| Written by John Shea,
on 18-08-2004 06:24
|
Published in : Reviews, Movies |
The critic in me wants to kick the snot out of this movie. It's flaws are large and numerous and all too easy to take potshots at. The fanboy in me wants to start a witch-hunt for writer/director Paul Anderson for finding all new ways to diminish these already tarnished franchises. But overall I'm too bored to get really nasty about it.
This movie is so by the numbers that it did absolutely nothing to get me interested. That's pathetic when the movie is based on movies like Aliens and Predator. Aliens was a movie so intense that after seeing it as a kid I refused to watch it again for many years. Predator had a different vibe but was definitely a real kick in the pants. AVP just goes through the motions. You can sense a big checklist of things used in the original movies being trotted out to satisfy the fans. And of course everything has to be bigger to be better, right? Not so much, really. Did I need the predators to look like they had been to visit Barry Bonds's trainer? No. Did I need a queen alien that looked like it could go toe to toe with a T-Rex? No. What I would like are some interesting characters that will make me care about these proceedings. As it is, my favorite character was one of the predators, and he had no dialogue.
The movie's story, for lack of a better word, revolves around the discovery of an ancient temple located two thousand feet below the ice in Antarctica. Oddly, virtually no effort is made to figure out how that could be. So eccentric rich guy Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) assembles a Jurassic Park style team to investigate. There is a subplot about environmentalist ice climber Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan) wanting time to train the team which isn't granted. Will she leave the team or not? I'm sure two or three people nationwide might be concerned about this but the rest of us have working brains and wonder why we're wasting time on this nonsense. So then it's time to dig down to the temple (they discovered it with satelites don't you know) except someone already did it for them overnight. Nope, that isn't the slightest bit worrisome. And so they head right down the shaft without a concern. They leave behind some guards who might as well have been wearing red Star Trek shirts.
In case you missed it from the movie's title, the temple is a battleground for aliens and predators with humans used as bait and breeding grounds. Probably the film's only surprise is that the lone black guy isn't the first one killed. Or maybe that aliens can now go from egg to face hugger to chest burster to fully-grown xenomorph in approximately 20 minutes. Also, they seem to occasionally form out of thin air as the number of aliens far exceeds the number of humans available for breeding. But that's just nitpicking. I should get on to more important problems like the complete lack of character development. If you can't tell who the last human standing will be ten minutes into the film, you've obviously fallen asleep. And a wise choice it was as it drastically reduces your exposure to this nonsense.
I'll give Anderson credit for creating a good-looking film. Unfortunately he hasn't created a particularly coherent one. The worst such offense is in the fights between the title critters. Shot with a shaking camera at close range and edited with a blender, the first face-off between the two is almost impossible to follow. Anderson further complicated things by setting the whole thing in a temple that rearranges itself every ten minutes, making having a sense of location or direction hopeless.
If the pace were faster, you wouldn't have time to consider a lot of the film's miscues but it inches along, leaving entirely too much time to think about what you are watching and point out the multitude of errors. Despite being spawned by a pair of movie franchises, it probably pays to not have seen any of the previous films. Knowing too much just obliterates any possibility of not laughing at the movie.
- John Shea
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