I could fill a book with the things wrong with this show. The metal guitar riffs to close out the clumsy cliff-hanger endings. The leaden exposition right from the start with the woman explaining to the crewmember who "missed social studies" that there are four companies. The low-intelligence of the world building that leads to things like there being four companies that now run different continents. The stomping all over existing lore. Weyland-Yutani was a British-Japanese company, fwiw. The anime level of sci-fi with Wendy jumping off what looks to be around 60+ metres cliff to the ground which is very far from the realistic feel that Alien strived for. Ash is strong - Parker is using both hands to slowly pry Ash's hand off his chest - but he's not from a comic book. And when someone hits him in the head with a fire-extinguisher it snaps his neck. But Wendy and the other children? Bionic super-beings. Also, the terrible casting. I don't demand some fantasy level of everyone being beautiful but when the child said of the adult body "She's beautiful" I honestly thought - no, she really isn't. The casting has an almost deliberately dysgenic feel to it. Also, they are not convincing either.
Lets talk about the kids in adult bodies thing. The rationale about synthetic body not growing so you start them off in an adult body makes sense. But I also strongly feel that the rationale was added later and what they wanted to do was have child minds in adult bodies. You have to be very careful with that to not make me feel you're being creepy. This show wasn't careful enough. Nor does it actually convince me. You have the actress do some weird little dance sometime or show teddybears in her room. That's not enough to make me feel like she's a child inside. Also, I'm sorry but the lines they add to for her 'child dialogue are just bad. Like her complaining her breasts "bounce around when I run". I mean...
barely.
The editing and structure is atrocious. All the unclear jumping back and forth to try and make the long boring exposition exciting by intercutting it with screaming. It's extremely messy to watch. So much of the plot just doesn't make sense either. Someone already mentioned her gluing the improvised katana to her back. Aside from just being a bit bizarre as something she can do (they gave her hyper powerful magnets as scapula apparently), it's a fucking search and rescue mission. To rescue survivors from a collapsing building and a crashed ship. Why the fuck is she taking a sword with her? I have never liked "Rule of Cool", but it works even less well without the cool.
The monsters are stupid. Some dodgy CGI alien leaches... bearable. The eyeball thing? What kind of stupidity is this? This is supposed to be an alien lifeform that happens to have human eyes which can also split those eyes by the power of CGI (seriously - how does that even work? Is the gristle of the eyeball actually just milk that the pupils float around in? Why does it have human style iris if the entire surface of it is... wait, - if its whole body is an eyeball, how does it have a lens? Lenses? What the Hell is going on here? In addition it can replace the eyeballs of other creatures and puppet their bodies around. This is just stupid.
I'm not just saying this out of disappointment because it's part of the Alien franchise, I genuinely think this is some of the worst TV I've seen in years. It's that bad. And it is not written for intelligent people.
Dan O'Bannon got upset that they rejected his idea of linking the Predators and Xenomorphs together. He wanted to show Xenomorphs literally transforming into Predators as their next physical phase. His script had an adult Xenomorph shed its skin and then become an adult Predator which would then tie the franchises together. It was incredibly stupid. David Giler personally rejected it which then caused O'Bannon to have a big personal meltdown and start ripping on the AvP films and seethe to the media once again.
Giler also didn't support O'Bannon when he got sued over plagiarism in the first Alien script and had to settle with the guy who sued Fox. O'Bannon was honestly lucky to get anything more than a story credit for Alien seeing how much he stole from other writers. Giler was the guy who got O'Bannon fired from the Alien series and took over which created huge animosity between them. Giler was then made producer for practically every Alien related movie, including often being executive producer, until he died. While O'Bannon would badmouth every single Alien related project from the sidelines until he died.
The guy who did the rewrites for the AvP films ended up writing all of the Avatar films for James Cameron as well. O'Bannon was a committed bridge burner. Who basically argued his way out of working on the Alien franchise. But he probably had the least to do with its creation out of all of the original team.
Dan O'Bannon is one of the people on the commentary on the Alien remaster (probably other editions) and he comes across as very weird and prickly and frankly not that good a writer. He kept interjecting to say what something was supposed to be and all I could think was "well thank goodness Ridley Scott threw that out."
which was when Lambert slapped the shit out of Ripley.
I love that moment. When it happened I had to stop and check where it came from because I'd never seen it before. Veronica Cartright is such a good actress. More than anyone else I've ever seen she manages to convey fear. At the end, she's almost regressing to a child with the way she treads from foot to foot.
This is a painfully bad show. The worst editing I've ever seen in a television show. The dialog is atrocious and embarrassingly filled with cringe inducing nonsense. The characters are just spewing exposition at the audience in forced unnatural conversations. The casting is DEI to the extreme. The lead actress is physically unattractive (and is apparently from a show business family). This is brutally awful.
I don't think anyone with a brain will be able to watch this series. Not even watch and enjoy....just literally finish the series without having to quit. I can barely make it through the first episode. Unless you are addicted to the Alien series like a drug addict needs heroin then just quit while you are ahead.
Yep. And I'm curious how it's being received generally. This is a show for the not-smart. A mid-wit at most could enjoy it but anyone who actually thinks will be too insulted by too many aspects of it.
The show does contain a sort-of allegory for trans-kids, in that the main character is a minor whose consciousness was irreversibly uploaded to an adult synthetic body without any parental consent or knowledge of the procedure.
I actually wondered if the kid at the start, the child-version of Wendy is a kid that got transed out very young by parents. Apparently the actors name is Florence Bensberg and the kid, even with hair, has a weird, boyish face.
"Began acting at the age of 5". Would fit the pattern. Even if not there's definitely that weird trans subtext in the show. Though I couldn't help but laugh at the way the scientists are careful to match up the synthetic ethnicities with their counterparts. The scientists might be killing children and replacing them with simulations, but they're not going to put a Black person in a White body, or an Indian dude in a Chinese one. They're not monsters.
Kane was an overachiever and prone to chase after rainbows, hence why John Hurt made him cajole the others into going further and further on.
Alien does such a good job in telling you so much with so little. Kane says "I'd like to volunteer to be in the group that goes out," and in the background Lambert says "That figures..." Tells you so much about Kane and his relationship to others in the crew with 1 second of dialogue.
Later after Dallas is gone, Lambert asks "could Dallas still be alive?" to which Ripley in consternation just goes "What? No...". Again, so much about the characters and their relationships in so few lines.
The franchise has yet to give a satisfactory answer as to WHY they're so obsessed with the critters, despite every single attempt to research and make use of them ending in complete disaster, oftentimes resulting in the total write-off of whole ships, stations or even planets.
I could give a pretty good one but it requires dipping into Prometheus / Engineer lore. But just say that they're not purely organic life (what did Kane know anyway?). Say that they're biomechanical. That was Giger's original vision after all. It explains so much - how they can grow so rapidly, how they appear to be able to gain energy without eating - perhaps just absorbing it from the surrounding heat. They do love to nest around reactors and in places where "it's like the goddamn tropics". It explains how they can have an inorganic carapace or remain inert for insanely long periods of time. They're bio-mechanical creations. At that point it doesn't really matter what they actually do - the technology with which they do it is priceless. A whole new realm of science. Hell, it even justifies the genetic memory (a bit).
They have to show what the result of a Xenomorph infestation is, other than everyone dies. Does the hive consume the planet and then go dormant? Or do you get "spooky" jungles with xenomorphs who are now just Jurassic Park raptors? One implies a designed purpose, the other implies that they are beasts who have an ecosystem. Of course these questions will never be answered. So really the Xenomorph is now Jason Vorhees.
The Aliens have to have a purpose other than kill. That implies some greater threat. Of course the franchise will just be high concept slasher flicks. Or whatever this thing is Hawley is trying to write.
The Alien RPG writers do a pretty good job with that. They really were up against the wall with the constraints they had to operate under but they also explore somewhat the later stages of what an Alien infestation might be like, with the hives, the nodes, their "Perfected". They can only go as far as tasters and hints because as I said... constraints. But in their supplements you do get this feel that the infestation stage is a precursor to something much larger. Frankly, this whole show would have been better if they'd brought those guys in. Not saying it would magically become a good show but they'd know the lore and come up with things that fit with it.
Who said in this thread that they pitied the RPG writers? Well I totally agree. They're just on the verge of releasing their 2nd edition of the game (called "Evolved" rather than 2nd edition, I think for marketing reasons and fear of angry customer base) and they could tweak it a bit to include stuff from this but I'm pretty sure it's too late. And the "Evolved" edition sounds like a bit of a cash-grab from what I've seen.
While I have no idea how canon AvP is to the Alien franchise as a whole, especially when both franchises are trying to fuse for real when it was simply a fun crossover movie like Freddy vs Jason, this implies that stupid decisions are from the Japanese branch...
In the Alien: RPG which is as close to a gold standard as you're likely to get for bringing the various parts together in a coherent way, it was stated by the developers there are three canons, per the instructions they received from the rights holders. There's Alien, there's Predator and there's Alien vs. Predator. Each are supposed to be separate, that's official.
