So far it is really nailing the vibes of the first two films. It takes place a couple decades prior to Alien and one of the new plot points is that an up and coming rival corpo city state to Wayland Yutani is porting the minds of terminally ill and disabled children into synthetic bodies.
The cast does a phenomenal job of portraying kids in adult bodies with their mannerisms, humor, and body language and it has all the clicky clack retro sci fi the series is known for an I fucking love it so far.
Definitely a mix of both films in terms of themes and action. There is clearly some Aliens feel with some military grunts investigating a crashed ship and also some Alien vibes with the slow burn of the first couple episodes. I highly recommend for fans of either of those movies.
Overall pretty good, I like the lining up of some corp-on-corp violence which hasn’t been seen in the franchise so far
One weird nitpick though
Her flashback where she’s watching a movie with her brother… and it’s fucking Ice Age, and not even the original but one of the sequels, took me out of it completely. One of the most crucial components to the identity of the series is the clunky 70s-style computer systems, which I just can’t possibly imagine being able to produce CGI movies like that.
Like, is it suggesting that technology and culture in this universe matched the real world until at least 2012, and then just regressed back to clicky-clacky command line terminals everywhere? And also that kids would just be casually watching a movie that could have been over a hundred years old at that point? Peter Pan I get, cause it has a cultural position that’s kind of timeless, but Ice Age?? It just doesn’t feel like something that could exist in this universe, right?
Edit: Okay, I started watching the second episode and there’s a callback?? Why would he say that? No one would say that! And then as she hacks the robot to deliver the response, Ice Age Sid fucking fades in to accompany the line???
How the fuck is this a real frame from the newest entry to Ridley Scott’s Alien universe??? This is so jarring, it’s like a parody except you couldn’t make something this funny on purpose. There’s obviously a narrative slot here for the ‘shared media reference’ that these two characters can use to communicate, but it should probably have been something with a little more, I don’t know, gravitas or cultural permanence than the fourth entry in the Ice Age film franchise, and even then the execution didn’t need to be THIS.
It’s also making me notice how much of the rest of the script and scenario is really kind of contrived, when before I think I was blinded by the excellent production. But whatever, I’m sure I can ignore it and keep enjoying this slop.
i do think the juxtaposition in technological style is weird at best. It’s like Prometheus on one hand and Alien on the other. Perhaps the chunky retro tech is used for reliability reasons, like how XP is/was used on space stations for a long time. But I kind of wish they’dve stuck to retro if they were going to use it.
although now that I think about it, all of the high tech stuff is used by the corpo freaks + their forces and the worse tech is used for lower class things like that robo HR desk that used punch cards. So maybe it’s intentional and hinting that the reason for tech regression is capitalist immiseration.