From a long, dubious questionable tradition of monster movie combos such as 'Godzilla Versus King Kong' (well, Godzilla versus anybody, really) comes this little entry in the annals of monster cinema. I have to admit, I gave the film a clean miss when it opened in cinemas. People who saw it unanimously canned it. I even avoided it after it got its DVD release. Then, just as fast as you can say 'H.R Geiger', the price of the DVDs fell to $20, then $17, then 15 dollars. This was because they released the 2-Disc special edition. So the decision became, "Do I buy the less expensive standard version or the special edition 2-dsic version for full price?" - by the way I don't rent DVDs. I don't know why, but I just don't. Call it a character flaw.Anyway, this X-mas, the special edition was being flogged off at $12.98 so I figured it was time to buy. If anything, this shows how unpopular this movie has been and how it has contributed to the falling box office receipts. Or is it buyers like me?
Anyway, I have to report that the second disc is a total and utter waste of time and not worth the extra bucks if it was still priced that way. If ever there was a garni-du-jour exercise in packaging, this 'Special Edition' is it. It's crap. I don't know what they were thinking in putting more marketing guff on the disc when you've already bought the cruddy DVD of the movie. I'm so glad I didn't pay a dime more.
What's Good About It?
There's a certain kind of pathetic pleasure in knowing what you're going to get. I order a Big Mac, I get a Big Mac. This film isn't called 'Pride and Predation', it's 'AVP: Aliens Versus Predator', and that's what you get. The Geiger Alien and the Predator going toe-to-toe, beating the green-glowing snot out of one another. The human characters are vaguely interesting, but mostly you're there to see the green-glowing snot fly.
Both the Alien and Predator behave as we've seen in their respective films, so most of the visuals are predictable, but satsifying because they're so familiar. The camouflage suit blur of the Predator, the face-hugger coming out of the eggs, all of it is nicely familiar; so familiar it elicits a yawn. Not that that is such a bad thing, just that anything this predictable is almost a cheat. Naturally, the best bits are when the Aliens and the Predators tussle. It's the point of the film.
What's Bad About It?
The way I see it, there's too much of the story that doesn't go anywhere and once the action starts, the humans cease to have a meaningful stake in the outcome. They're there to die; which may be the appeal of the AVP comic books, but this is the movies. Ripley was up to the alien Challenge. Major Dutch was up to the Predeator challenge. These characters seem to just be there to get whacked. It's not quite horror/suspense because you know full well what's going on, and it's not good action because the humans don't get enough volition other than to fire the occasional gun. In some ways, the most intriguing thing should be how evil and dangerous humans are in comparison to these monsters, and that idea never comes up - which is a shame because all the Alien films and the Predator films are imbued with that ironic notion.
There's also an impersonal quality to the story-telling.
They spend time setting up a character who has family back home and pretty much promptly kill him. It's sort of sad, but in the wrong way. If they were killing just another guy, you'd think, oh extra 1 through 6 just got killed. When this guy dies you think, "why did they bother wasting time setting up this guy's story when all that happens to him is the same, usual Alien face-hugger scene? Are we supposed to care about any of these people? In 'Aliens', like it or lump it, Ripley goes to save Newt and brings her back. It's a very important part of the story. In this film, there's never a moment in which the human characters have to rise to a similar challenge. The action is unfolding too fast to even get to important decisions, let alone spend screen time investing in character through-lines. In that sense, it's a really bad film.
Also bad is the setting: Antarctica. To me the combination of Antarctica and horror will always be 'The Thing'. This just isn't in that league of that ambient horror classic. If anything, all the efforts to portray Antarctica as a frightening environment only serve to lessen the impact of having the Predators and Geiger Alien on the loose. For all the hostility of the environment, the weather seems almost ideal, it's on a pretty isolated island. The threat to all humanity isn't as visually evident; and I don't think the film makers counted on that to happen.
Other Thoughts On The Film
The funny thing is, when I forked over my $12.98 against the information at hand, I really wanted to like this film on the level of being a fan of the source text movies. The disappointment really comes from the degree to which the actual story and themes are under-baked.
The way the Predators are portrayed in this film with the their interstellar hunting trips, one has to conclude that Predators are really dumb. I'm sorry, but they're dumb aliens. They're like a tribe of Ernest Hemmingways without the novel-writing skills. Or John Huston without the movie-making pedigree, off to shoot an elephant.
Who are they?
They're just fast and strong bipedal aliens that can attack with camouflage suits and mechanical spears and bladed frisbees, but in essence, they have about the same intelligence as the rioters down in Cronulla. As villains in a film, they're pretty impressive physical specimens, but on the whole they really aren't much intellectual whack. Sure, they kill lots of humans we hardly know in this film but they're monsters. It's almost obligatory to the genre. The thing is, if you can describe their MO with one word and it's 'predation', then it really is too easily comprehensible to be a truly alien culture.
On the other hand, the Geiger Alien is a truly sick creation. There is no conversing or communicating with these beasties. Nothing is negotiable. Dealing with it opens up a chasm of irrational fear and lack of comprehension. The machine-like repetitive procedures remind us of bugs, but that's inadequate to the horror of these beasties. The Alien is a scary-ass beast from the nether regions of our collective imagination. It's brutal, it's nasty, it's big-black-and-wrong and even slightly sexual the way it keeps dripping fluids. As a creation, it hits upon something in us, so much so that it's probably scarier than all the Terminators and Predators combined.
When these two beasties meet, it forces us to reckon with the quality of our own collective nightmare, for here in the frame are two archetypal anxieties: savagery and biological death. It's a bit like the climax of T2 where we are forced to contemplate Evil versus Death, and of course Death (Arnie) beats Evil (Robert Patrick) and casts it into the Lake of Fire. However things go a little more pedestrian in this encounter between Predator and Alien. The Aliens continue their programme of corridor ambushes while the Predators sort of mindlessly kill stuff they come across without much reason, until the last one finds it's in a bit of a bind and chooses not to kill a human. And we say to ourselves "Oh so he' not a TOTAL Savage? What a relief."
The upshot is that the Alien (rightly) remains an aloof entity beyond comprehension and stays as 'the other' while the Predator drifts back into an almost euro-centric anthropomorphic paradigm. The Predator is sort of like a big head-hunting Samoan with space-dreadlocks. Indeed it becomes evident that the strengths of the Predator is not that greatly in excess of our own, while its weaknesses are exactly of our own if not worse; and because of this it must negotiate with a human.
This is exactly at the point in which we find the weakness of the film. What is explained about the Predator interstellar civilization is so dumb and inadequate to being called a civilization, we're left with the sense that this film is hardly adequate in explaining the conflict we're witnessing on the screen. You know the feeling: "why am I watching this stuff?'
In turn, if Alien-hunting is a ritualistic game for the Predators, the human struggle gets devalued so quickly it's not worth investing our emotions with them at all. There's hardly anything at stake for the audience when in fact every Alien film and Predator film before it was explicit in this threat-to-the species angle. Indeed, there are miles of ideas to be mined in an universe that has Aliens, Predators and Humans, but not even 1% gets explored. What a damn shame.
Could I have done better? With all due respect, you better you bet. :)
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