Alien: Earth

I really wanted to like this, I was one of those people really excited for a new entry into the Alien Universe...but this is not the Alien Universe, at all. It feels like a typical sci-fi story that happens to have a xenomoprh running around, but the real plot has nothing to do with it. The atmosphere also feels off, it's like watching a fan-made flick with mediocre writing. Even the creature looks wrong, it looks fake, like a plastic puppet.

It's a shame, but since Alien 3 there hasn't been any good secuels, all of them are not able to understand the real myth behind alien.

As an alien fan for 40+ years, I was hopeful that this series could finally revive the franchise. However, what made Alien great was suspense. What made Aliens awesome was action (and a sublime cast, script, and director). Whoever wrote and directed this has completely missed what makes the franchise great; instead, they think it's about horror about grossing people out. They're going for cheap scares and have just completely missed what makes the franchise great. Sad. Hoping it picks up, but based on the direction the series is going, I hold no hopes.

As soon as I found that it's not Ridley Scott who was writing/directing this show, I had high hopes for the series. I watched two episodes and can say with confidence that the show has so far been more disappointing than even Prometheus and all the subsequent Ridley Scott's Alien movies. I am 100% sure the rest of the series will be worse.

The series seem to be turning Alien universe into yet another boring monster universe like that Godzilla and Kong universe. The writing is terrible. The characters are bland and boring. The conversations are so plebeian, soporific, and flat that my fingers had the urge to press fast forward button whenever two people started talking.

I will watch the rest of the series, but I expect the show to devolve further compelling me to downgrade my current 6/10 rating to a 5 or even 4.

The production values are a solid 10. For better or worse, the target demographic is adolescents and mid-teens of median intellect. The writing and plot are at a level of a 1980s Saturday morning cartoon. Dumbness and plot holes ruin the experience virtually every 30 seconds. For example, a search and rescue team is dispatched to a spaceship crash: they look and act like a comic small town militia, sloppy, inept, no discipline, armed to the teeth, no rescue or search equipment. The WTF moments just keep stacking up until the irritation factor just turns you off.

Alien Earth collapses under its own eagernes, to be profound, to reinvent, to cash in on nostalgia without daring to commit to any. The synthetic "children" wandering the set feel more like stunt casting gone wrong, and their supposed "dark innocence" floats on a sea of plastic acting that laughs in the face of genuine fear. The alien itself, once a menacing force lurking in shadow that used to embody primal fear, is rendered a dumb accessory tossed about on set. Where Alien used minimalism, shadows, and the human form to craft existential horror, Alien Earth hits us with glitzy CGI that looks as authentic as a dollar-store Halloween mask. Gore is swapped for cheap spectacle, existential horror is replaced with wannabe philosophizing that never lands. Hybrids, corporate intrigue, identity crises, weird needle-drop music.

The worst offense? Supposedly set in 2120, the props and sets look more like 1990s scrapyard leftovers than a plausible future. Monitors, weapons, and lab equipment feel out of place, clunky, and unimaginative, completely failing to sell!

Ultimately, it's an awkward Frankenstein of genre-strands, each poorly stitched, offering none of the terror, none of the suspense, only hollow, mechanical emptiness. A disservice to the legacy of Alien.