Alien: Earth

Despite an interesting premise and promising first few scenes the show quickly returns to the mean of modern writing. Plot holes, contrivances, poorly written characters and no logical consistency. Things just...happen...with no real sense of cause and effect, or god forbid clear and consistent character motivations.

This and Romulus are just poor, pale imitations of two of cinemas greatest films in their respective genres. It's not a show for grown ups, or at least grown ups paying any attention. It's just a shallow run through the most basic or tropes and ideas.

I'll give it a chance but so far its very disjointed and feels like there is very little in the way of a plot.

The atmosphere, tension & suspense of the movies has been jettisoned and replaced with inappropriate syth music to "tell" you when you're supposed to be excited or scared when the filmmakers havn't earned any of that in terms of storytelling.

The series opens up with a throwback to alien which, I assume, we will revist as a flashback episode at some point. Its a nostalgia tip of the hat but it felt all surface level and rushed. I wasn't invested in any of the characters so far. There was no tension built at all. A series gives you the opportunity to explore the world with depth which so far seems to be a secondary thought here.

Many reviewers have mentioned the glaring issues in the first two episodes which I wont rehash here. Suffice to say it does raise a few questions in terms of writing and direction.

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.

Most of the characters are dumb just like a typical horror movie they make dumb decisions in order to create suspense and drama.

The plot is dumb. A bunch of soldiers go on search and rescue. They take one medic and no real search and rescue gear. They take their pulse rifles though and head into a giant skyscraper that was hit by a giant spaceship. Imagine if police and firefighters put down any and all rescue gear and grabbed automatic rifles to rush into the twin towers during 9/11. That's what you have here. A very dumb plot. A better plot would have been if their boss, a trillionaire owner of arrival corporation to the corporation that owns the ship, had ordered them to go into the ship to secure it. See I fixed part of their terrible plot in just a minute. What happened to writers? They used to be able to tell such good stories and now they're just so dumb.

If you like horror movies with dumb plots, dumb writing and really dumb characters than this TV show is for you.

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.