Apparently without the benefit or hindrance of watching the original, he pans it:

Muv-Luv Alternative looks clumsy and amateurish after Tari Tari’s sophisticated plotting. Scenes often end with awkward pauses and you wonder why they’re in there in the first place. What we got is some nasty aliens called BETA who are set on wiping out humanity for reasons no one knows, and, throughout the few years depicted in episode one, are doing a pretty good job of it. We see much of this through a girl named Yui, who’s going to pilot a mecha thing and fight when she graduates, along with all her schoolfriends. Her military uncle shows up to talk about some weapon, talks about Gekishin and Zuikaku weapons while coming to no conclusions and then leaves again. Yui gets a rival in a girl named Yamashiro but they’re buddies before you can even blink. We get clothes-changing fanservice. The only good thing, if you can call it that, is the inevitable dread of the BETA invasion hitting the Japanese mainland, with the girls still in training. So I’ll have to watch the second episode to see how it turns out, though I have a pretty good guess. Otherwise, I don’t think I can stomach too much of this.

Sick burn!

J.P. provides a context view from the benefit of a hardcore fan. Peter's reaction goes against J.P.'s prediction of viewers fixated on small things. Instead, the implementation is bad enough to provide the blogging fodder.

UPDATE: J.P. Also counselled patience with a tweet: "i thiiiiiink the first 2 eps of TE are awkwardly-shoehorned in anime original backstory. emphasis on "awkward" since after all this show is directed by the luminary behind such platinum hits as dragonaut and rosario + vampire".