ALIEN
VS. PREDATOR (2004)
Director: Paul
W.S. Anderson
Fictional characters
crossing over to either team up or do battle is nothing new. It
happens in comic books all the time, and can be seen in movies
like Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, King Kong vs.
Godzilla, and Freddy vs. Jason. While many are
intended to be one-time-only ideas, one crossover has become a
full-fledged media enterprise. Following the first publication of
Dark Horse's "Alien vs. Predator" comics in
November 1989, the clash between the two extraterrestrial beasts
went on to spawn novels and numerous video games, along with its
own comic spinoff featuring another cinematic killing machine
from the '80s, "Alien vs. Predator vs. The Terminator."
After New Line Cinema scored big business with the release of Freddy
vs. Jason in 2003, Twentieth Century Fox unleashed its
murderous monsters onto the big screen the following year. There
was much rejoicing in the fanboy community, but Fox ultimately
decided to anger those fanboys by hiring relatively unpopular
director Paul W.S. Anderson and released it with an unimaginable
PG-13 rating. But does it manage to be good as its R-rated
predecessors, or is it just a great big letdown? That's what
we're here to find out.
Our story takes place in Antarctica, where a
satellite owned by the Weyland Corporation has discovered an
unusual heat signature on Bouvet Island, a remote island off the
coast of Antarctica. Upon further investigation, the Corporation
discovers what appears to be an immense ancient pyramid buried
two thousand feet beneath the island's surface. The pyramid
apparently has characteristics of Egyptian, Aztec, and Cambodian
pyramids, which is pretty amazing considering that it predates
each of those civilizations. But the thing is, they never really
make a credible attempt to explain the how's or why's of it. If
you're not going to explain it, why bother even bringing it up in
the first place?
Anyway, corporation founder
Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriken) and his assistant Maxwell
Stafford (Colin Salmon) assemble a team of scientists and
archaeologists to check the place out. The team is mostly
comprised of faceless nobodies, with three exceptions: Alexa
Woods (Sanaa Lathan), who is drafted as the team's guide for some
reason known only to the filmmakers; Sebastian de Rosa (Raoul
Bova), an Italian archaeologist who can read hieroglyphics; and
Graeme Miller (Ewen Bremner), a naïve archaeologist with a
penchant for photography. (And truth be told, Bremner's character
only stands out because of his thick Scottish accent.)
Weyland and Stafford inform
the team at a briefing that the expedition will be getting
underway as soon as possible, but Alexa objects. Turns out that
the team will need at least three weeks of training because they
don't exactly have the proper survival skills to survive the kind
of environment they'll be up against. Yeah, essentially calling
the crew a bunch of pansies is a really nice way to endear
yourselves to everybody. Weyland informs Alexa that time is a
luxury not afforded to them, so she quits. So what does Weyland
do? He threatens to hire her closest competition if she doesn't
accompany them on their fantastic voyage. A harsh businessman,
Weyland is. Alexa knows that nobody can do the job as well as her
and really isn't in the mood to lose out to a rival, so she
reluctantly rejoins the team as they set sail.
The team arrives at an
abandoned whaling station and prepare to drill down into the
pyramid, but they soon learn that a passage has been neatly
carved out at a perfect 30-degree angle. The passage wasn't there
the day before and nothing on Earth could have carved it that
quickly, but nobody in the team questions it. The team ventures
down the tunnel and enter the pyramid, but a few rash decision on
their parts unleash the bloodthirsty Aliens from their crypt in
the pyramid's basement. And to make matters worse, the scientists
are also intercepted by three interstellar hunters we know as the
Predators. Thanks to Sebastian's skill at reading hieroglyphics,
we learn that the pyramid is a hunting ground for Predators,
where they bred Aliens every hundred years so young Predators
could engage in a ritual rite of passage. And just their luck,
the humans are the bait. The squadron of Aliens soon wipes out
pretty much everyone, leaving only Alexa and one Predator (Ian
Whyte) to band together and fight there way to safety.
What a sad, sad, sad state
of affairs Alien vs. Predator is. The movie is one of
the most disappointing sequels I've ever seen, and everyone
involved should be ashamed of themselves for ruining a movie that
had such wonderful potential. There's something going on all the
time while nothing really happens, resulting in a film that's all
effort with no results. Not once during the course of the movie
is any sort of coherent story told, the movie is too poorly shot
and too tightly edited to make any sort of sense on a visual
level, and the cast brings nothing to the table. Not even the
effects can save the movie, because everything has been reduced
to get a PG-13 rating. Instead of the straightforward violence
we're used to in the Alien and Predator movies,
the violence here is broken into three parts:
- Show the monster
swinging a sharp object.
- Show the victim
anticipating the death blow (and screaming, if the victim
is human).
- Show blood splattering
nearby.
Simple as that. Oddly
enough, the movie is rated PG-13 for violence, language, horror
images, slime, and gore. Slime?! If the MPAA can give a movie a
PG-13 rating for slime, then I'm surprised Ghostbusters 2
didn't get an R. That movie is about slime. Just
add that to the list of things that made absolutely no sense at
all in this movie.
Speaking of confusing
things, we don't see the Aliens and Predators onscreen together
until 53 minutes into the movie. When you see a movie called Alien
vs. Predator, you expect to see monsters fighting each
other, not occasional monster fighting interspersed with a bunch
of worthless cannon fodder people walking around like a bunch of
morons. I can understand wanting a human element in the film, but
it shouldn't be at the expense of the title characters. The two
species of extraterrestrial killers do square off, yes, but by
the time they get around to fighting, the poor direction and
paper-thin characters will have probably bored you to death.
Seriously, what kind of idiot thought it was a good idea to give
the quite inconsequential research team more screen time than the
Aliens and Predators combined? Oh yeah, I know who that idiot is:
writer and director Paul W.S. Anderson. Anderson's screenplay is
ungodly bad, immediately evidenced by the fact that the movie was
set on Earth circa October 2004. That's about as lazy as Anakin
Skywalker living on Tatooine in The Phantom Menace. Why
not just set it in space in the year 3000, or something like
that?
The movie just plods along,
not really bothering to explain what's going on at any given
time. How do the little Chestburster Alien guys grow so fast,
when it took days in the previous four Alien movies? I
guess the Predators had the Alien Queen hopped up on steroids in
order to speed up their hunt, but since they never say one way or
the other, all I can do is make assumptions. It's one thing for a
movie to make the audience think about it, but it's another to
force the audience to guess what's happening at any given time.
Sometimes even the brightest viewer needs to have things spelled
out for the movie to make any sense. And then there's the
"surprise" coda that was so expected, it wasn't even a
surprise at all. I'll admit that it was cool, yes, but it could
be seen coming from a mile away.
And am I the only one who
noticed a few large jumps in logic? Take, for example, the scene
in which we are introduced to Sanaa Latham's character. She's
hanging from the side of a cliff on a clear day with nobody and
nothing around, yet is surprised when she discovers a helicopter
at the top. I may be jumping to conclusions here, but wouldn't
she have, you know, heard it flying overhead? I could understand
if she was so focused on scaling the cliff that she didn't
notice, but how do you not notice a helicopter
landing right above you? They aren't exactly a stealthy type of
transportation. Another bizarre moment sees Latham's character
telling everyone that the first rule of business was that
everyone should stick together. So what does everyone do? They
split up and go off by themselves. And then Latham goes off by
herself to yell at everyone for going off by themselves. The
insanity of the movie's screenplay culminates in a scene where we
learn about the ancient civilization that populated the pyramid
getting decimated by one of the Predator wrist-mounted nuclear
bombs. If the entire civilization was wiped out, how could they
write hieroglyphics about it? Were they doing it from beyond the
grave? And what was with the pyramid walls intermittently moving
around? There's no real rhyme or reason to anything. The whole
movie is a vicious cycle of stupidity.
And let's not forget about
Anderson's trite, hackneyed direction. With Alien vs.
Predator, Anderson appears to have no grasp on what made the
first two Alien movies and the first Predator
so enthralling. The movie suffers from uneven pacing and lighting
that's too dark to really get a grasp on what we're seeing. Alien
vs. Predator also suffers from the same problem plaguing
many action movies nowadays: lightning fast editing and shaky
camera work. During many of the one-on-one fight scenes involving
the Aliens and Predators, the camera is all over the place and
each cut lasts only a few seconds. What ever happened to the good
old days, where filmmakers would just film a fight scene from two
or three angles and let that be that? While I have no doubt that
Anderson can make a movie that is visually stimulating, he seems
to forget all the important stuff like story, decent scripting,
good characters, good actors, that sort of thing. He is very much
a director that favors style over substance, and while a
"style over substance" type of film can be good in the
hands of a competent director (e.g. John McTiernan's work on the
original Predator), Anderson has yet to prove himself as
either a credible writer or director. I don't hate Anderson with
the same vitriol of others online, and I do think he has a good
movie in him somewhere, but he needs to realize that just because
you make a movie with style doesn't mean you've made a good
movie.
I also found the cast to be
a tad lackluster. It seems like almost every character has an
overstated foreign accent, but the funny part is their accents
are all real. With the exceptions of Sanaa Latham and Lance
Henriksen, just about everyone in the main cast is from Europe.
The cast reads like a who's who of European countries; England,
Scotland, France, Italy, Denmark, and the Czech Republic are all
represented. Maybe the movie's very British director wanted a
cast full of Europeans because he didn't want to feel lonely, I
don't know. I don't have anything against Europe, but hearing
almost every character speak with an accent threw me off. But in
any event, Sanaa Latham has nothing resembling the screen
presence or strength as Sigourney Weaver would have. Latham has
all the charisma of a brick wall, and for the majority of the
movie, she's an annoying harpy that just bogs the movie down.
There's absolutely no reasoning given to make we the viewer want
to see her survive. The rest of the cast is nothing but fluff and
filler, with only Lance Henriksen being of note because he rules
no matter what project he's working on. Meanwhile, the musical
score composed by Harold Kloser is just like the cast:
unremarkable. It was just too generic to make any sort of mark on
the movie, and it never truly stood out in any way.
The movie's tagline is
"whoever wins, we lose," and I don't believe they could
have picked one that was any more fitting. Alien Vs. Predator
is stupendously bad, a disappointment on the grandest scale. It's
one thing to not live up to Predator and the first two Alien
movies, because those three movies are classics no matter how you
slice it. But when your movie makes people pine for Predator
2 and Alien: Resurrection, you may want to rethink
your career. I honestly can't justify giving Alien vs.
Predator anything higher than two stars.
It's a sad, depressing waste of potential, and it's a shame that
it couldn't even achieve mediocre status as a film.
Final
Rating: **