FX Alien: Earth

[Big s]

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I have an idea to restore the horror aspect of the Xenomorph:

  Hide contents

Give it a suit and tie, a calculator and clipboard, and have it work for the IRS

 

Brutal

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I have an idea to restore the horror aspect of the Xenomorph:

  Hide contents

Give it a suit and tie, a calculator and clipboard, and have it work for the IRS

That would certainly add an unexpected dimension to the threat the Xenomorph poses to Weyland-Yutani.

I can imagine little else that would strike as much fear into the executives as this slavering unknowable horror from beyond the stars stalks their halls and... audits their corporate tax returns. 

Miss Yutani would probably dry up and die like she'd taken a hit from the wrong grail. 😆 

[Seto Kaiba]

All right, episode 3 is out...

Spoiler

Somehow, while they were offscreen, the Lost Boys started capturing and packing up all the loose xenofauna from the Maginot's laboratory.  Probably for the best.  I guess that shows Kirsh is serious about treating them as invasive species.  Possibly the first smart thing anyone in this series has done so far.

Meanwhile, one of the hybrids feels compelled to have her fellows Explain the Joke in their theme naming as the Lost Boys.  Are we really assuming the audience are that dumb and didn't get the very blatant Peter Pan references even with Disney's Peter Pan on prominent display?

"Genius" Boy Cavalier decides to show he's a real wall-licking idiot by overruling his synth chief scientist and ordering them to box up the aliens and bring them to the company lab on Neverland for study, even though he has to know by now that just a few of these things got loose and wiped out the Maginot's entire crew in record time.  He also wants Wendy brought in even though she's off chasing after her brother, which is sure to end well.  

Not an inspiring start.

Spoiler

Our clicky hostage-taker has set a trap, which is probably the first sign of anything resembling actual intelligence from a Xenomorph in five movies.  Unfortunately, it's too much of a drama queen to actually spring its trap and settles for letting Wendy stab it for no clear reason and then rage-flipping the freezer trailer they were in for some reason?  The acid blood conveniently only burns Hermit's jacket and not anything else.  What did he do to piss the Xeno off anyway?  It seems to really enjoy just messing with him when all the other people it met got the instant sashimi treatment.

Once again, it's a "dramatic" slow speed chase as Hermit crawls away from it and it crawls after him for... reasons.  Just so it can get up in his face and go "Hiss!" real loud for his benefit.  

The fight scene that ensues just feels really awkward, with Wendy essentially out-muscling the xenomorph to toss it on the other side of a reinforced door only for it to use its tail to grab her before the door shuts so then her brother has to race to reopen it while the fight concludes offscreen.

This is one of the more erect dick moves on the writer's part.

Once again, the actual action is all offscreen... and not in the horror movie gory discretion shot kind of way.  As in, "there was a fight, but it's happening offscreen so we don't have to choreograph or shoot it".

Spoiler

Wendy effectively solo'd a Xenomorph offscreen armed with nothing but a machete and her wits... another massive, massive L for the Xenomorph.  She cut the front part of its skull off, and the acid conveniently forgets to burn anything.  It just sort of pools on the floor and smokes a bit where it was aggressively eating through metal seconds earlier.

For a hot minute, it even looks like she did it without taking any damage.  Then we see she's bleeding and she collapses.  Whatever her brother sees makes him vomit... in a very unconvincing manner.  Then he collapses?  For reasons?  There's a spooky violin sting here.

Slightly's just been chilling out in the egg room this whole time, only to get almost jumpscared by one of the other Lost Boys.  Prompting a bit of stress-relief roughousing in this creepy cargo bay full of eggs.  

Little bit of meta commentary there... underground truly is a dumbass place to put a spaceship.

Spoiler

Somehow, despite all warnings that the building's collapse was imminent after, y'know, being rammed by a starship moving under power... the building is STILL STANDING in the morning and supremely unconcerned crews are going around picking up Wendy, Hermit, and the dead Xenomorph.

Seems rather risky to put the lethal aliens and still smoking xenomorph corpse on the ship with the flesh-and-blood crew of soldiers and not the one manned primarily if not exclusively by synths who are Not Food.

Well, I think we now know for sure how this incident stays contained.

Spoiler

Prodigy is shipping all of the alien monsters back to Neverland to be researched on the company's remote and secret private island facility that is almost certainly rigged to blow up or eminently nuke-able.  The self-destruct might even BE a nuke.  

Kinda feels like this whole two and a third episodes spent in New Siam was an unnecessary digression.  They probably could've just had the ship crash on Neverland and cut out having all these scenes of running through an inexplicably deserted 60+ story tenement.

"Welcome, to Jurassic Holocene Park"

Spoiler

There's this big dramatic scene of Kirsh getting to walk his Lost Boys in and Wendy and then all the specimens getting wheeled in behind them with a slow electric guitar playing over it that lapses into strings and tubas as the xenomorph corpse shows up.

An effort is made to convince the audience that Wendy is either dead or damaged beyond repair.  Not a convincing effort, mind you... since it seems to be more about Boy Cavalier's fragile ego trying to goad the science team into challenging him for sending their billion dollar largely untested prototype into a literal disaster area.  Even Kirsh thinks every part of it was a bad call, and he's actually brave enough to tell his feckless boss as much.  He wanders through the lab and hey, there's just this unsecured and completely unsupervised xenomorph egg just sitting out in the open because what's lab safety anyway?

 

Am I really seeing this?  Someone behaving intelligently and exercising caution in the name of self-preservation in an Alien story?

Oh my stars and garters, I am!  Boy Cavalier may be enough of an idiot that he goes and sticks his face directly in front of a giant wet space egg... but when his research bot explains to him what the xenomorphs do to people he quite sensibly decides that this is Too Dangerous for anyone made of meat and has the lab locked down as a Synths-only zone with Kirsh in charge.  

 

Slightly and Smee get reassured that Cyborg Bro will NOT show up there and murder them in their sleep.  This is so obviously telegraphing that he WILL show up on the island and might even kill one of or both of them that it's hard to take seriously.  It's delivered with a punishing lack of subtlety.  

 

Cut to Cyborg Bro wandering around New Siam stealing food and even a phone off the street.  He apparently calls the Weyland-Yutani head office from a random cell phone he steals in Prodigy territory and this sets off no red flags on either side?  Yutani tries to tell him to do the sensible thing and just come back to W-Y territory and report in, but he insists he has to go get the creatures back.

 

So, hey, Cyborg Bro can just talk into Slightly's head now.  Because he put a sticker on him?  So now he's creeping him out while he watches Epic.  I get that this is cultural posturing on Disney's part, but do they not have popular culture in 2120?  Why is everyone preoccupied with watching century-plus old animated movies?  Peter Pan is 167 years old at the time this is set, the first Ice Age is 118, and even Epic is 107.  We're literally watching a Stranger Danger scene here.  Cyborg-Bro is gonna groom a kid in a robot body to help him infiltrate Neverland.

One of the Lost Boys is just having a psychotic break for no particular reason... I guess PTSD from meeting the eyeball monster?  Meanwhile, Hermit is in surgery and we see them remove a lung and apparently cut into his spine too?  Wendy wakes up and goes wandering around while Kirsh and the others cut into an egg.  Somehow, causing the facehugger pain causes Wendy pain too?  Can literally anyone walk into this lab?  There are no guards, no secured entry... Wendy just walks right TF in in her pajamas.  We're just stuck watching Sydney Chandler make a variety of silly faces in a slight breeze before collapsing as they extract a larval chestburster from the facehugger.

Well, this definitely doesn't seem like a bright idea.

Spoiler

Prodigy, having acquired all of the logs and research data from the Maginot and being fully aware that a dedicated Weyland-Yutani research ship could not contain an adult Xenomorph and with full foreknowledge of how deadly and uncontainable it is decide their best course of action is to make another one by surgically mutilating the injured brother of their extremely protective, super-strong, super-fast, super-smart, technopathic posthuman prototype unbound by the Laws of Robotics who apparently has 24/7 unchecked access to the labs where you keep your recently acquired stock of man-eating extraterrestrial horrors in case she wants revenge?

Even by the low, low, incredibly low standards of the Alien franchise that shows a punishing lack of self-preservation.

It's not enough to lab-grow a psychotically insatiable man-eating horror from beyond the stars... they've got to make sure the leader of a group of what are basically low-rent Terminators wants them dead too?  Pick a lane, Boy Cavalier.  Death by monster or death by robot.  You can't do both!

 

In the final analysis, "Metamorphosis" is a pretty weak episode with some serious writing problems.

Its main flaw is that it clearly wants to commit to the horror bit but doesn't seem to know how.  They try to build some tension by keeping the Xenomorph offscreen for a while and show some evidence that It Can Think, but they can't bring themselves to stick to it so it has to poke its head into the frame and ask the cameraman to get its good side before it'll do anything.  It wants to go the route of the scientists experimenting getting in over their heads, except that it's already shot itself in the foot by revealing the scientists know what they're getting into from the start and are just too dumb to live.  They're trying to build anticipation for a human villain, but the delivery is so ham-handed that feels like accidental self-parody.  Every twist and plot point is telegraphed so aggressively that there's no potential to build suspense.

A lesser problem is that it also wants to do action, but it seems to be afraid to actually show action.  I wonder if it's because the Xenomorph is a purely CG construct.  They cheat and have the climax of the confrontation happen offscreen and only let us see the aftermath.

[Raikkonen]

After episode 3 this morning, I've checked out.

The Xeno completely degraded to a MacGuffin.

Too many new lore breakers.

Too many "WT# how" moments.

And...

Spoiler

And as previously mentioned, these new androids have superhero powers so the Mary Sue can go one on one with the Xeno. 🤦‍♂️

I'll stick to the first two films as to what Aliens is all about.

[pengbuzz]

9 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

All right, episode 3 is out...

  Hide contents

Somehow, while they were offscreen, the Lost Boys started capturing and packing up all the loose xenofauna from the Maginot's laboratory.  Probably for the best.  I guess that shows Kirsh is serious about treating them as invasive species.  Possibly the first smart thing anyone in this series has done so far.

Meanwhile, one of the hybrids feels compelled to have her fellows Explain the Joke in their theme naming as the Lost Boys.  Are we really assuming the audience are that dumb and didn't get the very blatant Peter Pan references even with Disney's Peter Pan on prominent display?

"Genius" Boy Cavalier decides to show he's a real wall-licking idiot by overruling his synth chief scientist and ordering them to box up the aliens and bring them to the company lab on Neverland for study, even though he has to know by now that just a few of these things got loose and wiped out the Maginot's entire crew in record time.  He also wants Wendy brought in even though she's off chasing after her brother, which is sure to end well.  

Not an inspiring start.

  Hide contents

Our clicky hostage-taker has set a trap, which is probably the first sign of anything resembling actual intelligence from a Xenomorph in five movies.  Unfortunately, it's too much of a drama queen to actually spring its trap and settles for letting Wendy stab it for no clear reason and then rage-flipping the freezer trailer they were in for some reason?  The acid blood conveniently only burns Hermit's jacket and not anything else.  What did he do to piss the Xeno off anyway?  It seems to really enjoy just messing with him when all the other people it met got the instant sashimi treatment.

Once again, it's a "dramatic" slow speed chase as Hermit crawls away from it and it crawls after him for... reasons.  Just so it can get up in his face and go "Hiss!" real loud for his benefit.  

The fight scene that ensues just feels really awkward, with Wendy essentially out-muscling the xenomorph to toss it on the other side of a reinforced door only for it to use its tail to grab her before the door shuts so then her brother has to race to reopen it while the fight concludes offscreen.

This is one of the more erect dick moves on the writer's part.

Once again, the actual action is all offscreen... and not in the horror movie gory discretion shot kind of way.  As in, "there was a fight, but it's happening offscreen so we don't have to choreograph or shoot it".

  Hide contents

Wendy effectively solo'd a Xenomorph offscreen armed with nothing but a machete and her wits... another massive, massive L for the Xenomorph.  She cut the front part of its skull off, and the acid conveniently forgets to burn anything.  It just sort of pools on the floor and smokes a bit where it was aggressively eating through metal seconds earlier.

For a hot minute, it even looks like she did it without taking any damage.  Then we see she's bleeding and she collapses.  Whatever her brother sees makes him vomit... in a very unconvincing manner.  Then he collapses?  For reasons?  There's a spooky violin sting here.

Slightly's just been chilling out in the egg room this whole time, only to get almost jumpscared by one of the other Lost Boys.  Prompting a bit of stress-relief roughousing in this creepy cargo bay full of eggs.  

Little bit of meta commentary there... underground truly is a dumbass place to put a spaceship.

  Hide contents

Somehow, despite all warnings that the building's collapse was imminent after, y'know, being rammed by a starship moving under power... the building is STILL STANDING in the morning and supremely unconcerned crews are going around picking up Wendy, Hermit, and the dead Xenomorph.

Seems rather risky to put the lethal aliens and still smoking xenomorph corpse on the ship with the flesh-and-blood crew of soldiers and not the one manned primarily if not exclusively by synths who are Not Food.

Well, I think we now know for sure how this incident stays contained.

  Hide contents

Prodigy is shipping all of the alien monsters back to Neverland to be researched on the company's remote and secret private island facility that is almost certainly rigged to blow up or eminently nuke-able.  The self-destruct might even BE a nuke.  

Kinda feels like this whole two and a third episodes spent in New Siam was an unnecessary digression.  They probably could've just had the ship crash on Neverland and cut out having all these scenes of running through an inexplicably deserted 60+ story tenement.

"Welcome, to Jurassic Holocene Park"

  Hide contents

There's this big dramatic scene of Kirsh getting to walk his Lost Boys in and Wendy and then all the specimens getting wheeled in behind them with a slow electric guitar playing over it that lapses into strings and tubas as the xenomorph corpse shows up.

An effort is made to convince the audience that Wendy is either dead or damaged beyond repair.  Not a convincing effort, mind you... since it seems to be more about Boy Cavalier's fragile ego trying to goad the science team into challenging him for sending their billion dollar largely untested prototype into a literal disaster area.  Even Kirsh thinks every part of it was a bad call, and he's actually brave enough to tell his feckless boss as much.  He wanders through the lab and hey, there's just this unsecured and completely unsupervised xenomorph egg just sitting out in the open because what's lab safety anyway?

 

Am I really seeing this?  Someone behaving intelligently and exercising caution in the name of self-preservation in an Alien story?

Oh my stars and garters, I am!  Boy Cavalier may be enough of an idiot that he goes and sticks his face directly in front of a giant wet space egg... but when his research bot explains to him what the xenomorphs do to people he quite sensibly decides that this is Too Dangerous for anyone made of meat and has the lab locked down as a Synths-only zone with Kirsh in charge.  

 

Slightly and Smee get reassured that Cyborg Bro will NOT show up there and murder them in their sleep.  This is so obviously telegraphing that he WILL show up on the island and might even kill one of or both of them that it's hard to take seriously.  It's delivered with a punishing lack of subtlety.  

 

Cut to Cyborg Bro wandering around New Siam stealing food and even a phone off the street.  He apparently calls the Weyland-Yutani head office from a random cell phone he steals in Prodigy territory and this sets off no red flags on either side?  Yutani tries to tell him to do the sensible thing and just come back to W-Y territory and report in, but he insists he has to go get the creatures back.

 

So, hey, Cyborg Bro can just talk into Slightly's head now.  Because he put a sticker on him?  So now he's creeping him out while he watches Epic.  I get that this is cultural posturing on Disney's part, but do they not have popular culture in 2120?  Why is everyone preoccupied with watching century-plus old animated movies?  Peter Pan is 167 years old at the time this is set, the first Ice Age is 118, and even Epic is 107.  We're literally watching a Stranger Danger scene here.  Cyborg-Bro is gonna groom a kid in a robot body to help him infiltrate Neverland.

One of the Lost Boys is just having a psychotic break for no particular reason... I guess PTSD from meeting the eyeball monster?  Meanwhile, Hermit is in surgery and we see them remove a lung and apparently cut into his spine too?  Wendy wakes up and goes wandering around while Kirsh and the others cut into an egg.  Somehow, causing the facehugger pain causes Wendy pain too?  Can literally anyone walk into this lab?  There are no guards, no secured entry... Wendy just walks right TF in in her pajamas.  We're just stuck watching Sydney Chandler make a variety of silly faces in a slight breeze before collapsing as they extract a larval chestburster from the facehugger.

Well, this definitely doesn't seem like a bright idea.

  Hide contents

Prodigy, having acquired all of the logs and research data from the Maginot and being fully aware that a dedicated Weyland-Yutani research ship could not contain an adult Xenomorph and with full foreknowledge of how deadly and uncontainable it is decide their best course of action is to make another one by surgically mutilating the injured brother of their extremely protective, super-strong, super-fast, super-smart, technopathic posthuman prototype unbound by the Laws of Robotics who apparently has 24/7 unchecked access to the labs where you keep your recently acquired stock of man-eating extraterrestrial horrors in case she wants revenge?

Even by the low, low, incredibly low standards of the Alien franchise that shows a punishing lack of self-preservation.

It's not enough to lab-grow a psychotically insatiable man-eating horror from beyond the stars... they've got to make sure the leader of a group of what are basically low-rent Terminators wants them dead too?  Pick a lane, Boy Cavalier.  Death by monster or death by robot.  You can't do both!

 

In the final analysis, "Metamorphosis" is a pretty weak episode with some serious writing problems.

Its main flaw is that it clearly wants to commit to the horror bit but doesn't seem to know how.  They try to build some tension by keeping the Xenomorph offscreen for a while and show some evidence that It Can Think, but they can't bring themselves to stick to it so it has to poke its head into the frame and ask the cameraman to get its good side before it'll do anything.  It wants to go the route of the scientists experimenting getting in over their heads, except that it's already shot itself in the foot by revealing the scientists know what they're getting into from the start and are just too dumb to live.  They're trying to build anticipation for a human villain, but the delivery is so ham-handed that feels like accidental self-parody.  Every twist and plot point is telegraphed so aggressively that there's no potential to build suspense.

A lesser problem is that it also wants to do action, but it seems to be afraid to actually show action.  I wonder if it's because the Xenomorph is a purely CG construct.  They cheat and have the climax of the confrontation happen offscreen and only let us see the aftermath.

Perhaps a better idea would be to have the Xenomorph chase the writing team for this series through their own offices, spewing printer ink at them in a blind rage.

[tekering]

10 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

I wonder if it's because the Xenomorph is a purely CG construct.

On the contrary, it's very much a guy in a suit...

...with cable-actuated animatronics.

Edited Wednesday at 12:50 PM by tekering

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

And...

  Hide contents

And as previously mentioned, these new androids have superhero powers so the Mary Sue can go one on one with the Xeno. 🤦‍♂️

In an extremely halfhearted and apathetic defense of the show's writing on this one point:

Spoiler

Androids/synths have always had superhuman abilities in Alien going back to the original movie.  Enough so that it was what gave away that the crew's token Wey-Yu synth wasn't Human in the first two films.  Ash near-effortlessly overpowered the combined efforts of Ripley, Parker, and Lambert.  Bishop gave away his robotic nature with that superhumanly fast game of five finger fillet in the Sulaco's mess.

It is, however, stupidly obvious that the writers bent over backwards and invented Hybrids specifically and solely so that they could have the mandatory dark-haired waif fight the Xenomorph one-on-one.

 

 

Just now, tekering said:

On the contrary, it's very much a guy in a suit...

Really?  Well, color me VERY surprised.

[Hikuro]

Okay, I'm gonna say Episode 3 was a lack luster.

Spoiler

I can agree with Seto, all that action we could have gotten happening off screen was rather a buzzkill. And Now I got another reason to not like Slightly at all again as he's now considering the cyborg security officer a "friend" and not smart enough to realize he's being used. Nibs I think is going psychotic, and Curly I think has daddy issues clearly. 
We've now got a clearer picture as to the Xenmorph embryo which is interesting cause Romulus is is different, it's a pathogen that mutates is how it was suggested. But I'm not surprised as the unused Alien 3 script explained that the Xenomorph DNA can exist in different forms and a small amount of it can prove fatal and devestating altering the hosts DNA turning a Weyu employee into a hybrid. And to see them already using a chunk of the brothers body ie his literal left lung to grow a Xenomorph is rather a-hole-ish to say the least. I thought he had such a badly damaged lung they were gonna give him a synthetic replacement, nope, they're just using him. 

 

[Seto Kaiba]

Sanity check...

Spoiler

Did anyone else notice right away that Hermit had been stabbed in the chest by the Xenomorph's tail before being webbed up?  And that that's the reason he vomits and passes out after the fight and needs to be operated on when he gets to Neverland?

I somehow missed that among all the things going on in the episode, and it seems like a fairly important point that probably should have been obvious to the viewer.

 

[Big s]

Finally got a chance at the new episode. Now that the human soldiers are out of the way, I kinda like it better. Those guys deserved to die for their absolute stupidity. There’s also a few concepts that I really wasn’t into the last couple episodes that are kinda growing on me the more I think about them.

Spoiler

The idea that a robot with a super intelligent brain connecting with computers and gaining access to cameras and things kinda made more sense to me now. It’s a bit out there, but people are hacking computers and such with simple things like smart phones these days and these synthetic brains are already connected to Prodigy systems for monitoring them, it kinda makes sense that they would figure out how to do the reverse.

And then I kinda started thinking about how Wendy seems to connect with the aliens themselves in a way. And while Prometheus and covenant kinda make the alien seem highly biological, the og alien was very mechanical with odd pipes and hoses and metal teeth. And in Aliens they could connect with eachother. It kinda made me wonder about how mechanical they might actually be, like are they communicating with a sorta super sense or is it more of an electronic connection like how a phone can contact a satellite. Maybe the Aliens have a WiFi connection of sorts in that giant phallic head of theirs or something. So maybe that’s why Wendy is starting to pick up their signals 

Anyway, aside from my odd theories I still kinda like the show despite certain issues. And another Head Banger to end the episode. Whoever did the soundtrack to this show is probably a huge metalhead.

[tekering]

40 minutes ago, Big s said:

Whoever did the soundtrack to this show is probably a huge metalhead.

As a huge metalhead myself, I've been stunned week after week with the end credit music.  I mean, getting the rights to a Metallica recording used to be impossible (so impossible, in fact, that Paramount had to commission a whole new song just to get them on the Mission: Impossible 2 soundtrack), and not since Tool's debut EP -- 33 years ago! -- has any Tool music appeared in a movie. 🤯

When Stinkfist started playing over the final shot of "Mr. October," I honestly assumed it was some kind of software glitch on my computer. 🤨

[Big s]

2 hours ago, tekering said:

and not since Tool's debut EP -- 33 years ago! -- has any Tool music appeared in a movie. 🤯

There were actually a couple movies, the one I remember most was Escape From LA

Had to look up the song, it was Sweat. It did however take them a few decades to even stream their music. I think the only other holdout on streaming has been Samhain, and I’m still waiting on that since my tapes all died

 

Edited yesterday at 11:19 AM by Big s

[Hikuro]

8 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Sanity check...

  Hide contents

Did anyone else notice right away that Hermit had been stabbed in the chest by the Xenomorph's tail before being webbed up?  And that that's the reason he vomits and passes out after the fight and needs to be operated on when he gets to Neverland?

I somehow missed that among all the things going on in the episode, and it seems like a fairly important point that probably should have been obvious to the viewer.

 

The only one I saw was AFTER that not before. 

[sh9000]