episodes. As a fan of the original movie and being in my fifties, this series is definitely not for me. It's got none of the suspense, tension or build of the original, a weird teen genius who eats apples and appears to be a moron, super-fast synthetic children in adult form who move painfully slowly at all times. Sorry but I just found the whole thing utterly ridiculous.

Also - it's still just set in a spaceship, it just happens to be crashed into the side of a building.

Very disappointing.

The production values are a solid 10. For better or worse, the target demographic is adolescents and mid-teens of median intellect. The writing and plot are at a level of a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon. Dumbness and plot holes ruin the experience virtually every 30 seconds. For example, a search and rescue team is dispatched to a spaceship crash: they look and act like a comic small town militia, sloppy, inept, no discipline, armed to the teeth, no rescue or search equipment. The WTF moments just keep stacking up until the irritation factor just turns you off.

I'm a huge aliens franchise fan, specifically the first and second, probably shaped my love for sci-fi to this day, my go to genre of movies. When I heard about this, I was excited even, I thought some learnings came from the standard of TV series over the last 5 years. The bar has been set high and they have started treating the viewers like adults, no more bad screenwriting, weak plots or 2 dimensional acting, before we used to blanket sweep this based on the fact it's a "TV series" not a movie. Well... You don't have to a rocket scientist to figure out what my review is going to be, I've barely scraped through episode 2... My teeth were grinding by the end of it, the kid synthetics that wonder around like NPCs, lazy dialogues to make you feel like the writer used GPT and called it a night, the genuinely awkward attempt of the tech bro (plenty of them out there to base one on, still failed though?) the xenomorph who is running around like big bird in sesame street, all mystery and lore completely lost. The excessive, often pointless gore, just a cheap bandaid to make it "scary" but instead just looks cheap, the equivalent of having florescent lighting in a casino at 4am. If I had to choose to watch another episode or be introduced to a facehugger in a small room, you know my choice.

As an alien fan for 40+ years, I was hopeful that this series could finally revive the franchise. However, what made Alien great was suspense. What made Aliens awesome was action (and a sublime cast, script, and director). Whoever wrote and directed this has completely missed what makes the franchise great; instead, they think it's about horror about grossing people out. They're going for cheap scares and have just completely missed what makes the franchise great. Sad. Hoping it picks up, but based on the direction the series is going, I hold no hopes.

As soon as I found that it's not Ridley Scott who was writing/directing this show, I had high hopes for the series. I watched two episodes and can say with confidence that the show has so far been more disappointing than even Prometheus and all the subsequent Ridley Scott's Alien movies. I am 100% sure the rest of the series will be worse.

The series seem to be turning Alien universe into yet another boring monster universe like that Godzilla and Kong universe. The writing is terrible. The characters are bland and boring. The conversations are so plebeian, soporific, and flat that my fingers had the urge to press fast forward button whenever two people started talking.

I will watch the rest of the series, but I expect the show to devolve further compelling me to downgrade my current 6/10 rating to a 5 or even 4.