Y’know how sometimes, when you’re pissed off about something or just in a general shitty mood, and someone tickles you or does something funny to cheer you up, and you laugh, but you’re still pissed off while you’re laughing, and then when they’re done, you’re still pissed about the original thing, but you’re also pissed about them trying to make you feel better in such a stupid way? If you’re like me, you fucking hate that. Hopefully you see where I’m going with this. It will help you to understand my frustration with tonight’s movie.
After Paul W.S. Anderson (the W.S. stands for “Damn Near Lynched By An Angry Mob Of Geeks”) rammed a giant, razor-coated, diesel-powered dildo into the ass of the dreams of millions of horror fanboys, it was announced that we would be getting a second chance. There would be another Alien/Predator showdown. Internet hype began building. First time directors the Brothers Strauss started doing interviews saying their flick would destroy all the bad memories of the first one with an R rating, loads of gore, and a strong emphasis on the practical effects that made all the other movies from both franchises so great.
It’s easy these days for a movie to be killed by its hype before it ever hits the screen. Unfortunately, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem did not need excessive hyping to ruin everyone’s dreams of finally seeing their two favorite monsters bring the pain in what should be the greatest thing your eyes have ever seen. But it isn’t. Not by a long shot. In fact, watching this made me feel a lot more forgiving toward the first one. At least it had some original ideas, even if they weren’t presented very well.
There isn’t much for me to tell you about the plot, because there isn’t one. Sure, there’s some so-generic-the-Sci-Fi-Channel-would-be-embarrassed-by-it Dawson’s the CW Varsity Blues on the Hill bullshit with some people named Dallas, Ricky, Jesse, and a few others. They’re ciphers – monster fodder. We don’t give a shit about anything they do. The lines they spout are so fucking painful they’re barely even funny. After seeing a whole National Guard platoon wiped out in about 30 seconds by a swarm of xenomorphs, and several people beheaded by the Predator Private Eye (more on this later), Dallas turns to the sheriff and says, “People are dying.” I honestly think there wasn’t even a script. The Strauss boys just told the actors to say what was happening in the scene, and that’d be good enough. Maybe they had a random cliché generator on set to fill in some space that needed padding, but that’s it.
The movie picks up right after the events of the first one. The dead Predator hatches its Predalien hybrid, and it runs amok on the ship, causing it to crash. The distress call is picked up by a Predator on the home world whose job it apparently is to just sit in a chair all day waiting for a big robot scorpion tail with a magic “lets you see anything the plot needs you to no matter how impossible it would be unless there were a Predator news crew filming it” view screen to show him problems that need fixing. So off he goes to Earth, and starts hunting the xenomorphs down and pouring blue stuff on everything the aliens touch. The blue stuff, no matter how big a dose he pours on, totally and conveniently dissolves anything related to the monsters, but leaves everything else untouched. Carnage ensues, and in the end, the army nukes the site (it’s the only way to be sure) from orbit (or in this case, a fighter/bomber aircraft). Oh, and eeeevil army dude hands a Predator shoulder gun to a certain Ms. Yutani in the film’s one and only clever moment. It’s a nice touch to the mythos that the company that ends up being responsible for the events in three of the four Alien movies had Predator technology as its cornerstone.
Jesus, where to begin? Like I said before, at least the first one had original ideas, however clumsily handled. This is just a painful fanboy spankfest. All the original stuff flat-out sucks, because it’s just clichéd high school bullshit. No character development at all. And all the cool monster stuff has been done before. You could seriously make a fucking drinking game out of picking which scenes were stolen from which of the other movies. You’ve got the Predator walking out of a lake with his invisibility gear going all goofy, you’ve got the slaughter of a military outfit by the xenomorphs, you’ve got the Predator sitting in a tree fixing a superficial wound, you’ve got Predator standing in for Ahnuld running away from what has to be the smallest, cleanest, least noisy thermonuclear explosion in the history of physics, you’ve got a xenomorph hissing in the face of a cringing Ripley stand-in, you’ve got the Predator doing his fancy helmet-removal ritual (right in the middle of fighting the Hybrid, which must have been very impressed with Predator’s ritual to have been standing right next to him, and yet left him alone for nearly a full minute so he could undress), you’ve got another Ripley stand-in driving to the rescue in a big tank thing, you’ve got about six thousand shots of the Predator jumping off something just so he can look really cool when he lands. I could go on, but my fingers are cramping.
There are a couple of cool moments of violence, and you can tell that the movie wanted to be balls-to-the-wall, because there are more child fatalities here than in damn near any other movie I can think of. We have a grade-schooler getting chestbursted, as well as an entire maternity ward being either eaten or impregnated by the Hybrid (which is a very cool monster, kudos to the FX crew). Pretty rough stuff, but it’s ensconced in a movie that is so utterly retarded that what should be blood-curdlingly horrible is just kinda silly. It takes a mind-boggling lack of talent to make wholesale baby slaughter by a drooling alien monster seem silly.
Most of the xenomorph/Predator action is handled with that most hated of all contemporary cinematic devices: the shaky hand-cam. Fuck you, whoever thought shaky hand-cam belonged anywhere but news and documentaries. And even more, fuck you to every director who ever used this stupid crap to make sure no audience ever enjoyed an action scene ever again. When I go to a monster vs. monster movie, I expect to be able to see monsters beating the shit out of other monsters, goddammit! I don’t want to see monster-shaped blurs doing what vaguely looks like it may be the suggestion of a fight. In the last ten minutes or so, when Preds finally winds up in the hospital and the movie starts channeling Hard Boiled, I finally felt a little bit of satisfaction. The smackdown between Preds and the Hybrid, while waaaaaay too fucking short, is great, and what the whole movie should have been like.
On the upside, there’s plenty of monster action, and it’s almost all practical effects. I hate CG. It ruins movies when it’s not good, and it’s rarely good. Transformers had good CG, because it had the money; Jurassic Park had good CG (and can someone please explain to me how, in the 16 years since Jurassic Park that CG has been a major FX tool in movies, not one single movie has topped it – shouldn’t the technology be getting better, not worse?) because it had the money. But if you don’t have unlimited cash to toss at CG, it will fucking ruin your movie. Most recently, it ruined I Am Legend. God DAMN did those vampires look like shit.
What? Oh, we’re talking about AVP, aren’t we? Well, they got the Predator right, as well. I don’t know how they managed to biff it in the last one, but once the helmets came off, those Predators looked like cheap Halloween masks. This one is badass. Still not as good as Stan Winston’s original (once again, shouldn’t this technology be improving?), but definitely a step in the right direction. Goofy blue stuff aside, he’s got some pretty cool gadgets, too.
Man, what a fucking letdown. I really should have known better, though. It seems that Fox is desperately trying to kill its two biggest genre money makers. Why would you spend millions of dollars to make a barely-mediocre load like this, and then dump it in theaters on CHRISTMAS FUCKING DAY!? Studio heads must be the stupidest people on the planet because they never seem to realize that unless it’s Halloween, holidays are death for horror flicks. Spring and Autumn, that’s when you do horror. There are loads of great stories already written in comic book form just screaming to be made into movies (I’d personally love to see the “Eternal” miniseries be the next AVP flick, if there is one), and Ridley Scott was going to team up with James Cameron to make Alien 5, and Robert Rodriguez has a fucking ruling script for Predator 3.
How does it even make good business sense to make a shitty movie for two of the most beloved franchises in the history of horror and science fiction butting heads? Isn’t it obviously a better idea to spend a little more time and money on making an awesome movie with the talents that made the original movies great, and raking in buckets of cash when everyone loves it and sees it six times in the theater and buys all the merchandise, instead of making a stinking load that will end up losing money, just so Fox can say, “See, no one cares about these franchises anymore, we can put them to bed now”, when everyone DOES care, they’re just WAITING FOR FOX TO PULL THEIR HEADS OUT OF THEIR ASSES AND GIVE US THE MOVIE WE’VE BEEN SCREAMING FOR FOR ALMOST 20 FUCKING YEARS!?
But the box office on this pointless turkey will probably put paid to us ever seeing the movie we deserve. Goddammit, how do you fuck this formula up? There is absolutely no reason that this shouldn’t be the greatest movie ever made. It’s as easy as that. There should have been no need for anyone to ever make a movie again after ALIENS VS. FUCKING PREDATOR! WHY?! HOW!? HOW DO YOU FUCK THIS UP!? God fucking dammit, I was fine when I started this, and now I’m all fucking worked up and angry again. I need to go listen to some Viking metal and eat some kringle and make myself feel better.
The Moral of the Story: At least I got a cool 2008 calendar out of the deal. If I don’t feel able to give the next entry in this series (if there is one) a full five Satanic Smileys, I’m going take off and nuke Fox HQ from orbit. It’s the…only way…to…use this joke twice in one review. Damn.
Sequel to: Alien Vs. Predator
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