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In light of Noah Hawley TV show Alien Earth, Mark, Lawrence, Sarahlyn and Al revisit the franchise through its seven films (discounting the crummy and non-canonical Alien vs. Predator films) beginning with Ridley Scott’s 1979 classic.
While there’s plenty of sheer repetition (alien loose, killing people one by one) throughout these properties, the various filmmakers attempt to avoid sure repetition by shifting genres: Is it horror, action, science fiction, a political thriller? (…still with a lot of body horror.) On the new show, we get a pronounced shift to focusing on the synthetic humans, plus some new alien species and other twists. But are the characters fleshed out enough for us to understand and care about any of them? Is it a problem that the new show discards the lore that Ridley Scott gave us with Prometheus and Covenant, or were those films a dead end anyway?
Follow us @law_writes, @sarahlynbruck, @MarkLinsenmayer. Al would rather have his chest burst than use social media.
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