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3
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9 |
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10
= Highest Rating |
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Guest
Review by Rod
Barnett |
The
year is 2004 and billionaire industrialist Charles Bishop Weyland
(Lance Henriksen) assembles a team of experts to travel to one
of the most desolate places on Earth — Antarctica. One of Weyland's
orbiting satellites has spotted a mysterious heat bloom below
the ice that appears to be a huge buried pyramid. Cold weather
survival expert and guide Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan) warns that
more prep time is needed but goes along anyway. The team arrives
at the site to discover a large tunnel has been drilled down
to the pyramid literally overnight. Taking this remarkable (and
humanly impossible) wrinkle in stride they descend to the building
and begin their exploration. The structure seems to have Egyptian,
Mayan and Cambodian architectural elements along with ancient
hieroglyphic writings of each culture carved on the walls. Amazingly
the team's archeologists are able to translate these writings
in under a minute, telling us that only "the chosen"
can enter: then they locate a creepy "sacrificial chamber"
inside. Meanwhile, entry to the place has triggered the release
from storage of a Queen Alien deep in the bowels of the complex,
who is then mechanically forced to start laying eggs. On the
surface three Predators land, wipe out the people left in the
base camp and make their way toward the pyramid. By this time
the audience is aware that this spot is used to breed the serpent-like
Aliens for the Predator race to hunt as a rite of passage. Of
course, since neither creature speaks in the movie we're treated
to an archeologist translating this information instantaneously
from the walls and floor as we are given a pretty CGI visualization
of the history of the human race. It turns out we owe our Earthly
civilizations to the Predators and their occasional out-of-hand
battles with the Aliens are why some early advanced cultures
disappeared. Yeah... right! Anyway, a few of the team
are trapped in the sacrificial chamber, a bunch of eggs are
dropped in and 20 minutes later we have full grown Aliens running
around killing everything in sight. But that's not exciting
enough! Every 10 minutes the interior of the pyramid rearranges
itself, turning the place into a maze that separates the ill-defined
characters into small, easy to slaughter groups. Things progress
as you would expect (only more poorly edited) until the obvious
lone surviving human is standing beside a Predator fighting
off the hoards of nasty Aliens.
It's always nice to see Lance Henriksen and
the first battle between the two titular monsters is very well
done, but that's all the good I can find in the thing. It's
hard to know where to start complaining about this mess. Alien
Vs. Predator has to go down as one of the biggest missed
opportunities in genre history. Years ago, when the first comic
book stories crossing these two franchises appeared, fans were
presented with several great tales any one of which could have
been the basis of a good movie. All the producers had to do
was pick one and translate it to the big screen. Instead they
screwed around wasting money for nearly a decade and then turned
the project over to one of the world's least talented genre
filmmakers. Lots of disappointed fans have claimed that the
decision to secure a PG-13 rating was the death knell for AVP,
but I disagree — the fatal misstep was hiring Paul W. S. Anderson.
I can't say that Anderson is a complete hack, as I enjoyed Resident
Evil and Soldier was almost
OK, but his track record doesn't inspire confidence. When I
learned he would be writing and directing this film I held out
hope that his batting average would improve but it certainly
doesn't. I'm sure it would be possible to make a dumber, more
insulting movie with these iconic monsters but I just don't
want to imagine it. When I can think of a smarter way to tell
a film's story while I'm watching it, someone has really
screwed up. Of course, my ideas would have necessitated slowing
the movie's pace to build some much needed suspense and fleshing
out the characters to more than paper-thin stereotypes. I can
only assume that this kind of thing never even crossed Anderson's
mind. After all — everyone knew this sucker was a guaranteed
hit no matter what went on screen so quality was beside the
point. I can almost hear the pitch meeting now... "All
we need is the set-up and this thing will write itself!"
The mistakes in the film are epic in their
stupidity and more numerous than I have room to list, but they
all stem from a problem that's beginning to permeate Hollywood
films: the use of video games as a template for telling stories.
Even though a good movie based on a video game is about as rare
as a diamond in a toilet bowl, I'm not against the idea in principle.
Hell, movies have been based on everything from the Great American
Novel to a drunken phrase scrawled on a cocktail napkin — with
no way to predict eventual quality. But by using the structure
of a game as how the story is told you run into a storytelling
problem. In a video game, everything is happening now
with no real plot; simply a series of increasingly difficult
tasks that must be overcome to survive. AVP
is a good demonstration of the mistake of adapting this gaming
approach and I'll give an example to illustrate. Anyone that
has seen the Alien films knows that it takes several days to
go from a face-hugger to a full grown creature. AVP
has no time to for this cycle. Here the entire process is shortened
down to about 15 minutes so that we can move on to the next
stage of danger without slowing down. It feels like Anderson
expended all his patience in the poorly written set-up and all
he can think to do it speed up everything to keep us from realizing
he can't be bothered to play by the rules. Another problem is
that it's impossible to give a damn about anything that happens
in the film because we don't care about any of the characters.
In a game the characters are just icons on a screen acting out
our choices. They need no emotional investment because they
are simply stand-ins for the player; in a film we have to be
made to identify with the people we're watching. I think we're
seeing the first generation of filmmakers using video games
as the their model for action movies. They're making movement,
regardless of context, the driving force of a medium that demands
much more. This kind of anti-story movie making is showing up
a lot lately, with Van
Helsing being another 2004 example of this 'screw logic
— bring on the monsters and explosions' approach. It's as if
the critics on SCTV's Farm Film Report suddenly started
green-lighting scripts! Good movies require a bit more than
just pretty pictures of fast moving things that 'blow up good',
but that seems to be the way to big box office these days. This
saddens me since I can think of few things more boring than
watching someone else play a video game (no matter how cool
the objects look fighting each other). In the DVD commentary
Anderson says that he's watched ALIENS more than 100 times but
he seems to have missed the vital lesson of developing characters
with whom we can sympathize. When most of the characters in
Aliens die it's much more than
a cool action moment — it's gut wrenching. Because we care about
them, Cameron's film can be watched 100 times and enjoyed but
in AVP the characters are strictly
ciphers and their deaths are yawns. I sure can't imagine anyone
watching this sucker 100 times.
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Regardless,
there are plenty of folks out there that liked this movie and
for them Fox's DVD presentation is excellent. The 2.35:1 anamorphic
widescreen picture looks beautiful, showing off the good cinematography
and detailed sets very well. The 5.1 soundtrack is quite active
and vibrant, adding atmosphere to some otherwise flat scenes.
The disc sports a nice collection of extras including two commentary
tracks. The first is with Andersen, Henriksen and Lathan while
the second has the film's special effects wizards detail the hows
& whys of the creature work and visual effects. The director/actor
track is interesting but could have been summed up in about 20
minutes, leaving us without having to listen to Lance take a phone
call from his daughter and Sanaa eating her lunch. There's an
alternate opening scene that flashes to the Antarctic location
in 1904 for a brief bit of Alien/Predator tease that can be watched
as part of the film by choosing "'Play Extended Version".
It's pointless and was rightly omitted as were the three Deleted
Scenes that are offered. All three are really just longer versions
of scenes still in the movie offering nothing significant. The
item listed as AVP Promo is a 23-minute long making-of
piece that provides all the usual promotional fluff used to entice
potential ticket buyers. The neatest extra is a gallery of covers
from the various Alien Vs. Predator comic books of years
past, which served only to remind me how much better their stories
were in comparison. Finishing off the extras menu are promos for
Super Bowl XXXIX and the new TV series American Dad. I'm
still trying to figure out why these are on here wasting valuable
space. There's also some DVD-ROM stuff on the disc as well but
I didn't bother to look it over.
I guess for undemanding viewers this film can
make for an entertaining, mindless evening but if you're hoping
for a return to the glory days of these monsters you'll likely
feel disappointed. Let's hope they don't make the threatened sequel.
2/14/05 |
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