29 December, 2007
Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem
Arnold versus Aliens versus Predator: Requiem (AvAvP:R)
Alright, I make no apologies for the fact that I am a huge fan of both the Alien movies (1-3, with 4 having its moments but nowhere near the quality of the previous installments) and the Predator movies, with Predator 1 being one of the best hardcore macho action pictures ever made.
I was skeptical after the first AvP, which I declined to see in theaters (despite the fact that I'd been waiting for it for years) on account of hearing a little of the plot which is as follows: Predators enslaved early humans and built the pyramids to hunt aliens in on Earth, one of them happening to be UNDERNEATH THE ICE of Antarctica--this probably being the single most unnecessary contrivance ever contrived, and a decision that single-handedly bitchslapped the intelligence of anyone with a scrap of education on the history of human civilization and geological science, in addition to serving up a whopping platter of Disrespect to those ancient cultures. Paul Anderson must have thought that injecting this Chariots of the Gods tripe into an alien and predator film was a freaking BRILLIANT creative move that would make people go "whoa".
Well instead of that, it was the worst thing I have ever seen.
Until now.
So when I heard AvP:R came out, the first question I asked was: Does it take it upon itself to not only pencil in a bunch of half-assed characters with dialog that sounds like ass, and, not being satisfied with the soulless big studio smearing of two beloved franchises by not investing in characters you care about, proceed to take it upon itself to trash the very roots of human civilization and think I'm going to buy it?
As it happens, only the first part. But as it happens, it did something worse.
So there I was tonight, nothing really to do, staring ahead at a very long weekend, cruising the internet, and I happened across a promotional ad for AvP:R featuring the technomask-clad mug of a badass-looking Predator looking like he was going to kick some serious ass. I took a long, deep look into those menacing eyeplates, and remembered my fond regard for the utterly awesome first Predator movie, and I couldn't help myself. If the movie gave the Predator a decent treatment, I could at least have the enjoyment of seeing one of sci-fi's most tough, smart and interesting baddies on the big screen for the first time.
So my nostalgia won me over, and I hesitatingly went forth into the subzero night, knowing not what lay ahead.
So was it good?
Basically, the ass-raping of the alien and predator franchises continues unabated, only worse.
How, oh how, did we get from Predator and Aliens, to this contemptible fodder?
It started out with a mixture of promising and stupid that mixed together to finally form a heady brew of "meh" that managed to keep me thinking I had not made a mistake (at least for a while). It starts with the predalien hybrid (What a stupid gimmick--it was the worst part of the games) bursting out of the dead predator body aboard the pred spaceship just like at the end of the first movie. Okay, so it's a continuation of the Paul Anderson debacle. Super. I almost walked out. But then, we see the surviving predators from the first movie. One of them is in the trophy room, skinning an alien head from the hunt. That's kind of cool. But...then we see that the predalien chestburster has become a full grown monster predalien within a matter of seconds, and it kills the predator. WTF?
One of the other predators spots it and fires its plasma caster at the predalien. This punctures a hole in the hull of their ship which is still leaving Earth orbit, and it plummets back, crashlanding in Colorado. By this time, the idea that 1) The predators are so inept and apparently ignorant of the species they have spent generations hunting that they don't bother to check their fallen comrade for infestation when they take off and 2) they both a) have a flimsy-ass spaceship and b) are too stupid not to go firing plasma bolts willy nilly at their own hull while in deep space, all made me start rising out of my chair again.
But then, a beacon of hope.
We see the Predator homeworld for the first time, and it's pretty awesome. First there's a shot of the planet from orbit. It looks desolate in a cool way, and is circled by asteroids. Then we see a Predator city, and they have neat, predator-looking buildings under the glow of an alien sun. In one of the buildings, looking like they are kind of a fortress-like cubicle for a single occupant, there sits a lone predator who checks out an alarm blaring on one of his sweet-looking interfaces. As it happens, predators apparently have a 3-D telescopic zoom camera that enables him to check to see WTF is up on Earth light years away. He gets transmissions from the super high-tech visors of the preds on the doomed spaceship before it crashes. He sees everything go to hell, sees the Predalien in all its glory, sees the ship crash back to Earth. A little much. But things get better: Much agitated grunting and snarling ensues. The predator gets up from his predator throne, goes to his Wall o' Weapons and starts grabbing nasty-looking bladed things, whips, and plasmacasters, straps 'em on, then hops into his personal ship and blasts off into space to set things straight and mop up the mess left by that bunch of young inexperienced dumbasses that just got themselves killed. You could almost hear him say in Predator-speak:
"I'm getting too old for this shit."
(I might have really laughed if they had that subtitle. Would've been a nice homage to Danny Glover from Predator 2)
At this point, I couldn't help but think "Damn, maybe there's a character worth rooting for in this movie after all".
You get the impression that this Predator would be nicknamed "THE CLEANER" in whatever that translates into in Predator click-speak. So now maybe I could write off the first batch of preds as a bunch of incompetent redneck yokels of Predator society off on a reckless hunting party, but THIS guy is the one that knows what's up, will uphold the Predator Code of cold and calculating intelligence, yet also daring and toughness set forth in previous Predator films.
Then, we go back to Earth. We see the predator ship crash-land. Facehuggers that had been kept in stasis get out, and commence doing what facehuggers do best starting with a fatally curious father-8-year old son hunting party.
Now it's time to visit the Colorado town where the shit is gonna hit the fan. Will there be decent humans to care about? Well, let's see....
Instead of a close-knit team of ex-military mercenaries on a black ops mission against ruthless guerrillas in the notoriously inhospitable jungles of Central America ("Makes Cambodia look like Kansas") with Carl Weathers, Arnie, Bill Duke and 'Nam vet/wrestler/state governor Ventura, et al. delivering a hell of a performance at their most tobacco-spittin' macho badass, or a likeable platoon of tough colonial marines sent into the belly of the beast with one of the best female protagonists of our time, we get...
Dawson's Creek Squad.
And instead of setting the film in f-ing SPACE like it should be, we get Crested Ridge, Colorado, small town apple-pie baking America.
The hero of the film is a high school pizza delivery boy. WTF?!?
So in the tortuous movie setup, which is actually serviceable as an episode of Beverly Hills: 90210, we find out Pizza boy has a crush on Blondie McSweetass from school, but oh no, she has this meanie boyfriend.
So after a trade-off of juvenille sparring "Now I know who ordered the pizza with extra sausage" Ooooooh nice one. Maybe funny in a proper setting. Not in a f-ing Alien/Predator movie! The meanie boyfriend then proceeds to throw Pizza Guy's keys into the sewer drain. Oh my god! Oh heavens, o' mercy! Angels and Ministers of Grace, Defend Us!
Compare that conflict between characters to the scene in Predator where they're sneaking up on the guerilla base, and then Duke appearing out of nowhere to tell CIA agent Weathers in a menacing whisper "I don't care who you are back in the world. You blow our position one more time, I'll bleed ya, real quiet, leave ya here..."
THAT is how you do conflict dialog.
So anyway, I was thinking about leaving again, but then the Predator finally arrives, with the landing capsule disengaging from the ship and streaking meteor-like into our atmosphere just like in the first movie. I thought--alright that was pretty cool. Let's see what happens.
Well, what happened was suckage. The Lone Wolf predator was pretty cool, and the only character worth caring about. He has one neat fight scene at the beginning due to the use of some novel new pred-tech, but the directors, billed as "The Brothers Strausse", come from the school of "shaky-blurry-can't-tell-what-the-hell-is-going-on-in-all-this-crazy-motion-and-darkness" action-scene filmmaking. All sound and fury, signifying nothing. It sucked. Other than that, the Lone Wolf gets maybe 15 minutes of real screen time. There was one iconic scene of the predator being wounded, and then getting out his field med-kit to heal himself in painful fashion, but it was a weak scene compared to the predator Extreme First Aid of the first two pred films. The best character in the movie, and his action scenes are with a few exceptions nearly unwatchable, and his hunting/stalking scenes kept to a minimum and robbing me of screentime for the only character I cared about.
The only other part of the story where I perked up a little was when a National Guard brigade shows up, hoping for some real soldier vs. monster action. There was a little, but not nearly enough.
Most of the movie involves Dawson's Creek gang running through dark tunnels, etc. To be fair, there is one scene involving a massive predator throwing star that misses its intended alien target and introduces the abdomen of an unexpected member of Dawson's Creek gang to the wall behind them that was pretty awesome. The awesomeness continues with the predator killing yet another Dawson's Creeker via alien acid blood through sheer callous disinterest in what would happen to his face if the alien's head above him exploded. At least there's no "Predators working with the humans" in this one.
Then, there's what I call The Dealbreaker.
To show just how badass he can be with his R rating, the scriptwriter has a subplot involving the predalien in which it can, like facehuggers, implant human hosts. The twist is that it can implant multiple aliens, but it can only do so on pregnant mothers. The part where the predalien gets into the maternity ward is not "badass". It's just mean and sickening, even for me, who doesn't mind darkness in movies if there is a good point to it. There is not any good point here. It's sadism for sadism's sake, and the gory and graphic scenes involving screaming pregnant women on hospital beds is soulless and a terrible affront to our most primal evolutionary instincts.
A husband and wife walked out of the theater after this, with the woman looking severely distressed. I couldn't blame her a single bit. It was heartbreaking to see that, and I was utterly disgusted.
I spit on AvP:R. It's a heartless ruination of two of my favorite sci-fi movies. It had a few cool scenes with the Predator, sure, but there's no saving a movie with a script that is so inhuman and clueless as to what constitutes acceptable.
I will cap this review off with a hearty "F*** YOU!" to the bluetooth-wearing, suit-and-tie asshats at Fox that greenlighted this horrendous version of the alien and predator sagas, and forced the Dawson's Creek Gang, Anytown America setting on us, and a "F*** YOU!" to the scriptwriter assclown who pulled off the impossible: A story so bad and grotesque that AvP1 actually looks good in comparison. It may have spat on ancient civilization in a lame attempt at creativity, but at least it didn't feature graphic matricide/infanticide just for the sake of being "edgy".
"Requiem" indeed. I hope this movie rots in hell. I'm going to watch the first Predator again to remind me of what an actually good action movie is and rinse out the horrible taste AvP:R left me with.
To paraphrase Billy Madison:
AvP:R is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever seen. At no point in this rambling, incoherent movie was there even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this theater is now dumber for having seen it. I award you NO RATING (other than a 10 on my contempt-o-meter) and may God have mercy on your soul.
Alright, I make no apologies for the fact that I am a huge fan of both the Alien movies (1-3, with 4 having its moments but nowhere near the quality of the previous installments) and the Predator movies, with Predator 1 being one of the best hardcore macho action pictures ever made.
I was skeptical after the first AvP, which I declined to see in theaters (despite the fact that I'd been waiting for it for years) on account of hearing a little of the plot which is as follows: Predators enslaved early humans and built the pyramids to hunt aliens in on Earth, one of them happening to be UNDERNEATH THE ICE of Antarctica--this probably being the single most unnecessary contrivance ever contrived, and a decision that single-handedly bitchslapped the intelligence of anyone with a scrap of education on the history of human civilization and geological science, in addition to serving up a whopping platter of Disrespect to those ancient cultures. Paul Anderson must have thought that injecting this Chariots of the Gods tripe into an alien and predator film was a freaking BRILLIANT creative move that would make people go "whoa".
Well instead of that, it was the worst thing I have ever seen.
Until now.
So when I heard AvP:R came out, the first question I asked was: Does it take it upon itself to not only pencil in a bunch of half-assed characters with dialog that sounds like ass, and, not being satisfied with the soulless big studio smearing of two beloved franchises by not investing in characters you care about, proceed to take it upon itself to trash the very roots of human civilization and think I'm going to buy it?
As it happens, only the first part. But as it happens, it did something worse.
So there I was tonight, nothing really to do, staring ahead at a very long weekend, cruising the internet, and I happened across a promotional ad for AvP:R featuring the technomask-clad mug of a badass-looking Predator looking like he was going to kick some serious ass. I took a long, deep look into those menacing eyeplates, and remembered my fond regard for the utterly awesome first Predator movie, and I couldn't help myself. If the movie gave the Predator a decent treatment, I could at least have the enjoyment of seeing one of sci-fi's most tough, smart and interesting baddies on the big screen for the first time.
So my nostalgia won me over, and I hesitatingly went forth into the subzero night, knowing not what lay ahead.
So was it good?
Basically, the ass-raping of the alien and predator franchises continues unabated, only worse.
How, oh how, did we get from Predator and Aliens, to this contemptible fodder?
It started out with a mixture of promising and stupid that mixed together to finally form a heady brew of "meh" that managed to keep me thinking I had not made a mistake (at least for a while). It starts with the predalien hybrid (What a stupid gimmick--it was the worst part of the games) bursting out of the dead predator body aboard the pred spaceship just like at the end of the first movie. Okay, so it's a continuation of the Paul Anderson debacle. Super. I almost walked out. But then, we see the surviving predators from the first movie. One of them is in the trophy room, skinning an alien head from the hunt. That's kind of cool. But...then we see that the predalien chestburster has become a full grown monster predalien within a matter of seconds, and it kills the predator. WTF?
One of the other predators spots it and fires its plasma caster at the predalien. This punctures a hole in the hull of their ship which is still leaving Earth orbit, and it plummets back, crashlanding in Colorado. By this time, the idea that 1) The predators are so inept and apparently ignorant of the species they have spent generations hunting that they don't bother to check their fallen comrade for infestation when they take off and 2) they both a) have a flimsy-ass spaceship and b) are too stupid not to go firing plasma bolts willy nilly at their own hull while in deep space, all made me start rising out of my chair again.
But then, a beacon of hope.
We see the Predator homeworld for the first time, and it's pretty awesome. First there's a shot of the planet from orbit. It looks desolate in a cool way, and is circled by asteroids. Then we see a Predator city, and they have neat, predator-looking buildings under the glow of an alien sun. In one of the buildings, looking like they are kind of a fortress-like cubicle for a single occupant, there sits a lone predator who checks out an alarm blaring on one of his sweet-looking interfaces. As it happens, predators apparently have a 3-D telescopic zoom camera that enables him to check to see WTF is up on Earth light years away. He gets transmissions from the super high-tech visors of the preds on the doomed spaceship before it crashes. He sees everything go to hell, sees the Predalien in all its glory, sees the ship crash back to Earth. A little much. But things get better: Much agitated grunting and snarling ensues. The predator gets up from his predator throne, goes to his Wall o' Weapons and starts grabbing nasty-looking bladed things, whips, and plasmacasters, straps 'em on, then hops into his personal ship and blasts off into space to set things straight and mop up the mess left by that bunch of young inexperienced dumbasses that just got themselves killed. You could almost hear him say in Predator-speak:
"I'm getting too old for this shit."
(I might have really laughed if they had that subtitle. Would've been a nice homage to Danny Glover from Predator 2)
At this point, I couldn't help but think "Damn, maybe there's a character worth rooting for in this movie after all".
You get the impression that this Predator would be nicknamed "THE CLEANER" in whatever that translates into in Predator click-speak. So now maybe I could write off the first batch of preds as a bunch of incompetent redneck yokels of Predator society off on a reckless hunting party, but THIS guy is the one that knows what's up, will uphold the Predator Code of cold and calculating intelligence, yet also daring and toughness set forth in previous Predator films.
Then, we go back to Earth. We see the predator ship crash-land. Facehuggers that had been kept in stasis get out, and commence doing what facehuggers do best starting with a fatally curious father-8-year old son hunting party.
Now it's time to visit the Colorado town where the shit is gonna hit the fan. Will there be decent humans to care about? Well, let's see....
Instead of a close-knit team of ex-military mercenaries on a black ops mission against ruthless guerrillas in the notoriously inhospitable jungles of Central America ("Makes Cambodia look like Kansas") with Carl Weathers, Arnie, Bill Duke and 'Nam vet/wrestler/state governor Ventura, et al. delivering a hell of a performance at their most tobacco-spittin' macho badass, or a likeable platoon of tough colonial marines sent into the belly of the beast with one of the best female protagonists of our time, we get...
Dawson's Creek Squad.
And instead of setting the film in f-ing SPACE like it should be, we get Crested Ridge, Colorado, small town apple-pie baking America.
The hero of the film is a high school pizza delivery boy. WTF?!?
So in the tortuous movie setup, which is actually serviceable as an episode of Beverly Hills: 90210, we find out Pizza boy has a crush on Blondie McSweetass from school, but oh no, she has this meanie boyfriend.
So after a trade-off of juvenille sparring "Now I know who ordered the pizza with extra sausage" Ooooooh nice one. Maybe funny in a proper setting. Not in a f-ing Alien/Predator movie! The meanie boyfriend then proceeds to throw Pizza Guy's keys into the sewer drain. Oh my god! Oh heavens, o' mercy! Angels and Ministers of Grace, Defend Us!
Compare that conflict between characters to the scene in Predator where they're sneaking up on the guerilla base, and then Duke appearing out of nowhere to tell CIA agent Weathers in a menacing whisper "I don't care who you are back in the world. You blow our position one more time, I'll bleed ya, real quiet, leave ya here..."
THAT is how you do conflict dialog.
So anyway, I was thinking about leaving again, but then the Predator finally arrives, with the landing capsule disengaging from the ship and streaking meteor-like into our atmosphere just like in the first movie. I thought--alright that was pretty cool. Let's see what happens.
Well, what happened was suckage. The Lone Wolf predator was pretty cool, and the only character worth caring about. He has one neat fight scene at the beginning due to the use of some novel new pred-tech, but the directors, billed as "The Brothers Strausse", come from the school of "shaky-blurry-can't-tell-what-the-hell-is-going-on-in-all-this-crazy-motion-and-darkness" action-scene filmmaking. All sound and fury, signifying nothing. It sucked. Other than that, the Lone Wolf gets maybe 15 minutes of real screen time. There was one iconic scene of the predator being wounded, and then getting out his field med-kit to heal himself in painful fashion, but it was a weak scene compared to the predator Extreme First Aid of the first two pred films. The best character in the movie, and his action scenes are with a few exceptions nearly unwatchable, and his hunting/stalking scenes kept to a minimum and robbing me of screentime for the only character I cared about.
The only other part of the story where I perked up a little was when a National Guard brigade shows up, hoping for some real soldier vs. monster action. There was a little, but not nearly enough.
Most of the movie involves Dawson's Creek gang running through dark tunnels, etc. To be fair, there is one scene involving a massive predator throwing star that misses its intended alien target and introduces the abdomen of an unexpected member of Dawson's Creek gang to the wall behind them that was pretty awesome. The awesomeness continues with the predator killing yet another Dawson's Creeker via alien acid blood through sheer callous disinterest in what would happen to his face if the alien's head above him exploded. At least there's no "Predators working with the humans" in this one.
Then, there's what I call The Dealbreaker.
To show just how badass he can be with his R rating, the scriptwriter has a subplot involving the predalien in which it can, like facehuggers, implant human hosts. The twist is that it can implant multiple aliens, but it can only do so on pregnant mothers. The part where the predalien gets into the maternity ward is not "badass". It's just mean and sickening, even for me, who doesn't mind darkness in movies if there is a good point to it. There is not any good point here. It's sadism for sadism's sake, and the gory and graphic scenes involving screaming pregnant women on hospital beds is soulless and a terrible affront to our most primal evolutionary instincts.
A husband and wife walked out of the theater after this, with the woman looking severely distressed. I couldn't blame her a single bit. It was heartbreaking to see that, and I was utterly disgusted.
I spit on AvP:R. It's a heartless ruination of two of my favorite sci-fi movies. It had a few cool scenes with the Predator, sure, but there's no saving a movie with a script that is so inhuman and clueless as to what constitutes acceptable.
I will cap this review off with a hearty "F*** YOU!" to the bluetooth-wearing, suit-and-tie asshats at Fox that greenlighted this horrendous version of the alien and predator sagas, and forced the Dawson's Creek Gang, Anytown America setting on us, and a "F*** YOU!" to the scriptwriter assclown who pulled off the impossible: A story so bad and grotesque that AvP1 actually looks good in comparison. It may have spat on ancient civilization in a lame attempt at creativity, but at least it didn't feature graphic matricide/infanticide just for the sake of being "edgy".
"Requiem" indeed. I hope this movie rots in hell. I'm going to watch the first Predator again to remind me of what an actually good action movie is and rinse out the horrible taste AvP:R left me with.
To paraphrase Billy Madison:
AvP:R is one of the most insanely idiotic things I have ever seen. At no point in this rambling, incoherent movie was there even close to anything that could be considered a rational thought. Everyone in this theater is now dumber for having seen it. I award you NO RATING (other than a 10 on my contempt-o-meter) and may God have mercy on your soul.
27 December, 2007
The Golden Compass
I have to admit that my interest in this movie was piqued due to all the supposed religious controversy surrounding the movie. However, after seeing The Golden Compass, it became clear to me that all the controversy in the world wouldn't be enough to save this sorry mess. The story was muddled, plodding, and nonsensical. Even the controversy was completely overblown. Sure, the ruling group in the film (the Magisterium) uses the term "heresy", but that's about the extent of the commonality with religion that I was able to pick out. (And seriously, how often do churches use the term "heresy" anymore?) To be honest, I question whether all the controversy was drummed up on purpose to try to generate interest in an ultimately disappointing and poorly produced movie.Apparently, lots of churches in the United States have been sending out letters to their congregations urging them to boycott this movie. I think it would have been much more effective to do nothing, because then the movie would be judged on its own (rather lacking) merits, rather than some over-hyped, virtually non-existent "controversial religious themes".
My rating: Slaughtered. Trust me - The Lord of the Rings slaughters this movie.
