Alien: Planeta Tierra

Not talking about the kids in your living room, the on-screen versions are the ones that botched the alien franchise. It COULD have been great, because scenes are well-built and the adult characters work, especially the on-board android, but somehow, someone decided to give the main lead to a 12-year old, that acts and think like a 12-year old, with 10 year old friends as the entourage to battle extremely violent and blood-thirsty monsters. It doesn't work. And the constant switching of timelines and pace deludes the storyline more than helping it. Sorry, my rating is generous. A 12 year old would probably rate it higher, but I am not 12.

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'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.

Allen: Earth is finally here and I have to say I was hoping it would be a lot better than it is. It almost feels like a teen CW version of Alirn and not the Alien franchise we all came to know and love. I was promised the show would be full of enough excitement and thrills that make the episodes feel like they fly by. It's not. The other thing I can't stand is that we have to wait to wait a week between episodes. I have come so used to binging series that that's how I like to watch my shows. I hate waiting a week when I enjoy a show. I admit I'm not the biggest or most knowledgeable Alien fan, the originals were made before I was born but I have watched them and enjoyed them. I am a big sci-fi fan though so that's why I was looking forward to this so much and why I'm disappointed. I did read that if you are a big Alien fan that this series will reward you with plenty of fun Easter eggs and the more you know about the franchise the more you're going to enjoy this series. That was a lie.

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.