CRS
Chandler, Arizona, United States

There's an old saying. If you don't want someone to join a crowd, you ask them, "If everyone were jumping off of a cliff, would you?" Well, I have. So my answer would be "Yes". True story.
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Review of Alien Vs Predator

Wednesday, November 23, 2005

originally, this was meant to be a mini-review for a POLARITY, but as I wrote it it kept getting longer and longer, and I thought, you know, I am a huge, huge fan of Alien, so there's nothing wrong with me doing this as a full review. I know the movie is over a year old and everyone knows it sucks, so it's old news. But I gotta share my opinion, dammit!!




Unlike most other fanboys, I dreaded the idea of a movie based on the concept of the Alien and the Predator fighting one another. Keep in mind, Sigourney Weaver was, once upon a time, up for an Oscar for her role as Ripley in Aliens, a feat that's absolutely unheard of in an action movie, let alone an action movie sequel. So to say that Alien is a well-respected franchise is an understatement, and the idea of merging it with another franchise (especially one that, while cool, was never as well respected as Alien), reeks of fanboyism, and I couldn't care less about a fanboy project. But I'm a huge fan of the Alien movies, so I had to see Alien Vs. Predator eventually.

After having seen it, I came away with mixed feelings. Don't get me wrong. It's a terrible movie. The plot is absolute shit, and I mean absolute shit, and is so full of holes it you attempt to think about anything at any point in time, you'll be so befuddled as to be completely pissed off. This isn't a "turn your brain off and enjoy" movie, because there can be enjoyment brought by those kinds of movies. AVP requires your brain to be comatose to have any enjoyment. Further, there only seems to be one animatronic "attack head" Alien used for close ups; a shitty one left over from Alien: Ressurrection (where, for the first time, the most horrifying monster in cinematic history looked like a puppet), and the camera keeps sloppily extreme-close-cutting to it so frequently the Alien is downgraded to a hissing, drooling, one-trick pony. The computer generated sequences look terrible. The titular monsters don't look enough like their "real" counterparts, the quality of the images is muddy and muted, the animation sloppy and unconvincing. And, perhaps most insulting of all, Paul W. S. Anderson, the writer and director of this project, seems to hope you've never seen any of the previous six movies in the two franchises, and if you did, you really, really weren't paying any attention, because established rules get thrown out the window: most egregiously, the incubation cycle of the Alien, from inital face-hugging to newborn chest-burster, previously established at about 24 hours, has been ridiculously abbreviated to 2 minutes or less, as if it Alien babies came out of a bag of microwave popcorn. Anderson may complain that the excecutives forced him to cut his movie to fit a PG-13 demographic, but it's obvious he was pandering to an audience that doesn't pay attention to anything for longer than one minute in the first place.

Still, after a while, I started to feel bad for it. It is so horribly, confusingly editted-- to the point where entire action sequences go by without you having any clue as to what is going on-- and you initially blame it on Anderson's ineptitude. Then you realize plot devices go nowhere and characters that seem relevent but ultimately are not, and you start to get the smell of studio inteference. This movie is bad. And it was going to be bad no matter what if it was going to be based on this flimsy, fan-fiction-y script. But the movie is so poorly editted it has no fluidity, no style, and is just a confusing mess, while Anderson's previous movies, particularly Event Horizon and Resident Evil which, while they weren't classics, also didn't look like the negatives were thrown in a blender before being released to theaters. Anderson is not a particularly talented man, but his track record is consistently watchable. This, however, couldn't even be called that.

So why do the people in charge of the Alien franchise insist on ruining it? Didn't they realize that, after Alien 3, not allowing the franchise to flow naturally and trying to force things doesn't end up working? Alien Vs. Predator was a bad idea from the very concept, as it was an obvious and lame attempt at trying to make a quick buck at two old franchises. And Anderson, who had previously only directed some fun popcorn genre films was the wrong man to helm the franchise, let alone two different franchises. But without the studio's obtrusive insistence that the movie be catered to a PG-13 audience, at least the movie could have been watchable. That, and if they'd bothered spending any time with the shitty CGI and special effects. And the plot. And the stock characters. And the horrible acting. Well, you get the idea.
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with love from CRS @ 11:32 PM 

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