Yeah, I have to agree, though I’ll keep watching in case there’s more here than meets the eye-monster.
Romulus was certainly disappointing for the reason you mention. It definitely had a checklist feeling about it. ‘We’ll make it just different enough from the original movies we reference to get an Original Screenplay designation’ seemed to be the guiding principle.
With an Elmore Leonard adaptation you want bad things to happen to the characters because they are thoughtless and often amoral if not horrible characters. Ditto for most Coen Brothers movies. But I think—I mean, I assume—that you’re supposed to want the human and hybrid characters in this show to survive, and I found myself honestly hoping that they would all be killed off so that a replacement party of PCs with double digit INT scores could take over.
Stranger
As Stranger said, the characters being unsympathetic is a factor in Elmore Leonard’s depiction of the terminally stupid.
But to bring it back to the Alien franchise:
Look again at the first movie. The plot moves forward without ANYONE doing something stupid. Sure, Ash’s allowing the landing party (with the infected Kane) back on the ship would have been stupid—if Ash had been motivated to keep the crew safe. (As the crew assumed was the case.) But of course his motivation was very different.
From there no one had to do stupid things to make things happen. Yes, maybe in their distress they didn’t make the ideal choices of how to deal with this unknown-to-them lifeform, but the choices they made weren’t stupid as such.
This is largely true of the second movie as well. (Though the choice NOT to tell the troops why they shouldn’t be shooting inside the processing station might be considered a ‘deliberate stupidity needed to make the plot move’.)
Prometheus and Covenant are notorious for their ‘nothing happens unless the characters make idiotic choices’ plots, of course.
But look back at Alien for the gold standard of avoiding that lazy kind of screenwriting.
Yeah that is not this show. It is one episode and it really is the point that intelligent people are not signing up for the ship gig. The rest of the story has major characters who are limited because they are well kids, or by programming, or greed, or other reasons. But to me at least interesting.
I am not bother by not knowing the ecology of the home planets. I have no problem imagining one with fairly unintelligent larger life forms and the eye monster essentially managing them as their exploitable resource. The apex predator there is an apex parasite, they are a large zombie inducing organism …
Regarding the Maginot squad, also remember that a majority of the crew is still under cryo-sleep. We could be watching the B-Team. Also, the plot kicks off specifically because of sabotage, not someone doing something dumb. And unlike the Nostromo crew, they actually try (but fail) to quarantine the guy who got face-hugged.
Those are fair points.
I had the impression that all the Maginot cryo-sleepers had been killed by either the Xenomorphs or some of the other aliens. Maybe I misheard something.
Not initially. There was some discussion over if they should wake them up, and Morrow said not to.
But I mean by the time the ship had crashed. I had the impression that only Morrow had survived.
Well Morrow reports crew all dead. But he is unreliable in this regard.
True. But surely Boy’s troops (not necessarily the kids, but others) would have checked they cryo-pods almost first thing.
I’m just thinking the plot isn’t going to be thickened by the input of anyone else who has knowledge of the Maginot’s alien-gathering experiences.
But of course, that just highlights their stupidity.
It’s mentioned in dialogue that a crew member coming into contact with alien life is supposed to be put in cryo sleep. This rule makes sense, because unlike the Nostromo crew, these people knew they were collecting dangerous specimens, and as such, why the rule exists.
But despite that, they ignore the rule completely by trying to save, but ultimately killing, the captain, and then some of them argue about it for the other crewmember. Just fundamentally incompetent.
The Maginot crew were incompetent the same way the colonial marines in Aliens were, simply overconfident and unprepared for how deadly this particular aliens were. Collecting alien specimens is obviously not rare, and whatever procedures they use must have worked just fine hundreds of times. The science lady specially gave “just going through the motions” vibes.
I mean, that’s 100% the point of the show and probably the entire AU. One the core ideas is that rampant capitalism is deplorable. These massive corporations, running unchecked monopolies, treat people like disposable resources and they will cut every single corner they can to squeeze out a couple percentage points. Them farming work out to the lowest bidder, employing people into indentured servitude, and destroying the social safety nets that would ensure workers are educated and not-desperate is a central part of the world.
We see that the saboteur was pushed to this betrayal because W-Y was paying them next to nothing in exchange for 65 years of life. We see that the young engineer has basically no education whatsoever, not even a remedial understanding of the world, let alone any engineering, operations or science. We know that several crew members died capturing the specimens so the surviving crew knows exactly how half-assed the entire mission is. We see that several of the junior officers on the screw are basically 20-somethings with no real experience or leadership skill. The company employs Teng’s creepy ass and there are no consequences. W-Y is cheap and the workers are practically slaves.
One of the foundations of the lore is that we should not trust W-Y to run a Starbucks let alone run a dangerous interstellar Alien harvesting mission.
I think technically they are only awake small periods of time. What they are paid for is losing everyone they know. And after the first trip that is no longer a concern for them.
The reality is sort of the opposite and one could attribute most of the glurge that the franchise produced as a direct result. At the end of the day, the original Alien is based on a couple pieces of artwork and the screenwriter’s film school project. There’s no source material. There is no core creative team.
The successful first two films were made by two totally different teams with little overlap. They are essentially different genres. Neither made any serious effort at world building. Then we got 3 different threads of sequels and prequels (Scott’s prequels, Alien 3/4, and then the AvP stuff) which aren’t consistent.
While the first 2 movies have some cool visuals and themes, there’s not a lot of there there. And we’ve had 4 decades of people trying and failing to invent a world around them.
So if they weren’t killed by critters, or the crash, they were then …
Sadly this is common real life corporations.
That’s what makes it ripe for worldbuilding. Ridley Scott created a lot of visual detail and the implication of a corporation that treats workers as disposable assets but doesn’t bother explaining any of the backstory; the crew doesn’t even refer to Weyland-Yutani by name, it’s just “the Company”, with Brett and Parker just bitching about not getting full shares. The viewer is thrown into the same ambiguous mission as the crew, and except for “Special Order 937” we never really know what is up or who is behind it other than that someone did not have the best interests of the crew at heart. That Alien was highly improvised during filming and essentially made into a coherent story in edit is kind of irrelevant, and in a way actually facilitates the sense that there is a broader world that the audience is just invited to infer.
Aliens gives a little more backstory but Cameron (wisely) elected to cut most of the filmed expository scenes from the cinematic cut. We know Carter Burke is an asshole from the first time you see him (he assures Ripley that despite working for “The Company” he’s “really an okay guy”, so he definitely isn’t) and the viewer can concoct any theory they like about why they only send a single platoon of Colonial Marines with an inexperienced CO but it probably has something to do with Burke trying to recover a specimen of the xenomorph without anybody noticing, or having few enough people to pay off or dispose of if he manages to bring something back. Either way, there is plenty to work with there in terms of hypothetical intracorporate rivalry, the subordination of the military to ‘the Company’, et cetera.
The problem people often get into with worldbuilding in an established property is to fill in the backstory with consistent and detailed narrative which often ends up with something that is actually smaller than the original source and less interesting than the viewer would imagine, and too obviously constructed because of its consistency and how everybody somehow knows or is related to everybody else. It might be useful to construct some backstory to associate things together but there is no reason to, say, tell us how Han Solo got this name and the Millennium Falcon “made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs” because everything that was interesting in those tidbits basically came from Harrison Ford’s laconic delivery and line of bullshit that he was selling to an old desert codger and his farmboy companion to get them to pay more money. But that kind of detail just dropped here or there into dialogue, and the lived-in look of the set dressing is great to make it feel like a larger world that makes it an open tapestry for more stories.
Alien: Earth (again, just going from the first two episodes) feels like adding detail that references the original movie without doing any real worldbuilding. The plot is improbable if not actually nonsensical, the characters aren’t actually very interesting or have clear motivations, the aliens themselves have inconsistent abilities, and the tone is just too inconsistent to maintain any tension or suspense.
Stranger
So here’s the thing. I have never seen any of the Alien universe movies. They sound boring. More so the more I hear. I am interested in the world created here, in the characters and their growth (and what we learn about them), and find the plot reasonable for a sci fi world.
FWIW.
I’d agree that the first 2 films leave basically a clean slate for a writer to exploit. It’s a nice starting point. But that’s all.
I struggle to think of a single IP that was built piecemeal by multiple creatives. That’s the root issue. No one “owns” the lore and thus no one is empowered or motivated to create the world it deserves.
It seems like this creative team might be open to it if they get the runway. They haven’t married themselves to either the Scott prequels or Ressurection which is good.
*shrug*Tastes differ but I think Alien and Aliens are excellent movies in their own right (and you don’t really need to see the first movie to appreciate the second one) but that is about the extent of things that are good in the franchise standpoint, even given that Alien3 was basically taken away from Fincher and recut by inept studio execs.
Again, I’ve only seen the first couple of episodes of Alien: Earth so my judgement is based on an incomplete knowledge and maybe it is really better than the chatter here would indicate but it just seems like a world populated with complete idiots and obsessives whose existence is justified to drive the plot. I see a lot of this in modern storytelling (e.g. anything produced by JJ Abrams) because it makes the character-action-consequence cycle easy to construct but it’s not really a sophisticated narrative structure and doesn’t develop characters as having any depth beyond a single vector of action; it’s basically what you see in computer RPGs as a way to drive side quests, and indeed, this whole thing just feels like a series of sidequests.
Star Trek was definitely pieced together by different teams of creatives with very different ideas about what their domain of storytelling looked like. I don’t know that it is really the best example of consistent worldbuilding given the internal inconsistencies even within each show but it was not a single unified vision and it seems to be still appealing to people.
This ‘creative team’ doesn’t seem really interested in worldbuilding; they’re just creating things scene by scene as they are needed. Maybe I’ll get bored this weekend, watch the episodes that are available, and come to a different conclusion but I’m doubtful.
Stranger