FX Alien: Earth

[Big s]

23 minutes ago, M'Kyuun said:

I didn't really pick up on that many of the characters being quirky, a few sure,  but in hindsight, yeah, I guess there are more than I realized. 

Spoiler

A good amount of the characters were goofy kids trapped in adult bodies, then there’s the awkward synth leading them, then there’s the awkward cyborg, even the brother seems weird, and there’s the man child genius. Honestly, the only normal seeming ones usually just die and even half of those are awkward as well

 

31 minutes ago, M'Kyuun said:

Despite a few eyerolling moments, the show demonstrates promise; I hope they fulfill it satisfyingly without breaking established continuity and with a building story that beggars more seasons

I’m hoping it’s a one and done season. Although at this point with the Alien continuity it’s a bit confusing on what would change it in too much of a way. Now we have the xenomorph before the og movie already released on earth. I guess they probably will have to exterminate it before it spreads and leave no trace otherwise I think that would kinda ruin the first two movies.

[Test_Pilot_2]

35 minutes ago, Big s said:

  Reveal hidden contents

A good amount of the characters were goofy kids trapped in adult bodies, then there’s the awkward synth leading them, then there’s the awkward cyborg, even the brother seems weird, and there’s the man child genius. Honestly, the only normal seeming ones usually just die and even half of those are awkward as well

 

I’m hoping it’s a one and done season. Although at this point with the Alien continuity it’s a bit confusing on what would change it in too much of a way. Now we have the xenomorph before the og movie already released on earth. I guess they probably will have to exterminate it before it spreads and leave no trace otherwise I think that would kinda ruin the first two movies.

It may be plausible that all of these events are happening concurrently due to the length of time for space travel/hypersleep/etc, right?

Or maybe that's a stretch based off past canon analysis.

[Big s]

1 hour ago, Test_Pilot_2 said:

It may be plausible that all of these events are happening concurrently due to the length of time for space travel/hypersleep/etc, right?

Or maybe that's a stretch based off past canon analysis.

It’s definitely before Weyland and Yutani merged, so I guess that would be before Alien. I’m not as up to date on the fictitious dates or anything though, so I’d imagine someone else who keeps better track would know a little more. I could be wrong, but I think it was Weyland Yutani from covenant on. I only remember it being referred to as the corporation in the og movie, so I may have some of this timeline a bit off

[Seto Kaiba]

1 hour ago, Big s said:

It’s definitely before Weyland and Yutani merged, so I guess that would be before Alien. I’m not as up to date on the fictitious dates or anything though, so I’d imagine someone else who keeps better track would know a little more. I could be wrong, but I think it was Weyland Yutani from covenant on. I only remember it being referred to as the corporation in the og movie, so I may have some of this timeline a bit off

It's after the merger, but before the events of the first film as far as we know.

Spoiler

Weyland Industries merged with the Yutani Corporation to form Weyland-Yutani somewhere between the events of Prometheus (2089-2093) and Alien: Covenant (2104).

It's implied that the merger happened in the last few years of the 21st century, and that both the "disappearance" of CEO Peter Weyland and the gobsmackingly massive cost of the Prometheus and her top secret mission (in excess of $1 trillion) played a nontrivial role in said merger.

 

According to articles in Time, USA Today, etc. Alien: Earth is set in 2120.  16 years after Alien: Covenant and 2 years before the events of the original Alien movie (2122).

Spoiler

So Alien: Earth is taking place around the same time that the Nostromo left Earth on the first leg of its ill-fated round trip to Thedus that ended with the events of the first Alien movie.

 

[Big s]

6 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

It's after the merger, but before the events of the first film as far as we know.

  Reveal hidden contents

Weyland Industries merged with the Yutani Corporation to form Weyland-Yutani somewhere between the events of Prometheus (2089-2093) and Alien: Covenant (2104).

It's implied that the merger happened in the last few years of the 21st century, and that both the "disappearance" of CEO Peter Weyland and the gobsmackingly massive cost of the Prometheus and her top secret mission (in excess of $1 trillion) played a nontrivial role in said merger.

 

According to articles in Time, USA Today, etc. Alien: Earth is set in 2120.  16 years after Alien: Covenant and 2 years before the events of the original Alien movie (2122).

  Reveal hidden contents

So Alien: Earth is taking place around the same time that the Nostromo left Earth on the first leg of its ill-fated round trip to Thedus that ended with the events of the first Alien movie.

 

I thought it was before the merger since they only talked about the lady as in the lady from Yutani. I guess they were just shortening the name. Either that or it is her actual name and I kinda missed that bit trying to rush the episode last night.

Edited August 15 by Big s

[Hikuro]

3 hours ago, Big s said:

I thought it was before the merger since they only talked about the lady as in the lady from Yutani. I guess they were just shortening the name. Either that or it is her actual name and I kinda missed that bit trying to rush the episode last night.

according to the comic books of late, it seems there are several Yutani family members in the business. One in particular is rather young in his Teen years and uses a Synth body as his double to go on away missions to colonies and various projects he's interested in getting involved with while the real Yutani is on earth monitoring what goes on.
Infact I believe becomes familiar with the Xenomorphs himself and even tries to get them from some ice world and fails pretty badly resulting in his Synth being destroyed. 

[Seto Kaiba]

3 hours ago, Big s said:

I thought it was before the merger since they only talked about the lady as in the lady from Yutani. I guess they were just shortening the name. Either that or it is her actual name and I kinda missed that bit trying to rush the episode last night.

If you look in the credits, it's her actual name.  Sandra Yi Sencindiver is playing a character named "Yutani" (no first name given?) who is the current CEO of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation in 2120.

[tekering]

3 hours ago, Big s said:

I thought it was before the merger since they only talked about the lady as in the lady from Yutani. I guess they were just shortening the name.

Cullen Yutani had previously appeared in both Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem and The Predator.

[Big s]

2 hours ago, tekering said:

Cullen Yutani had previously appeared in both Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem and The Predator.

I think I skipped The Predator and don’t remember much of the AVP movies. In fact, I’m not even sure I saw Requiem. I remember Predator 1and 2, Predators and Prey though.

[M'Kyuun]

Considering that this show is a prequel of sorts to Alien, I'm hoping that continuity is at the forefront of the writers' minds as they plot it out. Little rankles more in a franchise than mussing up continuity and I hope Hawley and crew are cognizant of it every step.

I am curious, however, if it's going to be revealed at some point that the Maginot collected their Xenomorph specimens on LV426, hence Weyland-Yutani's interest in sending the Nostromo crew there to investigate, with Ash acting on their behalf to ensure new specimens are collected and brought back. I'm assuming that the Xenomorph currently causing all the havoc in Prodigy City will eventually be exterminated, and likely too, the Maginot's W-Y cyborg security officer, Morrow, unless he somehow changes his allegiance, or feigns doing so. Too, the eggs and facehuggers will likely all be destroyed and all knowledge of them erased, meaning our intrepid hybrids will be mindwiped or just executed to prevent their spilling the beans. Morrow is really a wildcard in this series, and IMHO, the most interesting character given his knowledge of the Xeno, especially his knowledge of how to fight/subdue it, and his steadfast loyalty to Yutani. Since the rest of Maginot's crew are dead, Morrow's the only one who can tell W-Y about the Alien, so it remains to be seen what happens.

I'm spitballing, but it seems that, based on the comments made in Aliens by the Company execs, nobody's ever heard of what Ripley describes to them. Either that info truly isn't known to W-Y, or it's known only to a select few and closely guarded.

[Seto Kaiba]

10 minutes ago, M'Kyuun said:

I'm assuming that the Xenomorph currently causing all the havoc in Prodigy City will eventually be exterminated, and likely too, the Maginot's W-Y cyborg security officer, Morrow, unless he somehow changes his allegiance, or feigns doing so. Too, the eggs and facehuggers will likely all be destroyed and all knowledge of them erased, meaning our intrepid hybrids will be mindwiped or just executed to prevent their spilling the beans.

"Practically everyone dies" is pretty much the default/only Alien story ending.

They all get there sooner or later... the only question is how.

[Test_Pilot_2]

16 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

"Practically everyone dies" is pretty much the default/only Alien story ending.

They all get there sooner or later... the only question is how.

Well, we know what happened to the rich.

[M'Kyuun]

9 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

"Practically everyone dies" is pretty much the default/only Alien story ending.

They all get there sooner or later... the only question is how.

Well, you're not wrong. 😄 I was just thinking that the hybrids, given their heightened durability and abilities relative to the average human would stand a far greater chance of facing down a Xenomorph. I'm sure acid will do a number on them, too, but they definitely have an advantage. Too, it seems like Weyland-Yutani already had a weapon that could subdue the Alien, if only for a short time. Morrow, a cyborg, seems to know what he's doing from experience and has thus far demonstrated greater success at non-lethally subduing an Alien than ever depicted in the franchise, AFAIK anyway. Since the Colonial Marines were neither hybrids nor cyborgs and didn't have Morrow's fancy bug-zapper/webber-upper, I'm thinking all were shelved and buried prior to Aliens, or at least that's the story they'll tell for continuity's sake.

9 minutes ago, Test_Pilot_2 said:

Well, we know what happened to the rich.

The Xenomorphs are equal opportunity killers.

 

[Seto Kaiba]

Finally sitting down to watch this one myself...

Spoiler

Considering the massive, massive economic inequality that makes most luxuries inaccessible and the general sh*thole state of... everywhere... in Alien, why would the race for a specific "immortality" technology decide the fate of the world?  

Come to that, why are Synths and Cyborgs even on the list of possibilities?  Synths are pure AI and a Cyborg's meaty bits are as prone to the ravages of time as any pure meat-sack's.  I'm not even one minute into this sucker and barely hit the title card and I'm already finding plot holes.

Really going hard on the thematic callbacks in this opening eh?  I know Alien is pretty much a creatively dead property coasting on nostalgia and nothing else, but c'mon... at least put in a token effort to do something different.

Spoiler

So the Maginot's been out there for 65 years as of 2120... that means she was launched in 2055, 34 years before Weyland sent the Prometheus on her ill-fated mission to LV-223, and they wake the crew up when the ship's still four months from Earth?  (The Maginot is apparently moving at 123 kilometers per second.  That's a hell of a clip.)  Conveniently, comms are down, the ship's log files are corrupted, and they've somehow burning too much fuel and need to shut down systems to compensate.  Might as well rename the ship the SS Killbeast Buffet while we're at it.  (And from the sound of it, the kilbeasts have already been snacking heavily on the crew.)

So... this new company Prodigy has a research island called "Neverland" full of kids they're experimenting on?  Putting their minds into androids?  And their douchey teenaged techbro CEO is literally named "Boy Cavalier".  He's literally screening the Disney Peter Pan animated movie on the dome at the top of the surgical suite to make this even more on-the-nose than it already is.  

Then we get a music video?  Followed by a therapy session where the staff tries to get "Wendy" accustomed to her new body and the new hybrids who are clearly meant to be evocative of the "Lost Boys" who lived forever in Neverland with Peter Pan.

'bout 25 minutes in and sh*t has clearly gone off aboard the Maginot.  We see her leaking atmosphere from at least one hull breach, alarms blaring, monsters clearly having the run of the place... and the ship's cyborg locking himself in the computer room and welding the door shut to ensure the last survivor becomes xenomorph chow.  He gets into an "impact room" conveniently located in the floor and narrowly avoids getting chomped himself as the Maginot grazes a space station in lunar orbit.

Wendy's monitoring her brother, who thinks she's dead.  Apparently her reminiscences heavily involve the movie Ice Age?  

OK, suspension of disbelief is punctured worse than most xenomorph victims at this point.

Spoiler

Somehow, despite the Maginot ramming a lunar space station and making uncontrolled reentry... nobody has noticed that the ship was coming down or made any attempt to intercept or stop it?  These battle-hardened corporate mercenaries don't even notice until the ship is practically (or literally) on top of them.  

The idea that there is no traffic on the streets at all at midday in future Bangkok is absolutely laughable.  Possibly the most unbelievable thing yet.

Spoiler

How did a ship that was moving at 123 kilometers per second (Mach 359) last time its speed was clocked enter the atmosphere and not burn up on reentry like a cheap wax candle?  Come to that, how it did do SO LITTLE DAMAGE to the city when it crashed?  This crash event should've looked like the first episode of Macross, with that sucker's wake flatting whole cities on the way down.  It seemingly caused mild to moderate damage to just a few buildings.  No fires, minimal debris, minimal dust.  The building the ship crashed into is still standing.  

For how absurdly little damage the crash does, I am still going to say "Bangkok without traffic" remains the least realistic thing in the show so far.

Spoiler

This whole scene is very well edited... but the problem is the content is absolute nonsense of people wandering in various directions with nothing really going on.

They just kinda wander through this miraculously intact building that the ship crashed into until they find a way into the ship.  Somehow, people who were literally right next to the ship as it crashed are completely unhurt.  How do we physics?  Do we physics?  Do physics?  Physics is clearly out to lunch.  The ship's interior is still mostly intact too, even after ramming multiple buildings.

The Cyborg crewman also survived this.  I am calling maximum bullshit.  A crash like that should've turned anything halfway organic into wall-gazpacho.

Prodigy boy sends the hybrids in to rescue people at the prompting of Wendy... because sending a bunch of literal children in superpowered robot bodies into a life-or-death situation is a great idea.  The other hybrids greet this pronouncement with the bewildered disbelief it truly merits.

Anyone else think Neverland looks like ****ing Jurassic Park when they take off?

Spoiler

So the troops just blithely wander into a room full of obviously alien specimens and decide to just get right up close and stick their faces in things and generally hang around in a room full of obviously dangerous, agitated alien monsters.

This is a huge pet peeve of mine when it comes to Alien sequels and spinoffs.  The original Alien movie was as scary as it was because the crew of the Nostromo were professionals who did (almost) everything right and still got killed by the xenomorph.  Every subsequent title in the franchise has seen a sharp decline in protagonist self-preservation instincts to or below standard horror movie levels such that by Prometheus and Covenant you'd swear the humans WANT to get eaten.

Spoiler

So the rescue team finds the cryopod bays... the crew are all dead from various debris or other causes.  One looks to have gotten hit with a chestburster, and the team misses a facehugger sitting in an open pod.

Both of the captured soldiers get killed by giant alien ticks?  

It's at a time like this that I have to ask myself why Weyland-Yutani is so doggedly determined to retrieve specimens of deadly xenofauna like this.  What possible use could a giant alien tick that drains so much blood it kills a person instantly have?  The idea that Weyland-Yutani wanted the xenomorph for weapons research was always stupid and that stupidity reached its peak in Alien: Resurrection which clearly showed why that was a moronic idea.  Romulus at least established that the reason they really wanted one was because the mutagen their reproductive cycle is based on is the Holy Grail of Genetic Engineering.

But why collect a seemingly random assortment of deadly xenofauna with no clear scientific merit?  Do they just really enjoy watching their employees die horribly for no real reason?

 

When it comes to the first episode, I have to say I am not impressed.  Bemused, certainly.  Even a little disappointed.  Is there a story here worth telling, or are they just jerking off like Fede Alvarez was in Romulus?

[tekering]

22 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

When it comes to the first episode, I have to say I am not impressed.

Episode 2 is a lot worse.  Noah Hawley ignores decades of continuity, reinventing the Xenomorph as a Terminator... 😑

...an impossibly efficient and indiscriminate Terminator, even. 🙄

No hive, no incapacitated victims, no instinct for reproduction or propagation of the species... just Jason Vorhees in a cheap rubber suit. 😑

[Raikkonen]

It didn't need the whole android with super stength and magic tech exploring it's own conscious. Only explaination is that the writer wanted to stamp his signature into the lore and that was the best he came up with, or, he plans to have a mary sue barehand showdown with the Xeno.

Remove all that sticky fudge, and the concept of a ship carrying various lethal species and crashing on Earth is alone a solid enough concept to build on.

Also, when in the alien lore will the protoganist be a male??? It's really screaming now that the alien is no longer the Xeno, but instead it's every slender paled skinned brunette. 

Edited August 16 by Raikkonen

[Big s]

11 hours ago, Raikkonen said:

It didn't need the whole android with super stength and magic tech exploring it's own conscious.

I don’t mind the androids being slightly stronger or able to do a bit more with computers and tech, but they are kinda showing them as near superhero and with odd abilities while connecting to electronics without even a connection that is a bit much. Near invincibility means less of worry about their survival in what’s supposed to be a horror story. 
 

I also don’t like that the human soldiers are chaotic idiots that will jump across a collapsing staircase without even setting up a way to return safely, let alone remember how to shoot a gun.

But so far I do find myself enjoying the show and hope things get a bit better as it goes on rather than worse

[Raikkonen]

51 minutes ago, Big s said:

I don’t mind the androids being slightly stronger or able to do a bit more with computers and tech, but they are kinda showing them as near superhero and with odd abilities while connecting to electronics without even a connection that is a bit much. Near invincibility means less of worry about their survival in what’s supposed to be a horror story. 

Nailed it here. 

54 minutes ago, Big s said:

I also don’t like that the human soldiers are chaotic idiots that will jump across a collapsing staircase without even setting up a way to return safely, let alone remember how to shoot a gun.

The way they were so goofy to their surroundings, reminded me of police acedemy. 

56 minutes ago, Big s said:

But so far I do find myself enjoying the show and hope things get a bit better as it goes on rather than worse

The almost superpowers of these new androids is still a siren that won't go off in my mind. 

[Seto Kaiba]

14 hours ago, tekering said:

Episode 2 is a lot worse.  Noah Hawley ignores decades of continuity, reinventing the Xenomorph as a Terminator... 😑

...an impossibly efficient and indiscriminate Terminator, even. 🙄

No hive, no incapacitated victims, no instinct for reproduction or propagation of the species... just Jason Vorhees in a cheap rubber suit. 😑

So... it's behaving like the xenomorph from Alien 3, Alien: Covenant, and Alien: Romulus then?

 

Starting episode two...

Spoiler

Much like Alien: Romulus, Alien: Earth is really starting to feel like another Disney-owned poster child for why putting fans in charge of a franchise is a capital-emphasis Bad Idea.

The grandiose display of affection for the original Alien worked so well in Alien: Isolation because the developers understood why the original Alien movie was a master class in the principles of horror.  What makes the Xenomorph frightening as a monster is that the characters know that it is out there, know that it is actively hunting them, but have no way of knowing where it is or stopping it if they did.  It's not just the fear of the unknown or the fear of the symbolic sexual assault represented by the facehugger.  It's the fear that comes from being in a life or death situation knowing that you could do everything right and it still wouldn't be enough to survive... that there is an unstoppable killer out for your blood but that they are in no real hurry to seal the deal because you are trapped with them and there is no way out.

Alien: Earth clearly doesn't understand that, because like the ship is full of what are ostensibly just Dangerous Animals, everyone's got guns, and the obvious protagonists here are a pack of synths who the xenomorph will naturally consider uninteresting due to not being alive.

So the Prodigy mercenaries are wandering around the inside of the Maginot, a ship with an on-the-nose name like everything else in this series, just finding piles of random corpses tangled in wires or laying around the floor, somehow not only physically intact apart from what damage the monsters did to them.  Some are even still in their beds, despite the ship making an uncontrolled reentry under power and crashing into a skyscraper.  Physics is clearly out to lunch.

Alien: Earth is so incredibly determined to show off the various gory demises suffered by the Maginot's crew when the ship's menagerie of monsters escaped that it's failing to build any kind of tension.

Spoiler

Seriously.  I am only a few minutes into the second episode and the series has already made chestburster victims an Unusually Uninteresting Sight, with the Prodigy marines dismissing the second chestburster victim with a flippant "Let forensics Agatha Christie this crap."

 

 

It was at this point that my internet connection went out... as if my modem were desperate to protect me from the remainder of Noah Hawley's inept assault on science fiction.

 

 

Spoiler

So medic bro lets one of the more curious marines know that Incident Code 1562 means the foreign body was alien.

The xenomorph was just hanging around in the background of that shot, but because the writers don't understand pacing or building tension it can't stay still... it has to get into focus and start posing and hissing and get a violin sting so the audience realizes it was there all along.  LAME.

Somehow, they've managed to wander all the way out the other side of the ship into an entirely undamaged hallway with smoothly-opening, well lubricated doors that leads into a concrete emergency stairwell that has only cosmetic damage, because again physics is totally out to lunch.

Then, of course, because building and maintaining tension is for competent writers, we jump cut to Neverland where the one lady is watching videos of the children for no clear reason and douchebaggy tech bro "Boy Cavalier" eats an apple as loud as he f***ing can to remind everyone he's a douchebag as he explains generic fear about how artificial intelligence will surpass humanity.

Is Noah Hawley is a first year film student?  Seriously asking.  This is some dogsh*t-tier writing even by Alien's low standards.

Spoiler

Imagine, we cut away from what's supposed to be a horror story so we can watch a simpering 20-something tech bro douchebag whine about how misunderstood he is, that he isn't all about money, that he's got Big Dreams, and that he desperately wants to meet someone smarter than him (while clearly so deluded that he believes himself to be the smartest man alive).

This would probably have been a more effective bit a decade or more ago before the general public collectively realized that all of the Tech Bros were always spoiled rich kids with room temperature IQs who used mummy and daddy's generational wealth to repeatedly fail upwards as venture capitalists and claim credit for the innovations of people whose companies or projects they hijack.

It is, in a way, terribly impressive that Alien: Earth is a horror series that has managed to make me this phenomenally bored.

I can honestly say this is less engaging television than some of the episodes of Paw Patrol or Blues Clues I've put on while babysitting my nieces and nephews.

Spoiler

Back with the Prodigy search and rescue team, the xenomorph nearly gets the drop on Wendy's brother and chases him across the chasm and somehow does so at such an incredibly sedate pace that he is able to get into an elevator (which still works?) and close the elevator doors before it can catch him.  I have literally seen small children move faster than this "perfect organism".  He tries to radio in, but the radio's not working.

Now it's time for another ****ing flashback where Wendy's brother talks to a HR robot about resigning in order to go back to medical school.

So... for no clear reason... Wendy is capable of technomancy?  She can control technology just by thinking it?  Did she sabotage her brother's career so she can keep spying on him through Prodigy's network?  Apparently it's something only she can do.  Somehow they never noticed she can do this?  So she's just idly treating every monitor like it's a touchscreen and swiping through security footage.

We get to see a call between Boy and the head of Weyland-Yutani.

Lots of walking set to dramatic action music.

So team Lost Boys finds a... giant saggy space tit in the middle of the ship and decide to split up to find something to capture it with.  They find the two Prodigy guards who got eaten by the space ticks, leading to some riveting commentary as the kids-in-adult-bodies wander around talking about how gross things are and they then find zombie cat being controlled by an eyeball with tentacles, which is defeated by simply catching it midair and sticking a bin on top of it.  Wendy's friend steps in xenomorph slime and they find the hall where Wendy's brother was in his epic low-speed chase.  He's wandering the halls randomly trying the radio, and bumps into another member of the team.  

The very first apartment door they knock on is a fancy dress party full of rich snobs dressed like Georgian-era nobility who have somehow failed to notice that a spaceship fell out of the sky and rammed the building they live in.  

There's another super-blatant background shot of the xenomorph just trying (very ineffectually) to blend into the scenery until's right up in the one soldier's face and kills him before he can open fire, causing the rich idiot to come barging out to complain about the noise and let the xeno in to massacre the partygoers.  Instead of de-assing the area with the quickness, Wendy!Bro decides to pick up a gun and go hunt it?  It has already done such a thorough job on the party guests that most of them never made it out of their seats somehow?  We have a gratuitous slow motion shot of the xenomorph crashing through a plate glass window and a chandelier to chase WendyBro, apparently with the intent of toying with him for a bit for no real reason after slaughtering a room full of people in seconds?  Then it gets tased unconscious by the Maginot's cyborg, who stuns him for good measure before gluing the xenomorph to the carpet and dragging it away?

OK, where was this technology at any point in the rest of the franchise when it would have been insanely f***ing useful?  

Spoiler

Creepy man and one of his Lost Boys are just there ogling the space boob until they hear the kids from the menagerie shouting.  Creepy man finds a working terminal and gets into the computer, and decides to point out the obvious.

Cyborg bumps into some Prodigy security evacuating the building, and the xenomorph wakes up.  They cuff the cyborg just in time for the xeno to wake up and kill everyone in three seconds flat, then conveniently spare him to go massacre other soldiers in a split second.  

Space boob has woken up and deployed a tentacle, and they walk off and leave it as their boss droid finds a nest of xenomorph eggs.  

Wendy catches up to the mess the xeno made earlier, as her bro wakes up in the wreckage of the fancy dress party and discovers an autographed Reggie Jackson baseball sitting out on a pedestal, leading to some random baseball trivia.  

Was it really necessary to bore the already bored audience further with American baseball reruns?

Will we get to watch Hermit enjoy some footage of paint drying next?

Spoiler

This acts as cover for Wendy sneaking up on him so she can reunite with her brother and a very lame title drop.

Creepy orders Wendy back to help Smee with the xeno eggs.  He very reasonably points out that it's an invasive species and they can't risk it getting out.

They take another conveniently working elevator down to the basement and right back into the ship.  This building got rammed by a starship at faster than terminal velocity and every elevator shaft is intact?  Also, the xenomorph knows how to work the elevator?

So they just stand around with Wendy proving she's really who she says she is.

The writers clearly fondly imagine this to be a very dramatic and impactful scene with these two characters who have had maybe four minutes apiece of development.

So, yeah... let's just go get NICE AND CLOSE to the obviously alien, wet, ominously clicky eggs.  There is no way THAT could go wrong, right?  WendyBro is just walking right up to the eggs like he wasn't JUST dealing with a massive murder monster of extraterrestrial origin half an hour ago.  Yeah, bend over, stick your face in it you too-dumb-to-live screaming beefheap.  Honestly, the alien tackling him was just unnecessary at that point.

 

What I'll say for this one is that it's really, hilariously ironic that they chose "Stinkfist" by Tool for the closing credits.  One of the first lines in the song is:
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear

This series thus far is a phenomenally dull D- by-the-numbers monster horror flick that feels like it was written by a first-year film student who just discovered what "symbolism" is and thinks he's being incredibly clever.  The writing is so unbearably tedious and cliched that it destroys any chance of building tension or suspense. 

Alien: Earth feels like a middle school class's haunted house.  It's all dark hallways, strobe lights, and fog machines.  The monster can't scare or even properly startle you because it's apparently so deeply insecure it has to keep reminding the audience that it's there in the first place.  If the alien gets any more desperate for attention, I'm going to expect it to start tiptoeing shyly out of the woodwork with blush stickers on and speaking in an "uwu" voice to ask senpai to notice it.

Did they poach these writers from Capcom or something?

[pengbuzz]

17 minutes ago, Seto Kaiba said:

So... it's behaving like the xenomorph from Alien 3, Alien: Covenant, and Alien: Romulus then?

 

Starting episode two...

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Much like Alien: Romulus, Alien: Earth is really starting to feel like another Disney-owned poster child for why putting fans in charge of a franchise is a capital-emphasis Bad Idea.

The grandiose display of affection for the original Alien worked so well in Alien: Isolation because the developers understood why the original Alien movie was a master class in the principles of horror.  What makes the Xenomorph frightening as a monster is that the characters know that it is out there, know that it is actively hunting them, but have no way of knowing where it is or stopping it if they did.  It's not just the fear of the unknown or the fear of the symbolic sexual assault represented by the facehugger.  It's the fear that comes from being in a life or death situation knowing that you could do everything right and it still wouldn't be enough to survive... that there is an unstoppable killer out for your blood but that they are in no real hurry to seal the deal because you are trapped with them and there is no way out.

Alien: Earth clearly doesn't understand that, because like the ship is full of what are ostensibly just Dangerous Animals, everyone's got guns, and the obvious protagonists here are a pack of synths who the xenomorph will naturally consider uninteresting due to not being alive.

So the Prodigy mercenaries are wandering around the inside of the Maginot, a ship with an on-the-nose name like everything else in this series, just finding piles of random corpses tangled in wires or laying around the floor, somehow not only physically intact apart from what damage the monsters did to them.  Some are even still in their beds, despite the ship making an uncontrolled reentry under power and crashing into a skyscraper.  Physics is clearly out to lunch.

Alien: Earth is so incredibly determined to show off the various gory demises suffered by the Maginot's crew when the ship's menagerie of monsters escaped that it's failing to build any kind of tension.

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Seriously.  I am only a few minutes into the second episode and the series has already made chestburster victims an Unusually Uninteresting Sight, with the Prodigy marines dismissing the second chestburster victim with a flippant "Let forensics Agatha Christie this crap."

 

 

It was at this point that my internet connection went out... as if my modem were desperate to protect me from the remainder of Noah Hawley's inept assault on science fiction.

 

 

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So medic bro lets one of the more curious marines know that Incident Code 1562 means the foreign body was alien.

The xenomorph was just hanging around in the background of that shot, but because the writers don't understand pacing or building tension it can't stay still... it has to get into focus and start posing and hissing and get a violin sting so the audience realizes it was there all along.  LAME.

Somehow, they've managed to wander all the way out the other side of the ship into an entirely undamaged hallway with smoothly-opening, well lubricated doors that leads into a concrete emergency stairwell that has only cosmetic damage, because again physics is totally out to lunch.

Then, of course, because building and maintaining tension is for competent writers, we jump cut to Neverland where the one lady is watching videos of the children for no clear reason and douchebaggy tech bro "Boy Cavalier" eats an apple as loud as he f***ing can to remind everyone he's a douchebag as he explains generic fear about how artificial intelligence will surpass humanity.

Is Noah Hawley is a first year film student?  Seriously asking.  This is some dogsh*t-tier writing even by Alien's low standards.

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Imagine, we cut away from what's supposed to be a horror story so we can watch a simpering 20-something tech bro douchebag whine about how misunderstood he is, that he isn't all about money, that he's got Big Dreams, and that he desperately wants to meet someone smarter than him (while clearly so deluded that he believes himself to be the smartest man alive).

This would probably have been a more effective bit a decade or more ago before the general public collectively realized that all of the Tech Bros were always spoiled rich kids with room temperature IQs who used mummy and daddy's generational wealth to repeatedly fail upwards as venture capitalists and claim credit for the innovations of people whose companies or projects they hijack.

It is, in a way, terribly impressive that Alien: Earth is a horror series that has managed to make me this phenomenally bored.

I can honestly say this is less engaging television than some of the episodes of Paw Patrol or Blues Clues I've put on while babysitting my nieces and nephews.

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Back with the Prodigy search and rescue team, the xenomorph nearly gets the drop on Wendy's brother and chases him across the chasm and somehow does so at such an incredibly sedate pace that he is able to get into an elevator (which still works?) and close the elevator doors before it can catch him.  I have literally seen small children move faster than this "perfect organism".  He tries to radio in, but the radio's not working.

Now it's time for another ****ing flashback where Wendy's brother talks to a HR robot about resigning in order to go back to medical school.

So... for no clear reason... Wendy is capable of technomancy?  She can control technology just by thinking it?  Did she sabotage her brother's career so she can keep spying on him through Prodigy's network?  Apparently it's something only she can do.  Somehow they never noticed she can do this?  So she's just idly treating every monitor like it's a touchscreen and swiping through security footage.

We get to see a call between Boy and the head of Weyland-Yutani.

Lots of walking set to dramatic action music.

So team Lost Boys finds a... giant saggy space tit in the middle of the ship and decide to split up to find something to capture it with.  They find the two Prodigy guards who got eaten by the space ticks, leading to some riveting commentary as the kids-in-adult-bodies wander around talking about how gross things are and they then find zombie cat being controlled by an eyeball with tentacles, which is defeated by simply catching it midair and sticking a bin on top of it.  Wendy's friend steps in xenomorph slime and they find the hall where Wendy's brother was in his epic low-speed chase.  He's wandering the halls randomly trying the radio, and bumps into another member of the team.  

The very first apartment door they knock on is a fancy dress party full of rich snobs dressed like Georgian-era nobility who have somehow failed to notice that a spaceship fell out of the sky and rammed the building they live in.  

There's another super-blatant background shot of the xenomorph just trying (very ineffectually) to blend into the scenery until's right up in the one soldier's face and kills him before he can open fire, causing the rich idiot to come barging out to complain about the noise and let the xeno in to massacre the partygoers.  Instead of de-assing the area with the quickness, Wendy!Bro decides to pick up a gun and go hunt it?  It has already done such a thorough job on the party guests that most of them never made it out of their seats somehow?  We have a gratuitous slow motion shot of the xenomorph crashing through a plate glass window and a chandelier to chase WendyBro, apparently with the intent of toying with him for a bit for no real reason after slaughtering a room full of people in seconds?  Then it gets tased unconscious by the Maginot's cyborg, who stuns him for good measure before gluing the xenomorph to the carpet and dragging it away?

OK, where was this technology at any point in the rest of the franchise when it would have been insanely f***ing useful?  

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Creepy man and one of his Lost Boys are just there ogling the space boob until they hear the kids from the menagerie shouting.  Creepy man finds a working terminal and gets into the computer, and decides to point out the obvious.

Cyborg bumps into some Prodigy security evacuating the building, and the xenomorph wakes up.  They cuff the cyborg just in time for the xeno to wake up and kill everyone in three seconds flat, then conveniently spare him to go massacre other soldiers in a split second.  

Space boob has woken up and deployed a tentacle, and they walk off and leave it as their boss droid finds a nest of xenomorph eggs.  

Wendy catches up to the mess the xeno made earlier, as her bro wakes up in the wreckage of the fancy dress party and discovers an autographed Reggie Jackson baseball sitting out on a pedestal, leading to some random baseball trivia.  

Was it really necessary to bore the already bored audience further with American baseball reruns?

Will we get to watch Hermit enjoy some footage of paint drying next?

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This acts as cover for Wendy sneaking up on him so she can reunite with her brother and a very lame title drop.

Creepy orders Wendy back to help Smee with the xeno eggs.  He very reasonably points out that it's an invasive species and they can't risk it getting out.

They take another conveniently working elevator down to the basement and right back into the ship.  This building got rammed by a starship at faster than terminal velocity and every elevator shaft is intact?  Also, the xenomorph knows how to work the elevator?

So they just stand around with Wendy proving she's really who she says she is.

The writers clearly fondly imagine this to be a very dramatic and impactful scene with these two characters who have had maybe four minutes apiece of development.

So, yeah... let's just go get NICE AND CLOSE to the obviously alien, wet, ominously clicky eggs.  There is no way THAT could go wrong, right?  WendyBro is just walking right up to the eggs like he wasn't JUST dealing with a massive murder monster of extraterrestrial origin half an hour ago.  Yeah, bend over, stick your face in it you too-dumb-to-live screaming beefheap.  Honestly, the alien tackling him was just unnecessary at that point.

 

What I'll say for this one is that it's really, hilariously ironic that they chose "Stinkfist" by Tool for the closing credits.  One of the first lines in the song is:
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear

This series thus far is a phenomenally dull D- by-the-numbers monster horror flick that feels like it was written by a first-year film student who just discovered what "symbolism" is and thinks he's being incredibly clever.  The writing is so unbearably tedious and cliched that it destroys any chance of building tension or suspense. 

Alien: Earth feels like a middle school class's haunted house.  It's all dark hallways, strobe lights, and fog machines.  The monster can't scare or even properly startle you because it's apparently so deeply insecure it has to keep reminding the audience that it's there in the first place.  If the alien gets any more desperate for attention, I'm going to expect it to start tiptoeing shyly out of the woodwork with blush stickers on and speaking in an "uwu" voice to ask senpai to notice it.

Did they poach these writers from Capcom or something?

I think I'll just watch the first two films  and call that good.

[Hikuro]

ya know, I read a lot of the novels, and the behavior of this particular xenomorph isn't surprising at all. it's interesting to see it on screen now, but they're brutal creatures and it's not just all about creating a hive and all that. They sometimes just wanna kill viciously and then reproduce afterwards. Infact I think in some of the old comic books they could completely rip apart a host, then somehow keep them alive just long enough to infect them with the facehugger.  

[Raikkonen]

43 minutes ago, Hikuro said:

ya know, I read a lot of the novels, and the behavior of this particular xenomorph isn't surprising at all. it's interesting to see it on screen now, but they're brutal creatures and it's not just all about creating a hive and all that. They sometimes just wanna kill viciously and then reproduce afterwards. Infact I think in some of the old comic books they could completely rip apart a host, then somehow keep them alive just long enough to infect them with the facehugger.  

I've always seen them as the first untameble beast that doesn't get tired and hungry, and will never stop which man has encountered. And that's part of their dark appeal as all other natural threats to man we've managed to tame or fence... 

 

Edited Sunday at 03:39 PM by Raikkonen

[Test_Pilot_2]

1 hour ago, Hikuro said:

ya know, I read a lot of the novels, and the behavior of this particular xenomorph isn't surprising at all. it's interesting to see it on screen now, but they're brutal creatures and it's not just all about creating a hive and all that. They sometimes just wanna kill viciously and then reproduce afterwards. Infact I think in some of the old comic books they could completely rip apart a host, then somehow keep them alive just long enough to infect them with the facehugger.  

Well said, I'm in this mindset. I've got a host of the old comic books, novels, games, etc...

I think some of these Xenos are behaving precisely as shown and described.

It's been fun and stupid at times, but mostly fun.

[Big s]

I do think they were better shown as hunting from the shadows, but reflecting on the second movie, they didn’t seem to shy away from frontal attacks. I don’t know if different types are really canon or not anymore or at all, but but I think the original type stayed hidden, while in the sequel it was a warrior type that fought without regard to personal safety. But that may or may not be an actual thing. Alien has shifting rules 

[Raikkonen]

1 minute ago, Big s said:

I do think they were better shown as hunting from the shadows, but reflecting on the second movie, they didn’t seem to shy away from frontal attacks. I don’t know if different types are really canon or not anymore or at all, but but I think the original type stayed hidden, while in the sequel it was a warrior type that fought without regard to personal safety. But that may or may not be an actual thing. Alien has shifting rules 

This is one of those franchise's where the cannon keeps on reinventing itself with each release. 

[Seto Kaiba]

22 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

I think I'll just watch the first two films  and call that good.

Honestly, I'd even skip Aliens.  It was a pretty good or even great action movie but it was a pretty miserable follow-up to the excellent horror movie that was the original Alien.

IMO, the only writing team thus far to actually understand the assignment when it came to writing an Alien sequel was Dan Abnett, Dion Lay, and Will Porter.  What they understood that James Cameron and every other writer working on sequels failed to grasp is that what makes the Xenomorph work as a horror movie monster is the paranoia it evokes.  Like the shark in Jaws, what makes the Xenomorph in Alien scary is NOT being able to see it.  They know it's out there.  They know it's hunting them.  They know that It Can Think.  But they don't know where it is until it's too late and the monster is ready to strike.

Having the audience know where the monster is because it's constantly mugging for the camera robs it of most of its ability to scare.  Combine that with being able to Just Shoot It and the threat it represents is diminished all the way to the level of "just a dangerous animal" like a tiger or bear that escaped from the zoo.  Can you honestly say the Xenomorph's scariness and ability to intimidate didn't take another gigantic L when we saw a single guy tase it unconscious and bag it like a ten point buck in deer season?

 

6 hours ago, Hikuro said:

ya know, I read a lot of the novels, and the behavior of this particular xenomorph isn't surprising at all. it's interesting to see it on screen now, but they're brutal creatures and it's not just all about creating a hive and all that. They sometimes just wanna kill viciously and then reproduce afterwards. Infact I think in some of the old comic books they could completely rip apart a host, then somehow keep them alive just long enough to infect them with the facehugger.  

Throw Expanded Universe material into the works and pretty much anything is on the table due to wildly inconsistent presentation over decades of material of varying quality.

Edited Sunday at 09:06 PM by Seto Kaiba

[505thAirborne]

Watched episode 1, not impressed with the story & plot so far. I might watch more of it later but I'm in no hurry. I would much rather finish up Wednesday, The Bear, King of the Hill and Strange New Worlds. 

For me there is only ALIEN & ALIENS, both masterpieces in their own ways, just like there is only The Terminator & T2. 

[renegadeleader1]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Honestly, I'd even skip Aliens.  It was a pretty good or even great action movie but it was a pretty miserable follow-up to the excellent horror movie that was the original Alien.

Aliens looked at the original film and did the logical thing by asking "How would actual trained military people handle an Alien and how would we make them an even bigger threat?" Then ran with it. After that every attempt since has tried to rehash the original film's horror aspect or done a stupid creature feature VS mashup and has been terrible.

 

I do find it amusing though that you whine once again one of your spoilers about putting fans in charge of franchises and then heap praise on Alien: Isolation which was 100% a product of putting fans in charge of the franchise.😆

[Seto Kaiba]

46 minutes ago, renegadeleader1 said:

Aliens looked at the original film and did the logical thing by asking "How would actual trained military people handle an Alien and how would we make them an even bigger threat?" Then ran with it. After that every attempt since has tried to rehash the original film's horror aspect or done a stupid creature feature VS mashup and has been terrible.

Which serves to illustrate how thoroughly the studio missed the point back then.

Asking how the military would deal with a (non-supernatural) horror movie monster is a fundamentally tension-destroying premise.  Would the likes of Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, or Leatherface be able to generate any real tension or fear if they were up against a platoon of heavily armed infantry instead of a bunch of teenagers and camp counselors?  No, they wouldn't.  If everyone's got guns and your monster ain't bulletproof, then your monster's not scary anymore.  If you try to make it scary again by having a ton of them, all you've done is make your monster into just a dangerous animal and that's just not as scary.

 

46 minutes ago, renegadeleader1 said:

I do find it amusing though that you whine once again one of your spoilers about putting fans in charge of franchises and then heap praise on Alien: Isolation which was 100% a product of putting fans in charge of the franchise.😆

😆 My friend, note that I'm holding Isolation up as the exception that tests the rule there... as the one time the people working on it understood the assignment instead of mindlessly indulging in fanservice like Alien: Earth, Alien: Romulus, etc.

[Big s]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Would the likes of Jason Voorhees, Michael Myers, or Leatherface be able to generate any real tension or fear if they were up against a platoon of heavily armed infantry instead of a bunch of teenagers and camp counselors?

Actually, they might do pretty well. Maybe not Leatherface. But the other two are quiet and have super catch up abilities. And they kinda seem to just get up after being shot, but angrier.

[Raikkonen]

9 hours ago, Big s said:

Actually, they might do pretty well. Maybe not Leatherface. But the other two are quiet and have super catch up abilities. And they kinda seem to just get up after being shot, but angrier.

Depends on the director. The right director has often taken cardboard characters and turned them into icons. 

Edited Monday at 03:53 PM by Raikkonen

[renegadeleader1]

7 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

If you try to make it scary again by having a ton of them, all you've done is make your monster into just a dangerous animal and that's just not as scary.

And what's the alternative? Doing the same stale crap over and over again until you become a parody of your original concept and rebooted into oblivion? Because that's where we are now, and what every franchise you mentioned turned into.

 

Aliens may not be a horror movie, but it at least innovated over the original and was able to stand on its own.

[Tking22]

Caught up on both episodes, everything good episode 1 did was undone by episode 2, Prometheus levels of stupid decision making to go around. And for me, for the record, Aliens>Alien, I was never blown away by Alien, it was mid, I think the Alien Isolation game did everything better then the original film. 

[Seto Kaiba]

9 hours ago, Big s said:

Actually, they might do pretty well. Maybe not Leatherface. But the other two are quiet and have super catch up abilities. And they kinda seem to just get up after being shot, but angrier.

On reflection, this may be a poor choice of example on my part.

I had quite forgotten that Halloween implies Michael Myers was unnatural/supernatural as early as the first movie and its novelization.  Jason's a better example, since he's tough but not "shrugs off gunfire" tough until after he's implicitly (if not explicitly) turned into an undead monster.

 

6 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

And what's the alternative? Doing the same stale crap over and over again until you become a parody of your original concept and rebooted into oblivion? Because that's where we are now, and what every franchise you mentioned turned into.

A fair point!

That's a question with no right answer because, as you say, doing the same thing over and over again will inevitably result in diminishing returns.  IMO the best thing that a horror property can do is pace itself.  Turning your monster into grist for the sequel mill and churning out a new sequel every few years is how you dilute the special-ness of the monster and burn out its narrative potential quickly.  After the first few movies, Jason and Michael had to both be explicitly supernatural to explain how they soak up so much punishment and keep coming back and the already supernatural killers like Freddy or Chucky devolved into cartoon characters spouting one-liners.  In either case, the movies quickly cease to provide true horror and instead are simply gore porn where audiences aren't turning up to feel scared but rather to see how the monster kills off the latest crop of generic movie teenagers.

Declawing your horror movie monster by turning it into a more family-friendly action movie antagonist is a pretty decisive way to kill any prospects for future horror storytelling, though.  Once you've made your monster less scary, it's very hard to make it truly scary again.  Alien and Terminator both got hit with this hard after their actionized sequels with unsuccessful attempts to pivot back towards horror with their badly diminished monsters.

 

6 hours ago, renegadeleader1 said:

Aliens may not be a horror movie, but it at least innovated over the original and was able to stand on its own.

That it did... but to the detriment of what came after.

The studio has been desperately and unsuccessfully trying to recapture the fear that Big Chap evoked since Alien 3 and generally failing to get there because they keep treating the Xenomorph like the dangerously aggressive and territorial animal from Aliens and not the obviously intelligent, patient, and cruel hunter from Alien.

I mean c'mon, you can't tell me you felt any tension at all watching that xenomorph fail to negotiate an ordinary 90 degree turn in a hallway during its at-best walking speed chase with Alex Lawther's character.  (Made worse by how it's animated scrabbling around on all fours like it's hauling *ss instead of moving at the leisurely walking pace it's actually going.)

[pengbuzz]

5 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

On reflection, this may be a poor choice of example on my part.

I had quite forgotten that Halloween implies Michael Myers was unnatural/supernatural as early as the first movie and its novelization.  Jason's a better example, since he's tough but not "shrugs off gunfire" tough until after he's implicitly (if not explicitly) turned into an undead monster.

 

A fair point!

That's a question with no right answer because, as you say, doing the same thing over and over again will inevitably result in diminishing returns.  IMO the best thing that a horror property can do is pace itself.  Turning your monster into grist for the sequel mill and churning out a new sequel every few years is how you dilute the special-ness of the monster and burn out its narrative potential quickly.  After the first few movies, Jason and Michael had to both be explicitly supernatural to explain how they soak up so much punishment and keep coming back and the already supernatural killers like Freddy or Chucky devolved into cartoon characters spouting one-liners.  In either case, the movies quickly cease to provide true horror and instead are simply gore porn where audiences aren't turning up to feel scared but rather to see how the monster kills off the latest crop of generic movie teenagers.

Declawing your horror movie monster by turning it into a more family-friendly action movie antagonist is a pretty decisive way to kill any prospects for future horror storytelling, though.  Once you've made your monster less scary, it's very hard to make it truly scary again.  Alien and Terminator both got hit with this hard after their actionized sequels with unsuccessful attempts to pivot back towards horror with their badly diminished monsters.

 

That it did... but to the detriment of what came after.

The studio has been desperately and unsuccessfully trying to recapture the fear that Big Chap evoked since Alien 3 and generally failing to get there because they keep treating the Xenomorph like the dangerously aggressive and territorial animal from Aliens and not the obviously intelligent, patient, and cruel hunter from Alien.

I mean c'mon, you can't tell me you felt any tension at all watching that xenomorph fail to negotiate an ordinary 90 degree turn in a hallway during its at-best walking speed chase with Alex Lawther's character.  (Made worse by how it's animated scrabbling around on all fours like it's hauling *ss instead of moving at the leisurely walking pace it's actually going.)

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

Spoiler

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