Wendy's

Alien: Earth reads well if you tell yourself it's a live action Ghost In The Shell. From the rotorless choppers to the equatorial backgrounds to Timothy Olyphant's Batou bleach job, the story (if not the production) is the latest example of the West looking East in the hope that the older culture has figured it out. The discomforting subtext of dropping face-huggers into Space Thailand-Bangkok-Singapore or wherever it is, is that the hardworking locals can deal with this shit. Aliens are simply another challenging infestation for the Future Third World along with mosquitoes and Colonial traders and Hollywood.

I can't decide if that makes Alien: Earth comfort viewing or street food. It's heaped with pleasures disguised as unpleasantness and vice-versa. The camerawork is reassuringly smooth (none of your claustro-Scott handhelds), the dialogue jejune-or-is-it, the tech Cowboy Bebop retro just as Ron Cobb intended. What AE does bring over from Covenant and Prometheus is the eloquence of their CGI-enabled alien biology. From blobs and plants to the fast-moving berserker xenomorph that head-butts its way through safety glass like an hysteric, the things are the things that are most alive.