ALIEN VS. PREDATOR (2004) It's not horrible...but it is bad The title promises nothing less than the ultimate "vs." - two creatures and movie series of which I was once a big enough fan that I actually owned and wore the t-shirts. This surely wasn't the only reason I stayed a virgin through high school, but it's probably the most visible. So for many years, dating back before the video game, before the comics, before the skull in Predator 2, all the way back to the rumors about the skull in Predator 2, I would've sold my entire family into slavery to see an Alien Vs. Predator movie. And now the time has come at last. And...I won't go so far as to say that a piece of my childhood died today. But it was pushed crotch-first onto the balancing beam. I hope I established from paragraph one just how much I wanted this movie to rule mightily from an iron throne in the jagged peaks of Mount Awesome. But I knew, going in, that the odds were against that. The setting on modern-day Earth wasn't a good start. And Paul W. S. Anderson, as I'm sure we've all noticed by now, is a director of spectator video games, not movies. Most daunting: it's PG-13, something unprecedented in both franchises and unthinkable to fans. I will start at the beginning. By which I mean the script, by Anderson himself, with unclear credits regarding story and characters to four previous Alien and Predator writers. Anderson seems to have a very, very low opinion of his audience. He seems to think that we need it pointed out to us that a perfect thirty-degree hole through two thousand feet of ice can't be done in a day, at least by humans...and he seems to think we need about a dozen lines of dialogue to make that point. He seems to think that we need to be told no fewer than three times that the room with the eggs in it is called the Sacrificial Chamber. Most curiously, he also seems to think that his complete fuckwit story is somehow served by a climactic unmasking of a Predator (which has been unmasked before in two movies), and us not even seeing any Aliens until the movie's half over. So what's in the first half? Here's what Anderson thought would make for a movie worth watching: faceless people we don't give a shit about, occasionally telling a sad story about their fathers or kids to supposedly flesh out their characters, wasting time in dead-end "find somebody else to lead your team!" episodes, getting a False Scare By Penguin (a fucking penguin!), and slowly figuring out they're in a more violent version of Stargate, with the Predators as ancient gods lording over us puny mortals (no, seriously - and the 45-second-or-so montage which shows the Predators running things and ultimately screwing them up back before there was all that ice looks like a trailer for a way better movie than the one we were given). Does he hate the Alien and Predator movies? Because it seems like he hates them. So...way back in 2004, the Weyland Corporation (to become, in the future, The Company of the first three Alien movies) finds that a gigantic Cambodian/Egyptian/Aztec pyramid (yes, it's all three at the same time) under the Antarctic ice has "powered up", so they get some experts and, under the direction of company head honcho Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen), check it out. Turns out it's an isolated Alien breeding ground that the Predators return to every 100 years (to the day) to bone up on their ass-whuppin'. This pyramid - which is older than all known civilization - has a calendar in it which fires it up in time for each visit. The script takes care to point out that base-ten math is integral to the pyramid's design. Funny how the important day for this pyramid is the tenth day, of the tenth month...of a modern calendar, which would match this lost civilization's calendar I can only assume by fantastic coincidence. And all the blocks inside the pyramid change around exactly every ten minutes. Forget the calendar; when did minutes start getting measured out with such precision? That's our minutes, not Predator minutes or ancient Cambogyptec minutes. So glad the builders of the pyramid were so considerate towards earth denizens of the future. Not only is the pyramid's structure constantly changing, but there's an Alien Queen being held in restraints in the basement, squeezing out eggs on a conveyor belt. The Predators can cross the stars, but they don't hold an Alien Queen in restraints that are impervious to acidic Alien blood? (Predator weapons are inconsistent on this score) There are actually two scenes - because one wouldn't be enough in the span of about 30 minutes, I guess - where two characters make a running leap over a crumbling chasm. The climax has those two characters also outrunning a nuclear explosion...right after outsledding it. Uphill, back out into the snow...not like they ever left the snow though, because snow can be seen falling in a number of shots when they were underground. The humans all lack identity, except Henriksen who's usually worth watching and is the only person here who manages to make his "my character has depth" scene work. There are other such scenes for other characters, but they don't work and only serve to tediously pad out the movie's Alien-less first half. We hear a few more accents not heard before in Alien movies (Italian, Scottish). The line "You're one ugly motherfucker" is started, but it can't be finished because, to my understanding, you're allowed a couple of "fucks" in a PG-13 movie but even one "motherfucker" will get you an R. We actually heard as much of "motherfucker" in the abortive sentence here as we did in a trailer for Taxi before the movie. I know, I'm totally shitting on this movie. But I'll be honest. It wasn't horrible. There are a number of good moments here, I mean it. When Anderson isn't making a quick-cut jumble out of an action scene (possibly to secure that PG-13), or pacing his "scares" with the obviousness of someone who's never seen a horror movie before (I knew and so will you, exactly when and where the Queen was gonna burst out of that ice) he can actually do some justice to the Aliens. These creatures are shot well, all glossy black, usually kept in the shadows (which is a lot of this very dim movie), and maybe most importantly, they're mostly animatronics and not CGI. What CGI is being used on the Aliens is often excellent - when the Queen expectedly breaks out and stomps around at the end, she looks fantastic. There's even a tiny bit of effort made towards personalizing the Aliens; one of them sports a unique and eye-catching scar from a fight with a Predator, for example, and we see it a few times later on. One thing I miss though, is that previous Alien movies have all made their monsters a little weirder, given their beasts increasingly bizarre natures and forms. This movie only attempts that in its groan-inducing final moments, and it isn't even really a new wrinkle if you'll recall the "dogburster". The Predators don't fare as well. There are three here, and two of them die in (I think) their first encounters with their "prey". Just as well; the new, more elaborate mask on one of them (team leader, I guess?) is lame and I was happy not to see it anymore. The first Alien on Predator fight is the dorky video-game cheese Anderson is known for...fallen fighters leaping to their feet, picking each other up and swinging each other around...one expects voiced-over comments like "Killer! Combo! Predator! Two points!" I do not doubt that Anderson will eventually figure out that the movies are not his true calling. I just wish he'd figured that out before this. The Predators do get a not-bad attack on some very confused humans in an abandoned whaling station, and one Predator gets the movie's most badassed moment, in a shot where it comes to the rescue in the climactic fight against the Queen. For a second there I actually found myself caring. That PG-13 pretty much neuters them for the first half of the movie though; the violence against the humans is mostly implied, with a few impalements on semi-invisible things with a minimum of blood. The Aliens' violence against the humans is almost not there at all; there are two "chestbursting" scenes, both of which are over in an eyeblink, and all the adult-Alien-on-human violence is off screen. As is expected for PG-13 monster movies, most of the gore is from the monsters but most importantly, it's not red (see also Tremors and Star Trek VI). Flourescent green blood and metal-eating yellow blood doesn't seem to bother the MPAA. The ending sets us up for two possible sequels, one of which is kinda dumb (we've already seen Aliens survive hard vacuum, plunges in molten lead and even in this very movie, being frozen solid; I doubt what happens to the ol' battleaxe here will inconvenience her in the slightest), the other, REALLY dumb (do the Predators not take the most obvious precaution, when bringing back their own from an Alien hive...especially when, as is demonstrated earlier in the movie, they have x-ray vision and can see an Alien larva writhing in your chest?). Complete dumbfuck script, about three-quarters dumbfuck execution. Would it have cost so much to buy the rights to that comic book series and adapt it? Certainly it wouldn't have been too budget-intensive to actually film - it took place on this, like, farming planet. Somebody at Nintendo, give this man a job. Please. BACK TO THE A's BACK TO THE MAIN PAGE