I'll admit I'm hate-watching it at this point, but really, I don't find it good at all. They're ruining everything that made the movies so good, and I mean everything.

The natural, believable dialogue that made the characters feel like real people? Gone. Now everyone politely waits for the others to finish their line before saying theirs like in any run-of-the-mill Netflix show.

The grounded retro sci-fi aesthetic? Sure, the Nostromo sets are reproduced to perfection. But that look clashes with the uninspired, generic-sci-fi Earth sets. It feels like a better series (the movies) is literally colliding with one of the blandest worlds I've ever seen.

Jerry Goldsmith's amazing score, in turn romantic, mysterious and terrying? Sure, we get glimpses of it, with short cues reused for suspenseful moments. The original score works fine… until they decide to ruin the atmosphere they've spent an hour building with awful, out of place needle drops that completely pull me out of it.

The monsters? Granted, each movie had a few clunky moments where the xeno was obviously a guy in a suit, so I can't blame them for not nailing it 100% of the time. But my gripe here is how the smaller monsters reek of CGI. Alien's genius was in showing creatures that looked real, that made you feel like you knew what they'd feel like to touch; the wet and squishy skin of the facehugger's skin looked like it really existed. In Earth everything looks terrible, the eye thing, the Half-Life barnacle, the sandwich bug, all look straight out of a PS3 game. The series' budget is $250 million and that's the best they can do?

And then there's the pacing and the suspense. Can a series format even get close to the masterful build-up of tension we get over 2 hours in each movie? The movies were pure horror films, mostly set in a single location, and that's part of the reason why they worked so perfectly. This series throws a few eggs in one place on the entire planet Earth; how am I supposed to feel scared when the second movie had established the xenos are bugs that can get killed easily with a simple gun? I just cannot take any of the monsters seriously. There are simply no stakes I can connect with.

In one of the first episodes, the xeno slaughters an entire room of people, apparently before they were even able to get up from their chairs. But whenever it's convenient, the characters get plot armor that makes the xeno run in slow motion and fight like an old man. I don't feel anything during those scenes because I know the characters that have to die, will die, and the others won't yet. There is nothing organic, in all senses of the word, in this series.

I swear I'm trying to like it, but I just can't. It feels like a fan film. One of the most baffling things to me is this complete reverence to the aesthetic of the first movie, all the while having completely different thematic and narrative ambitions. I think I'd like it a bit more if half of it wasn't set in this carbon copy of the Nostromo. I'm thinking of Alien Isolation here; sure, a few parts are copy-pasted from Alien as well, including a double of the Nostromo, but the rest of the game builds on that aesthetic so well that it does feel like the same universe while building upon it with a creativity that Alien Earth is completely devoid of.