Lance Henriksen is a billionaire entrepreneur, and when a satellite of his spots a heat signal from a pyramid six hundred metres below Antarctica, he decides to recruit a team of the world�s best whatevers to explore it. So they do! But the Predators, from their spaceship, are interested to. But why, and in what capacity? And what of this Alien Queen, beneath the pyramid, who appears to be thawing out?
Writer/director Paul W.S Anderson and I have an interesting history, mainly because he sucks. He likes it big, loud and stupid, but I think his sense of fun completely fails to materialise on the screen. He certainly has a sense of fun- that�s the reason he makes movies- but somehow it just doesn�t translate for me.
Also, he has a really weird fetish for three dimensional diagrams, as using them to transition between locations. It�s quite strange.
I�m not going to complain about anything with characters, or dialogue, or plausibility, because I�m not that big a snob. Or maybe I am, but I try not to show it. But let�s face it: you know that the human characters are there just to get us to the showdown between two such iconic characters. You know everyone except the black girl is expendable, because she�s been built up as the protagonist. You know everyone�s going to be stupid and ignore all these warning signs, because without this happening, we couldn�t get to the showdown. The showdown is the point of the movie, so let�s get to it.
Frankly, it�s rather average. In the past year, we�ve had Spider-Man going at it with Doc Ock, The Bride taking down Elle Driver, Aragorn and his men attacking thousands of Orcs, and Shaun, Liz and Ed beating up a zombie using pool cues to the tune of Queen�s �Don�t Stop Me Now�. Those were some scenes that got you involved, and got your heart beating faster. The Alien vs. Predator fights, while never laughable or sleep-inducingly dull, are really just� there. I don�t know if passive is the right word, but it�s the one I�m going to use. The audience is completely passive in these fights. The Alien meets the Predator, the music tells us that this is a big moment, they fight a little, and then we move on.
It�s hard to tell why this is so. It could be that the studio-enforced tame rating ensured that there was very little actual violence to the fights- that�s certainly the reason why the stalk-n-kill scenes were so dull. It could be that pitting these two creatures together in combat was never going to work- the lack of human characteristics means there is absolutely no emotion in the fights, and it�s just two animals trying to kill one another. It could just be that Anderson is useless. Really, it�s probably a combination of the three.
So, Alien vs. Predator is a big dumb action movie that fails to deliver very much excitement. It�s an improvement on Anderson�s last, Resident Evil, and it kept me awake. Other than that, there�s really no reason to recommend this movie to anyone ever.
