| Plot: Charles Bishop Weyland convinces a group of archaeologists to go with him on an expediton into Antarctica to what may be the first pyramid (even though it looks more like a ziggurat) ever made. Too bad for the puny humans that the pyramid is in fact a hunting ground where the Predators and Aliens have been mixing it up for centuries. It's "that" time again and a group of Predators go on safari as a way to prove they're worthy warriors against a hive of Aliens with the humans smack dab in the middle. Rock and roll? Review: The best way I can possibly start this review and sum up the film is that this was a soul-crushing disappointment. Honestly, how could anybody fuck up such an air-tight concept? Freddy vs. Jason was a very implausible crossover but they pulled it off, yet Alien vs. Predator was a crossover that fit like a glove yet director Paul Anderson and company fucked up an almost unfuckupable concept. It took over a decade for them to come out with this flick, constantly rewriting the script and this was the best they could come up with? Despite the terrible buzz this movie was getting, I wanted to give it the benefit of the doubt. Hey, it has Aliens and Predators, how bad can it be? Famous last words. Alien vs. Predator was all about adding insult to my injury. First they pound the crap out of me with a movie that doesn't deliver on any level and then it completely insults my intelligence with all the things it gets wrong about the Aliens series. Let me explain--Paul Anderson apparently thinks that he can get away with putting so many plot holes into the film. The chest-bursting process takes about an hour or so in the other movies, but here it occurs in mere minutes or even less. The Predators wristblades and armor get burnt via Alien blood but their spears don't (what's up with that?). The Predators just string up their victims instead of skinning them, and the list just goes on. Supposedly he watched all the Alien and Predator movies, but for some reason he can't seem to keep up any consistency with the previous movies. He even puts in a character who is supposed to be the origin of the Bishop androids even though it was clearly stated that the guy in Alien 3 was the creator. I know I'm sounding like something of a geeky fanboy, but c'mon, who did Paul honestly think was going to see this besides fans of each series? Secondly, the film is rated a very weak PG-13, meaning that when the humans die a gruesome death the camera cuts away just in time. None of the other Alien or Predator movies were rated PG-13, they were all very gory, and as to why this entry doesn't follow suit is beyond my understanding (MPAA dickheads). Another thing that irks me is the fact that the only truly new weapon they added to the Predator universe (nets don't count, they've been in the comic books since time out of mind) was a pathetic take on the disc in Predator 2...except it's a ninja star. Pfft. Fanboy gripes aside, AvP takes place in a truly mediocre setting. It's modern day in an isolated pyramid. Why not set it in the future like all of the other "vs" stories have been? At least we would've had some colonial marines. I'm so sick of hack directors trying to rip-off the claustrophobic atmosphere and instead coming up with a pale imitation. Paul Anderson calls it "keeping it suspenseful," I call it chickening out. AvP should've had balls-to-the-wall, non-stop action, and instead we get a painfully slow "suspenseful" film. The Aliens and Predators don't show up until the ass end of the film and even then it's a complete let-down. There are only three Predators and all of them are complete weaklings, two of them ate it within a few minutes of showing up and a few seconds apart from one another. Weren't they supposed to be badass hunters? At least one goes down with a decent fight, the only real Alien against Predator fight that means anything. It was them slashing the crap out of each other, throwing each other into next week, and spilling their alien blood all over the place. Why couldn't they just have more action sequences like that? Too bad you can't really see the action due to a very annoying jerky camera. Oops, I'm sorry, that's supposed to be the famous "MTV-editing" at work. Way to give me motion sickness, you asses. Anderson is also completely in love with the bullet-time effect from the Matrix as he rehashes it in scene after scene (bullet-time in movies is now officially dead). In addition to the director making the action as nauseating as it is scarce, he also decided to put in some very weak characters. I know that in Predator and Alien a lot of the characters were deadmeat, but at least they were likeable and didn't need some lame backstory to them. In here, all of them have backstories to make up for their lack of personality. Everyone's blubbering about how they have kids, how their dad died, or other such personal drivel. Even Lance Henrikson couldn't do anything with his character. The main female lead, Alexa Woods, was supposed to be a Ripley-esque character, but here she's completely subdued and just as uninteresting as all the other characters. And her "relationship" with the one Predator made me want to puke my guts out all over Paul Anderson's head. What is this tripe, the LifeTime Channel's version of the Predator? And he even made her some makeshift weapons, how cute! Every moment they were onscreen I thought they were just going to kiss each other for Christ's sake. More importantly, if the Predators weren't out for the humans, then why did they slaughter the entire expedition except for her? It doesn't make one bit of goddamn sense, which pretty much sums up the plot for AvP. The humans were supposed to be bystanders in this flick yet the Aliens and Predators only get a maybe a solid twenty minutes devoted to them. On the only real positive level of the film, seeing the Aliens and Predators is still just as cool as it was back in the day. Despite Anderson getting just about every fact about each species wrong, his team did manage to create some cool-looking monsters that did keep at least some resemblance of the spirit of the previous films. The Predators looked a little different, but they looked almost as cool as they did before. And thankfully they weren't computer-generated. That's right, good ol' fashioned guys in suits and puppets. And the scene with the Alien queen was decent enough (although it did seem more like something out of Jurassic Park). The last bit that really pissed me off was how Anderson rehashed shots from the previous movies. The scene with the Alien queen going into the depths of the icy waters was just a rip-off the final scene in Aliens (except they flushed her into outer space), the last scene with all the Predators was the same as it was in Predator 2 except they didn't give her a trophy, and there's a close-up scene with Alexa and the Alien which is just another rehash of the close-up in Alien 3. Supposedly Paul Anderson saw all of these scenes, but for some reason he thinks the hardcore fans aren't going to remember them so he can use them again. AvP is that double whammy of badness--it's action is just as weak as the plot. I would've excused a lot of the bad acting, weak characters, dumb storylines, and even some of the basic facts gotten wrong if this was filled to the brim with gooey action...but it wasn't. AvP doesn't respect each series and completely insults fans of both movies. It's only out of the infinite goodness of my heart that this film doesn't get the dreaded half star. I can't rant anymore about the film or else we'd be here for hours. The only thing AvP did to my satisfaction were the special effects, and that was it. I hope this adaption is completely forgotten and someone comes along and gets AvP done right. I can't recommend AvP for any fans, even the most diehard ones because it's such a gigantic waste of a great concept, money, and effort. There should be a law stating that Paul Anderson will have no affiliation with any future projects involving the Alien or Predator franchises. AvP takes out everything we loved about each of these six films. The characters, the action, the suspense, the gore, everything is gone in this movie. AvP is by far the worst summer blockbuster movie I've seen in a long time. Just skip this trash, you'll be a lot happier. |
| Rating: * |
| Review by Jim |
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