FX Alien: Earth

[Big s]

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

he's almost certainly got an oral fetish.  There are Quentin Tarantino levels of "the director's obvious fetish" crowbarred into this series with the camera spending more time up close and personal with the bottom half of Sydney Chandler's face than her dentist probably has.  (I'm not saying she had bad teeth, I'm just saying if the camera gets any closer it's going to be less a sci-fi "horror" series and more an upper GI endoscopy.)

Just be glad he didn’t have anything to do with Rings of power. I don’t think anyone can stand the sight of Galadriel’s chompers with that kind of up close attention.

 

3 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Has anyone done a fan edit of the series with Yakity Sax BGM and cartoon sound effects?  

That might actually improve it.

 

Add in some Benny Hill theme music and it’s a winner.

Oddly this and Weapons both need a Benny hill treatment 

[pengbuzz]

18 hours ago, Seto Kaiba said:

Has anyone done a fan edit of the series with Yakity Sax BGM and cartoon sound effects?  

That might actually improve it.

 

Episode 5, the "how this sh*t started* flashback episode, is almost a competently written horror story.  Almost.  Its main stumbling block is that the characters featured therein are all exhibiting Covenant levels of suicidal incompetence.  So much so that it honestly seems like they want to get killed horribly.

The rest of the series?  An eminently skippable example of minimum effort spinoff slop.  There's a barely-there fanfic tier story that shows the writer learned NOTHING from the poor reception of Prometheus and Covenant, pacing so poor that there's no tension whatsoever, and "scares" so stale and telegraphed they can't even startle.  Most of the time its feeble attempts to scare are so un-scary that it ends up unintentionally funny.  The characters are so incredibly dim-witted that it's impossible to sympathize with any of them.  The only signs of intelligence come from the monsters, and even they aren't very bright.

My key takeaway from season one was that Noah Hawley probably used ChatGPT for a lot more than just "research" while writing it despite his claims to the contrary, and that he's almost certainly got an oral fetish.  There are Quentin Tarantino levels of "the director's obvious fetish" crowbarred into this series with the camera spending more time up close and personal with the bottom half of Sydney Chandler's face than her dentist probably has.  (I'm not saying she had bad teeth, I'm just saying if the camera gets any closer it's going to be less a sci-fi "horror" series and more an upper GI endoscopy.)

Makes me wonder at times if part of the Alien universe is a virus that induces epic levels of suicidal stupidity....

[Big s]

59 minutes ago, pengbuzz said:

Makes me wonder at times if part of the Alien universe is a virus that induces epic levels of suicidal stupidity....

Yeah, and it’s infected the Predator and Id4 and possibly even the Blade Runner franchises 

[Seto Kaiba]

4 hours ago, pengbuzz said:

Makes me wonder at times if part of the Alien universe is a virus that induces epic levels of suicidal stupidity....

If that's a virus, it's absolutely endemic anywhere modern "horror" stories are told... and it's why most modern "horror" isn't remotely scary.

Effective horror needs tension, and it's hard to build tension if your characters are falling over each other in a bid to be first to become Purina brand Monster Chow™️.  Making sure a monster or killer has a huge body count isn't scary in and of itself.  The gore is just gore.  If the audience knows where it is at all times because it's constantly mugging for the camera its ability to frighten is thoroughly minimized.  Likewise, if the killer's victims consistently exhibit a lack of common sense to the point of reckless disregard for their own safety and/or that of others it's next to impossible to get the audience in their corner to build tension over their fate.  Combine those two problems and you have something that's gory but feels a bit like one of those comically over-the-top safety video parodies than something intended to frighten.

Alien: Earth's whole plot is full of people doing the dumbest possible thing at any given moment.

Spoiler

Prodigy develops the Hybrids but doesn't bother to include any safety features in them besides GPS tracking.  So there's half a dozen super-strong, super-durable robots that aren't Three Laws-compliant wandering around essentially unsupervised with personality software built on the minds of terminally ill children with untreated mental illnesses without any measures taken to prevent them from snapping and killing everyone save for the occasional panic button.  A flaw made more egregious by the acknowledgement that they tried this before with adults and it led to mental breakdowns.  There are security cameras, but they're apparently unmonitored and the armed guards are apparently from the Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy.

Then they decide to conduct research on the stolen alien monsters in the same facility.  They store all the specimens together in the same "secure" lab in enclosures that all have single point-of-failure access and can be unlocked en masse from an unsecured PC in the middle of the room and also set up to be controlled via the internet so any hacker can unlock them remotely.  The room with unsecured floor-level air vents so large and sturdy that multiple adults can climb into them no sweat.  The room with no armed guards and nobody monitoring the security cameras.  And the multi-trillion dollar megacorporation bankrolling this research can spare... exactly one synth to run the entire laboratory.  One synth who is being timeshared with the facility's OTHER research project.  Oh, and a literal child.  

Neverland is so obviously a slasher setup that it's impossible to take it seriously.  They didn't build a plausible research facility, they built a space practically designed to ensure one insane hybrid could kill everyone unhindered and then built a Xenomorph Bed & Breakfast inside it.

Not that the Maginot is any better.  Morrow is literally the one competent crew member and everyone else is so casual and sloppy around a cargo of murderous monsters who had already dispatched most of the crew just collecting them that you'd swear they wanted to get eaten.  The conspirator who wants to crash the ship in Prodigy territory has a plan consisting entirely of:

Phase 1: Sabotage the ship full of dangerous man-eating monsters so it crashes

Phase 2: ???

Phase 3: Riches and immortality

 

Edited 6 hours ago by Seto Kaiba