Category: Alien vs. Predator movies

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007, Colin Strause and Greg Strause)

Surprisingly, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem does elicit some conversation. Or, at least the first forty or so minutes of it does. The rest might elicit armed revolt, I’ll never know.

The movie’s interesting for a few reasons. Firstly, it’s atrocious. From the incompetent direction–the Strause brothers apparently couldn’t handle a Doublemint commercial–to the cheap CG (maybe the worst I’ve seen in a theatrical release in years) to the totally unknown cast (picked from the finest Canadian used car dealership advertisements, I’m sure) to the script. But the script brings up the second point (but does not provide a convenient paragraph break apparently).

The script owes more to early B-movies than it does to either of the film series or anything else. It’s like a cheapie from 1938, complete with contrived story lines for a number of people (ex-con, soldier returning, teen in love). Instead of being in a bus depot, however, these people are in a small town–well, not so small, the aerial shot reveals its quite large. When Requiem started, I figured–given the cast of idiot teenagers–it was going to turn the franchise into a slasher movie. Unfortunately, it does not (the slasher take would be a lot more interesting). Instead, it’s scene after endless scene of these idiotic people leading their contrived, TV movie lives. As far as I can tell, there probably isn’t even the payoff of watching the aliens eat these morons.

And that sentence brings me to my final point (I can’t waste time doing a paragraph about the music). It’s boring. It’s a movie called Aliens vs. Predator and it’s boring. Nothing happens. There’s one Predator. Whoop-de-doo. They show the Predator planet, which should have been interesting, but instead is certainly not. The aliens never invade, which is dumb. Here they’re afraid of the light too, which makes no sense because they don’t have eyes. The Predator has this computer and it literally has a function for everything he could need.

The first movie’s no good, but it’s fun and cheaply imaginative. This one is putrid garbage of an inconceivable level. I think I kept it playing because I couldn’t believe someone would greenlight a movie called Aliens vs. Predator where most of the story plays like a soap.

Alien vs. Predator (2004, Paul W.S. Anderson), the director’s cut

Now, who exactly thought a film entitled Alien vs. Predator could be good? I mean… just from the title, it’s obvious there’s a fairly low potential for the film. As such, Alien vs. Predator is fine. It’s wholly watchable. It’s stupid and there are some enormous plot holes–not just in the established Alien or Predator canon, but in what the film itself has already established–but it’s called Alien vs. Predator. Any film with “vs.” in the title is automatically exempt from certain critical reasoning. Those plot holes in Alien vs. Predator shouldn’t bother anyone because the point of the film is not the understand it, rather to see it. I’ve seen Alien vs. Predator before (there was a review up on The Stop Button over a year ago, in the pre-archive) and when I was actually able to rent the monumental director’s cut (it adds eight minutes and I noticed maybe one new scene, but it isn’t like I had the film committed to memory).

In a few ways, Alien vs. Predator reminded me of Superman Returns, as I got to see some things I didn’t expect. Had any filmmaker of any merit made another Alien sequel or another Predator sequel, he or she would never have glazed on some of Alien vs. Predator’s enjoyable stupidity. No one with any artistic ability would ever have an Alien Queen chasing someone like a dinosaur out of Jurassic Park (or so visibly lift the opening to Jurassic Park for another über-mainstream film), but that lack of creativity is Paul W.S. Anderson’s strongest filmmaking virtue. Anderson makes a pseudo-scientific argument, which struck me as a goof on some film I can’t quite remember, some occasionally witty dialogue, a handful of lame characters (played, usually, by good actors), and let loose. The result was a film with some decent action (though the Alien and Predator fights could have been more dynamic) and some decent visuals. Anderson litters the film with references to the other Alien and Predator films, but he never really has any good money shots. It might be–this example being the only significant inconsistency I couldn’t let go–because the Predators are all short. They’re short and stocky and they don’t look right. They were designed to be lean and tall and Anderson doesn’t redesign the look in a way not to make them look like runts. Interestingly, the guy who played all the Predator roles was 7’1”, so Anderson did something wrong.

With the casting, however, Anderson did all right. Lance Henriksen is boring in his glorified cameo and Sanaa Latham is only acceptable when she’s got speaking actors to act off, but otherwise there’s some decent performances. Maybe I’m being a little rough on Latham, but she spends the last twenty minutes or so with no one to talk to and it messes up her performance, making Alien vs. Predator, for the first time, seem like something not even the actors could take seriously. Raoul Bova, Ewen Bremner, and Tommy Flanagan are all good, with Bremner and Flanagan even really acting in their scenes together.

I just realized how long this post is getting, but Alien vs. Predator is one of the more known films I’ve written up (I can always easily rant on a discussed topic). I’m unable to get over the negative response to this film. If you want a good movie, you don’t see one called Alien vs. Predator–nothing with a title like this one has any promise of being good. Unfortunately, I imagine the Alien vs. Predator movie the fans “wanted” would be even worse.