Alien: Pianeta Terra

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.

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.

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.

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.