Alien: Earth

[Micael]

I’ve watched the first two episodes and I think that it’s really good, well worth a watch if one likes the Alien franchise. So far I would place it as the best installment since the first two movies, I just hope that it doesn’t fall off as the show progresses.

[Nathan45]

Agreed on the first two episodes so far, and its interesting to see some expansion of the lore of the Alien universe. Its hard for series like this to stick the landing but Im hopeful.

Incidentally, I'm watching this for free, but I must admit its jarring to have a hard R body horror movie constantly being interrupted by cheerful commercials.

[Nathan45]

I’ve watched the first two episodes and I think that it’s really good, well worth a watch if one likes the Alien franchise. So far I would place it as the best installment since the first two movies, I just hope that it doesn’t fall off as the show progresses.

Ok now that I've seen the first four episodes, I'm updating my review a bit. Spoilers ahead

So far...TLDR I do like it, I enjoy the lore expansion to a certain degree, I loved some of the other alien species (The eye thing...I suspect that will be very important later.) Honestly I'm not sure that I agree with setting some aspects of the lore in stone (That there are no more earth governments, only corporations seems explicitly contradicted by Aliens (Fun fact if you freeze frame on some scenes in Aliens you can clearly see they are United States Colonial Marines...) but that could be clarified later with ...well yes there are still governments, but they are controlled by the corporations.

After the first 2 episodes I saw a lot of the guys I follow on youtube (Mauler, critical drinker etc) say it was awful, and I thought that was at best premature, the first 2 episodes were set up, and they were done well enough that I needed to see the payoff before giving a final assessment. And honestly 4 episodes in its still setup, and how the series is viewed in the long run is very dependent on if they stick the landing.

I have to give credit for the writers deciding to use synths to deal with the aliens, which frankly seems a no brainer considering what they do. At the same time the use of synths with the memories of children is....well the hybrid children plotline, centered on terminally ill kids’ consciousnesses transferred into synthetic adult bodies, feels tonally jarring and conceptually shaky. While Sydney Chandler’s Wendy is a compelling protagonist, her childlike naiveté in an adult synth body—along with the “Lost Boys” named after Peter Pan characters seems a bit too on the nose. It does offer a in universe explanation of why they do stupid things, which is better then then they do stupid things so the plot can progress, but I'm still not sold on it. (Incidentally I don't believe even for a moment they really transferred the children's minds to synthetic bodies, the children are dead, they just made a copy of their memories to implant into a synth body.)

But its still setup, it can still stick the landing. I'll keep watching. The android character in particular is compelling, if disturbing as hell, and no one is bad at acting. Lets see where this goes.

[Micael]

Episode 5 is kind of interesting in that it’s like Alien but if the Nostromo crew lost a bunch of IQ points.

[Nathan45]

Yeah, I know the franchise is big on the incompetence of humans leading to their downfall but yikes, some of these crew react to other members being killed by something that is still actively loose and going to kill the rest of them with mild annoyance.

Im digging the eye creature though.

[Micael]

I did see a serious attempt at explaining it by conjecturing that the corporations run their own schools to train the only people moronic/desperate enough to sign up for these mad missions, and this is the result that you get.

I also saw someone suggest that their biohazard safety manual is a yellow sticky note with ”LOL YOLO” written on it in crayon. Fairly accurate description.