TV you've just watched

[vol.2]

Alien Earth - Disney +, 2 episodes.

This caught my eye last night, but I was too tired to watch it. Looks like there will 8 episodes, so I'm curious to see how that goes. Often times, it takes a few episodes for a show to hit its stride.

[Randorama]

I find the new Alien show a mixed bag.

It has that distinctive Noah Hawley style that I recognise from Fargo and more clearly from Legion, various small inconsistencies to let the plot run smoothly (a spaceship entering atmosphere and only smashing a skyscraper, other stuff), and small canon mistakes (Aliens mentions that the USA are still around, though corporations really run the planet). It pilfers from SF anime/manga the idea of "children soldiers using powerful weapons" (Wendy/Marcy and the other kids, even though we need to see how powerful their "weapons/mechas" actually are), and from the Dark Horse comics various other minor ideas (e.g. xenomorphs being sensitive to fear).

I guess that the show will involve a lot of world building, so I wonder where they will go with that aspect. I hope that it will not be another six episodes/six hours of people going around corridors and getting slaughtered by one xenomorph (hey, get some more to join the fun!). The occasional dialogues in which characters try to say something smart made me chuckle due to their "high school ethics class" flavour: TV shows and "philosophy" seldom mix, I know, but Hawley and the other writers could perhaps do a bit more research on the topics they wish to "explore".

I found the few xenomorph scenes intriguing because the big X quickly exterminates lots of people in absolutely gruesome manners and, frankly, the first group deserved that (Go, Xenny! Slaughter the rich!). I feel that the visual effect people wanted this specimen to be particularly bulky and scary, so the xenomorph does look different from previous movies. The retro SF look is impressive but it is used in a heterogenous manner: why "New Siam" looks so "modern", but spaceship interiors are straight from the 1970s? Do Weyland-Yutani really love the "zee rust" design so much?

I am rooting for the multi-eyed little fella to survive unscathed, to be honest, and for the xenomorphs to slaughter a few more dozens of detestable people. Hopefully, the whole cast, which I found mostly one-dimensional. If they will evolve over the episodes I would be delighted: their deaths at the hands (pardon, claws) of the xennies will be more enjoyable Go, xennies, go!

The Peter Pan and baseball references give me headaches, anyway. I *do* want the tablets that look like 1970s radios, though.

[neorichieb1971]

I find the new Alien show a mixed bag.



The Peter Pan and baseball references give me headaches, anyway. I *do* want the tablets that look like 1970s radios, though.

I find myself being a hypocrite. I will say it retreads old ground too much, but what new there is just doesn't feel "Alien universe" to me. Disney brought Star Wars to Earth like environments and now the Alien universe is on Earth too. Like who would have thought that in an Alien universe, an Alien would gate crash a party?

Looking at this mornings advert on facebook, the messages seem scripted.

Rick Errington
Very good
14h
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Terry Throop
Loved the first two episodes
14h
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Ben Eld
Loving the first episode
21h
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Wez Ratcliffe
Loving it so far
14h
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Terry Hodson
First two episodes have been awesome.
11h
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Shayee Carter
loved it can't wait for more
17h
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Thomas Mailley
Been very good so far love the blade runner links. Transitions into the flashbacks through me a little wasn't expecting the fever dream type of filming but it worked well.
1h
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Mark Ball
Its Brilliant a sure fire hit..
1d
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Jan Marjan Majeran
Best thing on disney rn
1h
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Richard Halford
Awesome so far very much the feel of Alien with a big dip into Blade Runner.
The aug steyr pulse rifles and maxim 9 were very cool.
1h
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Steven Pooler
Throughly enjoyed first two episodes, can't wait for more releases
1h
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Cam Whiley
Love how they used the 80s style cameras and the setting is just immaculate! Loving it so far

[RGC]

Yeah, but that's fb for you. Also, my comments on it in the movies thread were basically 'love it so far'. A lot of the time peeps just want confirmation others are liking the same stuff, and save the analysis for elsewhere (if they can be arsed to analyse; I often can't).

[Randorama]

I actually agree on the show recycling it too much and then shoveling Disney-style stuff in; I forgot that the big D was behind this. Another headache, really.

I think that it feels like a show designed to be “1980s cyberpunk throwback at all costs”, and then they added the xenomorphs because the big D now owns everything and they thought ‘why not?’. I safely avoided their output for decades but they caught me off guard, this time.

When the xenomorph gatecrashed the party I definitely started rooting for the Alien(s), anyway. If there will be more occasions in which the “Big Chap” dismembers obnoxious characters (i.e. more or less everyone, so far), I consider myself satisfied.

I do think that I should watch this with my father when I am back in the homeland (not this summer; work matters and so on). I think that he would snap every five minutes and I would laugh for hours thanks to his ‘angry nerd’ tirades

[AGermanArtist]

Mr In Between is brilliant.

[neorichieb1971]

I actually agree on the show recycling it too much and then shoveling Disney-style stuff in; I forgot that the big D was behind this. Another headache, really.

tirades

There has a been a trend with certain directors and Ridley Scott and Jim Cameron definitely fit into it.

Terminator 2 was a reiminaging of Terminator. Just better effects. Same story, just told slightly differently. (Jim Cameron). Even T3, went down the same road again. Terminator back in time, blah blah blah.
Avatar 2 was just a slight rescript of Avatar. Same story, just told slightly differently. (Jim Cameron). I believe Avatar 3 will be the same.

Then you had Aliens, which whilst a continuation, had many aspects copied, vamped up and told again. (Ridley Scott/Jim Cameron)

But with Alien, its gone a bit too far. We have 6 or so movies and a TV show, which regurgitates the same storyline everytime. So its not that Alien Earth is retreading old ground, its that the formula has been done to death.

And another thing I'm not liking about Alien Earth, is the fact that 50 odd security rescue officers have wandered into this crashed spaceship, found 15 people dead inside by chest buster deaths, alien species in the lab rooms, dead people everywhere by means of violent conduct (not crash related), including 2 officers which just entered the ship, and no fucking quarantine/alarm or anything. The show writers are ignoring common sense practices.

Back when I was 13 years old, I took entertainment for what it is, entertainment. But I analyse things a bit too deep these days. Why did he do that? Why doesn't he do that? Why are you just fucking standing there when alien dribble has fallen onto your body?

[RGC]

I actually agree on the show recycling it too much and then shoveling Disney-style stuff in; I forgot that the big D was behind this. Another headache, really.

tirades

There has a been a trend with certain directors and Ridley Scott and Jim Cameron definitely fit into it.

Terminator 2 was a reiminaging of Terminator. Just better effects. Same story, just told slightly differently. (Jim Cameron). Even T3, went down the same road again. Terminator back in time, blah blah blah.
Avatar 2 was just a slight rescript of Avatar. Same story, just told slightly differently. (Jim Cameron). I believe Avatar 3 will be the same.

Then you had Aliens, which whilst a continuation, had many aspects copied, vamped up and told again. (Ridley Scott/Jim Cameron)

But with Alien, its gone a bit too far. We have 6 or so movies and a TV show, which regurgitates the same storyline everytime. So its not that Alien Earth is retreading old ground, its that the formula has been done to death.

Definitely. But like I said in the movies thread, I'm not sure there's much left to say about the xenomorphs or the company (that would be of interest to me). Origin stories are largely a turn off -- if you explain everything you leave nothing for viewers to mull over or interpret. Endless sequels follow a trend of diminishing returns, as ideas start to link back to the source in increasingly tenuous ways (and usually with decreasing budgets!), and any writing talent associated with the original idea has long departed to work on fresh projects. Remakes? Not sure anyone wants a scene-for-scene reshoot of the classics. So that leaves reboots in the form of these parallel/sidequel?/midquel? stories. I think this show has the potential to work on that level, but it needs to leave a lot of the old formula behind. Since the xeno feels so well known now it's sort of reduced to generic monster status, a bit like the zombies in Walking Dead. So there's three options: tell a decent story of human drama against this generic monster backdrop, or change the backdrop and add different monsters (in which case, why bother setting it in the aliens universe at all? Oh yeah, $$$ fan loyalty $$$). Third option is to do both; I think that's what they're going for here. I'll try to reserve judgment for now, as it's early days.

[BryanM]

That's why Alien:Resurrection is by far the best of the Alien movies that came after Aliens. Just pure schlock, dialed that shit up to 13. Like Jason goes to space kind of nonsense.

The emotional core in the franchise was severed when they threw all the expanded universe characters in the second one into the trash. Ripley's cat, her husband, her robot lover, her newt. At that point, yeah screw it.

If you can tell the movies/shows in a franchise apart from the marketing/movie poster alone, that's already a win in the memespace inside our brains.

Back when I was 13 years old, I took entertainment for what it is, entertainment. But I analyse things a bit too deep these days. Why did he do that? Why doesn't he do that? Why are you just fucking standing there when alien dribble has fallen onto your body?

So real Prometheus vibes eh.

[Randorama]

General comments...

recycling, my two cents: Hollywood has been "recycling land" for decades, Alien is Horror province and horror on the big/small screen is about repeating a formula well beyond death, so the show being horribly formulaic is not exactly surprising and not even depressing; just vaguely annoying.

Internal logic/coherence: The writing feels ham-fisted in this regard. I think that Hawley and co. wanted some eye-catching visuals and pretentious-sounding dialogues and decided to ignore how to get from point A to point B of the story without just making up stuff at random.

There is also a degree of "vanity writing" stealing time from "common-sense framing" scenes: a 5-minute scene on some famous baseball player of the 1970s, in a show set in 2120 in Thailand? Hawley and co. might as well as appeared in the show and give a monologue about how delicious their favourite diabetes-inducing breakfast cereals are (...maybe we will get one in episode 3).

The whole franchise: Dark Horse tried to develop the whole fictional setting with their first comics run (1988-1998). There was a lot of world building and most of the stories reduced the "bug hunt/slasher monster" tripe to a minimum; the rest was sometimes relatively decent ruminations on human beings, greed, space and so on. Some books published in the 1980s and 1990s also offered interesting plots and ruminations with the excuse of using the xenomorphs as a catalyst for some dramatic change.

Dark Horse eventually ran out of decent stories and worked on reprints and the occasional special issue (1999-2008), then switched to regurgitating the same "bug hunt/slasher monster" ideas for a few more years (2009-2018), until Marvel/Disney acquired the rights and provided their own brand of regurgitation (2019-now). There is the occasional decent comic, from what I have read; most of it is "more of the same".

If the show continues along these rails, I am fine with the scenes in which the xennies brutally dismember people, and maybe I will just "watch" the rest of each episode at double speed. Pet peeve: xenomorphs are eyeless, by the way. Since Alien 3, there is at least one scene per movie in which the camera shows a xenomorph's first person view, which looks mostly like a human's.

Simple fact of life: without eyes, "seeing" works differently. Photograph directors could try to imagine how xenomorphs would navigate space without eyes and perhaps offer that kind of first-person view. Comics did this by showing that xenomorphs have something like eco-location, which can be simulated with cheap CGI programs, and would look "cool" and "alien", I guess. Predator did that in 1987. Just sayin'.

[BryanM]

The isekai series I Became An Evolving Space Monster does kind of a good job of explaining the issue. At first it's novel and entertaining enough, but like with most web novels it has the problem when it comes to endurance. The protagonist will kill people and level up, and that's pretty much the beginning and end of its depth.

On the flipside, the monsters in I Became The Tyrant Of A Defense Game are given a little bit more depth and emotional drive for their actions. They make for far more interesting villains than 'wah this thing will kill u (but not eat u)'. It's a bit crazy when you stop to think about it: Xenomorphs are a worse bad guy from a story construction standpoint than a wild animal.

'Cause I've got all kinds of wild animal stories. The horrible chimp wars. Anything about tigers, who'll get really fuckin' pissed if you even take a finger off the carcass of its hunted prey or touch their babies. Compared to that, what's a xenomorph, besides some asshole who'll tear you apart for no reason?

There's a lot of 'adventurer in space' tabletop stuff that carries on with the theme of looting/salvaging dead alien tech in unknown worlds. It's actually a really interesting theme for a dungeon crawl, like how the first movie was a neat twist on the cliche haunted house story. Just as long as it doesn't devolve into a 20 minute long xenomorph chase sequence again, yeah?

[SuperPang]

Unpopular opinion - Resurrection is the only bad Alien movie. There are, of course, only two great Alien movies.

The Predator/AVP franchise on the other hand makes the Alien sequels look like fucking Shakespeare.

Alien Earth is a mixed bag so far, for reasons stated above but Im glad it exists.

[BryanM]

Unpopular opinion - Resurrection is the only bad Alien movie.

Eh, it's not unpopular, it's just different people like different things about movies. Alien 3 has its fans who enjoy bleak absolute black suffocating misery. Resurrection is like the Space Balls of Alien, after all.

Alien 3 even ranks higher than it slightly on IMDB.

[vol.2]

I stick by what I said about Alien Resurrection. Everything structural about the movie was correct (the overall story, the action, the special effects, the tone). Where it failed hard was the script. I can't even tell if the actors are good or not because someone handed them all dog shit to read.

But even given that, it's still a better movie (IMHO) than A3 was. It's the third best Alien movie. At least I had fun watching it, unlike A3 which I actively thought sucked the whole time. Only thing I liked about A3 was the creature designs and the toys.

Will watch this new show soon. Interested to see opinions as it continues.

[neorichieb1971]

Alien earth - 2nd viewing

I watched it with my wife this time.

Up until the crash i'm 100% ok with the way it went.

After the crash. Iillogical decisions crept in. Like 1) People were dead onboard, obviously not from the crash, no alarm raised. 2) 2 newbies on board, get killed, no alarm raised. 3) New rescuers on board, find chest busted humans, no alarms raised. 4) A lab full of alien bodies, no alarm raised. 5) In a 120 odd storey building, press lift button, lift is there in 1.5 seconds. 6) 3 or 4 rescuers with machine guns get slaughted in 1.5 seconds, Marcies brother without a weapon runs for at least 20 seconds. 6) Did I mention no alarm was raised? 7) The story of Marcie and her brother seems more interesting to me at this point by the end of ep2, the alien story seems to be a sideshow. Conveniently comms are all down, but Mark Zuckerburg is watching everything on cameras. Maybe I missed it, were the comms deliberately switched off?

Just like many movies/tv shows, if the people are supposed to die, they just fall like storm troopers. But when they are meant to survive, they survive even against all the odds.

What I do like -

1) A potential war between the 2 companies.

Its worth watching and I will watch all 8 episodes. Sometimes we just watch shit because its the trending thing.

[PC Engine Fan X!]

Alien earth - 2nd viewing

I watched it with my wife this time.

Up until the crash i'm 100% ok with the way it went.

After the crash. Iillogical decisions crept in. Like 1) People were dead onboard, obviously not from the crash, no alarm raised. 2) 2 newbies on board, get killed, no alarm raised. 3) New rescuers on board, find chest busted humans, no alarms raised. 4) A lab full of alien bodies, no alarm raised. 5) In a 120 odd storey building, press lift button, lift is there in 1.5 seconds. 6) 3 or 4 rescuers with machine guns get slaughted in 1.5 seconds, Marcies brother without a weapon runs for at least 20 seconds. 6) Did I mention no alarm was raised? 7) The story of Marcie and her brother seems more interesting to me at this point by the end of ep2, the alien story seems to be a sideshow. Conveniently comms are all down, but Mark Zuckerburg is watching everything on cameras. Maybe I missed it, were the comms deliberately switched off?

Just like many movies/tv shows, if the people are supposed to die, they just fall like storm troopers. But when they are meant to survive, they survive even against all the odds.

What I do like -

1) A potential war between the 2 companies.

Its worth watching and I will watch all 8 episodes. Sometimes we just watch shit because its the trending thing.

A war between Weyland-Yutani and the Prodigy Corporation would be interesting see to happen/unfold, especially between the two conglomerate owners whom are trillonaries as it is -- spending money like nothing on military excursions to get the job done right the first time -- plus Wey-Yu's eagerness to acquire the xenomorphs (at any costs including employees deemed "expendable" to further the "Company's agenda/goal/endgame" for supremacy over the other four corporations) for their bio-weapons division branch side of things (as they did in the movie Alien Romulus but had to "write it off as a loss" for the time being).

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It's interesting to note that the events that take place in "Alien Earth" occur two years earlier to what happens in the first Alien film. Writer/director Noah Hawley has said if AE gets more seasons "green-lit/made," he hints that there's a possibility that it could tie-in into the first Alien movie -- we'll see if that happens or not.
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PC Engine Fan X! ^_~