On Fary Cry:
“I’m not specifically adapting any of the games that they’ve put out – I’m saying much as I did with the Coens or X-Men [he created FX’s Legion] or Alien, ‘Let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is.’ We can have a larger conversation about the strengths and weaknesses of adapting video games specifically because games are built in a way that doesn’t make for the best drama.
“When you play a video game, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cut scenes that you can skip, so when you go to adapt those games you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline. That is death for a show.”
I watched the first two episodes of Alien Earth. It starts ok and very quickly becomes stupid.
Episode 5 is basically a mini Alien movie as a flashback to before the ship crashed and it is awesome.
That’s the good episode. I like the themes, but have forgotten everything except episode 5.
I don’t understand why people liked that episode so much. We already knew who survived, so there was zero tension. It added very little to the story and was essentially a waste of an episode in a season that was already struggling with pacing.
It felt like it should have been the first episode. It did kind of break up the show itself midway and as I really hate kids in shows and I hate adults pretending to be kids even more … having an Alien-ish episode made me re-engage for a bit but you’re right in that I don’t know why I should care.
(I can’t seem to get Spoiler tags working on Connect, so SPOILERS BELOW!)
spoiler
You get to see to Boy Cavalier (or whatever) bribe the guy on the spaceship which is a “sort of” reveal … then you think about it and it’s kinda dumb. The guy has to crash the spaceship and he’s not likely to survive? Also, it’d be a better reveal if we thought Barefoot was like an honest dude, you know? Then his betrayal would mean something. Instead when I watch it, I’m like, “wow, that’s a zero latency call happening between Earth and Space”.
I agree, it would have worked a lot better as a horror episode if it had been the opening. The writers know this too, because they did open with scenes from that episode and used them as engagement bait for the rest of the series. That’s probably why it was shifted into the second half of the season. It forced people to watch half the show to “get to the good bit”, after which they were over halfway through and were more likely to finish it due to sunk cost fallacy.
Perhaps another reason for moving it into the second half is because it’s so far removed in terms of tone and style from the rest of the series that it may have felt like a bait and switch to audiences. I imagine the complaining would have been a lot louder if audiences had expected episodes like that the whole way through.
THANK YOU!!!
I quit this dipshit show in the third episode and i had heard all the chatter online about great the fifth episode was so i powered through E4 and E5 and it was …just as shitty as the rest of the show.
It was well written and acted, the behavior of the aliens was interesting, how people lived or died was interesting. It was enjoyable because it was well done. Plus things happened at a much better pace than the other episodes where everything dragged out.
Pretty sure we learned a few things during the episode too.
Episode 5 was the reason I finished the series as I was about to lose interest.
I also enjoy watching the movie Alien frequently despite knowing what is going to happen because it is well done.
The fifth episode is in no way comparable to Alien, except in a sort of nostalgia bait way with the visual references. I take your point that for you it came at a good time in the season, though. I’ve spoken to many people about the show and it seems to be a consistent theme that we all began to lose interest at one point or another. Would you say you enjoyed the latter episodes (6 - 8) more than the opening four?
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Its a tiny thing but god I couldnt get passed the obvious Ice Age ad in like the 2nd episode. We’re supposed to be 80s sci fi not “has full access to modern CGI with path traced lighting but only choose to put shitty old 8bit terminals on our expensive interstellar ships” sci fi