Alien: Earth (2025 – present)

Two episodes in and it's ok at best. Good premise, but there's a real lack of tension and stakes. The main characters have plot armor: the xeno will tear apart a room of people in seconds but all the main characters get harmlessly thrown around or not attacked when there's a xeno around. The possibility of the xeno leaving the ship wreckage, being loose on Earth and multiplying is not even discussed and is not a source of tension. This feels like a complete misstep for a show called Alien: EARTH. On the flip side, references to previous films in the series don't feel as forced as Aliens: Romulus. The new aliens and learning their abilities are one of the bright spots but the show is limited by its characters. Besides the stoic synth team leader, the bulk of the other characters are essentially children and haven't had any individual personalities written for them beyond that so their reactions/motivations are all similar and flat.

Why did the original "Alien" and follow up "Aliens", films work? The back story was far fetched certainly but it had a grittiness, a sense of realism, that denied disbelief. The characters were the sort of rough hewen, mature, resourceful people, you'd expect to find on a space freighter or in the military. It made sense. Now imagine mostly soft faced types, who feel like they belong teaching tutorials on a university campus or running a yoga class, in the same environment. Because that's what you get with "Aliens Earth". You could say its middle class leftist Californians, facing off against horrific, alien monsters. In the context of a dark comedy, it could have had potential. As you might expect the sense of plausibility, raw realism and creeping dread, isn't there. The characterisations and acting, are none too inspiring either. An unoriginal story, that borrows heavily from the original films and even manages to do a bad "Blade Runner" knock off, rounds out the sense of pervading blandness. In summary, the whole premise feels unconvincing. I really don't know how they managed to make something so amateurish out of high quality, iconic material but well, they did. Not recommended.