Watched ep.1. I think the show’s good enough to stick with it. Certainly looks like they dumped some money into it.
RE: the spaceship interior, I had the same thought, that they were matching the original set designed in the 70s. And I did think at first “nice attention to detail and continuity, unlike some franchise resurrections, like the JJ Abrams Star Trek movies, which made the bridge of the Enterprise look like a Vegas casino”.
But then I thought, wait, isn’t this show, in the story timeline, decades later than the original ‘Alien’ movie? More time even, than IRL? In that case, it seems like they would have advanced beyond ‘status lights’, CRTs, and 70s style mechanical keyboards.
That would also explain why the robot / android / synth (whatever it was) was a surprise in the original ‘Alien’, yet they’re ubiquitous in this show-- the tech has advanced.
ETA: I looked it up. According to the Google AI:
The time gap between the movies “Alien” (1979) and “Aliens” (1986) is 57 years in the story’s timeline. In “Alien,” the events take place in the year 2122, while “Aliens” is set in 2179.
But I clearly remember a title tag on the show setting the time in 2120, so the show is a period piece in the ‘Alien’ franchise, taking place before even the timeline of the original movie. So that explains the retro look, and the robots, well, I believe that was being treated as a ‘secret’ project on the show, so that may explain the general public not being too aware of them y 2122.
Ah, that makes sense, thanks for the clarification.
Which brings to mind a pet peeve of mine about the old sci-fi trope of transferring one’s consciousness into another body / android / computer program:
Even if you grant that you could copy a person’s consciousness more or less exactly, it’s still a copy. The sick little girl ‘Marcy’ died when her consciousness was transferred to the Wendy-bot. Yes, she would have died eventually anyway, but she could have had more time. And she was lied to that she would wake up as ‘Wendy’. From Marcy’s perspective, she went into the great black void just the same as anybody who dies, whether or not their consciousness got copied.
Heh, I get the reference, but is there an old SDMB thread dedicated to this subject that you’re referencing, similar to the great ‘plane on a treadmill’ debate? I did site searches for ‘transporter paradox’ and ‘transporter dilemma’, but came up with nothing.
Do we know when the Nostromo left Earth originally? I’m wondering if they’re already on their way, or if Wayland ends up sending them as a direct result of the events of the show.
Notably, the star freighter where Alien takes place, named the USCSS Nostromo, also takes off from Earth in the year 2120 for its disastrous interstellar mission. So it’s entirely possible that we’ll see the Nostromo launch into space at some point during the events of Alien: Earth.
Also note that the Maginot was returning from a 65 year mission (where it had apparently visited multiple strange new worlds, bringing back the most bioweapon-worthy species available on each of them) placing the construction of that ship at no later than 2055.
Looking forward to watching this. Love Alien(s), Olyphant and season 1 of Legion.
Wondering about the naming of Maginot. This is only slightly less subtle than naming it Titanic II. Why not continue the tradition of Cool Conrad inspired names?
One thing in ep.1 that was very annoying to me was the show kept inserting these split-second flash forward(?) scenes, that were sort of jump-scare like. They weren’t really startling, at least to me, but they were so strobe-light quick they probably should have had a warning for epileptics.
Alien semi-officially takes place in the Blade Runner universe, with synths being a replacement for replicants. It probably even rises to the level of officially-officially:
Another clear connection formed between the two franchises with the Blu-ray release of Prometheus in 2012. That set includes a booklet containing a diary excerpt from Guy Pearce’s character, Peter Weyland. Weyland reflects on his experiences with his mentor (clearly referencing Blade Runner’s Dr. Eldon Tyrell) and how the failures of Tyrell’s Replicants inspired him to design a better, more obedient class of android.
(Krish seems to have a bit of Roy Batty in his design.)
Weren’t those all shown as being experienced by one character (“Morrow,” played by Babou Ceesay)? If so, clearly they are showing that the character has quite a…history. Or has pre-cognition, if they are flash-forwards.
Hawley’s involvement leads me to be optimistic, too.
I did dislike the opening card, which was something to the effect that three technologies are competing to provide immortality: artificial persons, cyborgs, and transplantation of human consciousness into artificial bodies. …. Surely only the third could provide immortality!
Unless they were using “immortality” to mean something like “AI that can endure for centuries,” which seems an eccentric way of looking at immortality. Usually it refers to living things (such as humans). Both cyborgs and transplanted consciousness could work under that definition, but I don’t see how the artificial-persons industry could be said to be providing immortality.
Anyway, having more than one Evil Corporation seems like a good plot generator. If it’s ALL Weyland-Yutani, things could get dull.
Alien: Earth is set in the year 2120, which is just two years before Alien (released in 1979, and set in the year 2122). This makes Alien: Earth a direct prequel to Ridley Scott’s original film.
Not that I blame you for not reading to the end of one of my long-winded posts, but I did mention that in an ‘ETA’ at the end of the very post that you quoted.
Sorry, I missed that. I suspect the show will end with the Nostromo being launched on its fake mission, with its real mission being to get some more aliens.
Of course, that doesn’t explain why a ship launched on an expedition in the mid-21st Century would have such ‘backward’ technology, so…don’t go digging too deep into chronology or looking for much consistency, I guess.
They’re trying to throw in mostly fake jump scares but the tonal shifts from scene to scene make it very difficult to take it seriously.
I’ve only watched the first episode but it really seems like a jumble of different transhuman and corpro-fascism story ideas into the Aliens universe where they really don’t fit any better than Ridley Scott’s attempt to insert ‘ancient aliens’ into the prequels. As presented in the original film and sequel, ‘The Company’ (Weyland-Yutani is never named in dialogue but obvious from the various logos subtlly placed in the background) is a faceless conglomerate which is just more focused on obtaining and developing profitable technology for the ‘Bioweapons division’ at the expense of disposable contractors. The inclusion of a ‘synthetic’ in Alien was to give an internal antagonist that could be the loyal face of the company as well as the xenomorph threat, and it was a complete surprise to the crew that Ash was an android. Bishop in Aliens was set up as an obvious potential threat which was actually a feint, as it was Carter Burke who was actually willing to sacrifice everyone to sneak the xenomorphs back to company labs on Earth. ‘Synthetics’ are thus treated as a rare occurrence–something used for long space voyages or as spies–but in the prequels, Alien: Romulus, and this show they are treated as being commonplace (and now, also capable of transferring a human consciousness into).
The xenomorphs themselves were presented as essentially unknown in the original Alien (although the Company clearly knew that there was something useful and potentially dangerous when the directed the crew of the Nostromo to LV-426), and then apparently covered up and completely forgotten about between the events of Alien and when Ripley was recovered at the beginning of Aliens, causing Burke to go send a survey team to check out the derelict ship (which somehow wasn’t found in previous surveys), which then resulted in the colonists being used to gestate the aliens and the Colonial Marines (along with Ripley and Burke) sent to check out the loss of the colony even though the review board doubted her story about a species “… never recorded once in over three hundred surveyed worlds.”. Now we have prequels with ancient ‘Engineers’ generating life on Earth, decades-long expeditions collecting various species of virulent hybrids, and in Romulus an abandoned research facility with multitudes of facehuggers (which are incidentally way clumsier that they’ve been in any other film just to give the human characters a chance) which can grow a full-sized xenomorph in minutes instead of hours or days. From what we see here the ‘Middle Heavens’ should be liberally crawling with deadly lifeforms derived from Engineer goo, and everybody should be constantly running for their life, firing pulse weapons and flame throwers at anything that moves. And there is less consistency about the various xenomorph forms than and how they develop than the ages of the children in the Vacation movies.
Overall, I fond that this show has a great production design and aesthetic that credibly apes the original film (although anachronistic for the expedition vessel) but has big tonal shifts, a lot of ideas that don’t really seem to work very well together, and as all of the other films since Aliens, a lack of distinct characterization or real driving narrative. It’s not as obviously just-here-for-the-fan-service as Alien: Romulus was (where it liberally borrowed plot developments and whole elements of dialogue directly from the first two films even if they didn’t actually make sense in context), and it isn’t as if the acting, production design, cinematography, and other production elements aren’t good, but I just don’t understand the point of this other than to make money out of rehashing the same conflicts and threats without any really new ideas except for the ‘Hybrids’, which feel like something better explored in a story that doesn’t involve blazing away at acid-spewing xenomorphs, or if it does it should be in a different milieu than what was previously established by Ridley Scott (before the pointless prequels) and James Cameron.
But hey, maybe I’m just bitter about how nobody has used the multiple options taken out on Eclipse Phase to make a real cinematic exploration of transhumanism and alien contact.
Thanks for that - I can never decide whether the amount of free time we’ve generated collectively for “artistic endeavors” is a good thing, or just a giant wank-fest.