I can't believe it. That show was absolutely brain dead. We made it through the first two episodes before we realized the writer's room was either completely green or extremely bad, and that besides the set design or the vfx crew no one was a real Alien fan.

Inventing a new company built around a tech boy billionaire who proclaims to be the smartest person in the world and whose motive was stated as "to have a new and interesting conversation" while doing absolutely nothing to demonstrate his intelligence felt like weird corpo porn. If you're gonna say a character is smart, you have to make them do or say smart things. One of the first decisions we see him make is sending in children in superhuman Android bodies (priceless by the way) to a collapsing building. No training, no education past general academic things, no practice in anything relevant. Unbelievably stupid.

The main character takes a paper cutter arm and puts it on her back like a sword, that level of stupid, throughout the whole series.

I also hate when cash grab entries in a franchise advance the tech or introduce world changing lore that water down the original product. Like touch screens? In a famously tactile and retro sci-fi world? Introducing cybrogs is fine, playing them identically to androids, all to seemingly be different in concept from the originals (and set up this supposedly important tech race) while paying beat for beat homage to them. Gosh, a cold calculating ~~android~~ cyborg kills part of his crew for no stated reason (unlike the original entry where it was stated and good).

I mean I could go on but I don't want to yuck anyone's yum. If you liked the show, I'm happy you're getting a second season, but if anyone's looking for a review - don't fuckin watch it. It was so poorly written. THE XENOMORPH CAN SMELL FEAR NOW AND THAT'S WHY IT KILLS, After Earth-type bullshit levels of bad writing.

I'm just so disappointed because after Alien Romulus I was hoping whoever was making the franchise calls was maybe capable of revitalizing the IP. But I'm treating Romulus like Andor, a fluke (not that it's Andor levels of good but that it was an unintentional outcome of the mass production of old IP pieces).

[–] pumpkin_spice@lemmy.today 1 points 4 days ago (1 children)

I came here to write this, so thank you for saving me the trouble.

I really wanted to like this show. It has great production value. It has some good actors. It had potential.

Unfortunately the writing is so bad it's insulting to my intelligence as a viewer.

[–] gusgalarnyk@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago

You know how fire fighters and medic personnel FAMOUSLY bring assault rifles into every collapsing building or emergency situation? Or how elevator doors close lightning quick after you enter them, such that they could prevent... Oh let's just be hypothetical here... A XENOMORPH from catching you, or how famously quiet plane crashes are when they hit your building such that you can continue your apartment party without being any the wiser?

I'm happy you found my comment useful. I'm just stunned this has a 66% on RT with viewers. I'm not shocked when critics are wildly off base, but for the viewers to have given this such a high score speaks to how hungry people are for high budget sci-fi properties or maybe just Alien specifically. Either way, this franchise should have had more room to be better than it was clearly given.

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