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"This is like finding Moses' DVD collection!"
I've never liked AVP: Alien vs. Predator. I tried to open my heart for this review. There are people who like this movie, James Cameron said it was the third best Alien film. At best it is like a bad version of Event Horizon.
Even as a kid in 2004, I never found this concept all that terribly exciting. There's a whole cadre of nerds who read the Alien vs. Predator comics and played the video games, I never knew about any of that stuff. Dark Horse has an entire genre of wacky media crossovers, such as RoboCop vs. Terminator, Green Lantern vs. Alien, and of course, we cannot forget Archie vs. Predator. These sound like fun novelties, they're not for me, but I can take some comfort knowing somewhere out there exists Freddy vs. Jason vs. Ash. However, let us be honest, this is not the most serious or dignified artform.
If you really think about it, Aliens fighting Predators doesn't really work in terms of wrestling booking. The draw is two iconic film monsters fighting it out. The problem is that these monsters are very good... at killing humans. This is not like the classic Toho monster crossovers, say King Kong vs. Godzilla, where it's two giants smashing up a miniature model of Atami Castle. A kaiju wrestling match is classic. Aliens and Predators are two monsters whose primary attack is stealth ambushes. Even the names are redundant, it's a species of alien predators fighting a different species of alien predators. Yeah, they could be very well-matched on paper, but does that make a good show? It is like watching the Jets and the Broncos try to play their game last month, two stout defenses and bad offenses, so nobody could do anything. Close game, bad match.
About forty-five minutes into AVP, Paul W. S. Anderson stages the big Alien vs. Predator fight, and... it is okay, I guess? This is why we're here, it does complete the assignment. I'll give Anderson credit that the creature work still looks decent twenty years later. There's plenty of practical effects and guys in suits and real sets. Unfortunately, I think the Predators look way too bulky as played by Ian Whyte. They're like Kane Hodder's Jason as a fully-rectangular slab of meat. You really miss the physicality that Kevin Peter Hall gave the first two movies. The Predators lost the ability to speak, so that's yet more personality removed. And the sets are endless repetitive poorly-lit dark gray corridors.
I don't think this fight scene is the greatest thing put to film. But it does do the thing, at least. The problem is that there's a lot of uninteresting movie around it.
20th Century Fox rushed Alien vs. Predator into production following the surprise smash hit of 2003, Freddy vs. Jason. That also was a fundamentally bad idea for a fight scene, but at least that movie was smart enough to know it was trash and so leaned 100% into comedy. The alien fight is not aiming for vast melodrama or anything, but it is a much less fun movie. One major flaw in Alien vs. Predator is just a lack of character actors. There's Ewen Bremner at least. But it is a cast full of serious people lacking much depth to them. Our protagonist Lex Woods (Sanaa Lathan) is good enough as an action star, but she really needs bigger personalities around her, such as Ripley got in all her movies. Or that filled the screen in the Predator movies. Where's Bill Paxton or Jessie Ventura or Brad Dourif? Instead we get Raoul Bova, who plays a very handsome yet very dull Italian archaeologist guy.
AVP is set in modern times, I guess as a nod to the Predator setting, but the plot has bigger roots in the greater Alien mythology. Lance Henriksen plays Charles Bishop Weyland, the CEO of the early Weyland Corporation, a reference to the android Bishop in Aliens. He's dying of cancer and wishes to achieve one great final act in his last days. That final act being an investigation a pyramid from an ancient human-alien culture buried thousands of feet under the Southern Ocean ice. (Please hold your objections, I got you.)
There is an attempt at first to make this movie concerned with the threat of the cold and the Antarctic. Lex is an explorer here to lead the team and make sure nobody freezes to death or do anything stupid. But by the halfway point AVP forgets that Antarctica is even cold. At the end, Lex is left wearing only a fleece in the middle of winter and never shivers. Nobody's breath is visible. I don't know why they bothered with the location therefore other than to be an extensive reference to Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness, a novella about discovering an ancient civilization in the ice. Turns out the Predators raised humanity to be hosts for the xenomorphs.
You'll also notice also that this is the plot of Prometheus, supposedly the more serious Alien franchise reboot, which is interesting. We'll get to that in a few days.
Alien vs. Predator is a very dumb movie but not in the fun ways of being goofy and exploitative. (It is PG-13 as hell.) Instead Anderson's script is full of preposterously bad ideas of history, ones that even the ancient aliens guys would probably groan at. Such as the notion that there was a civilization in the Antarctic when that region of the world has been uninhabitable by humans all throughout our species' short history. Then there's the pyramid design, which the script tells us incorporates features from Ancient Egyptian, Mesoamerican, and Cambodian cultures, the implication being that this is the common origin point of all three people, even with a shared origin language. Now I'm sure linguists are rolling in their aisles in objections, but even in terms of timeline this makes no sense. The Egyptians built their pyramids thousands of years before even the earliest verses of the Bible. The earliest Mesoamerican culture begins thousands of years later, and the Khmer culture began a thousand years after that. Plus this movie never decides if it is talking about Mayan or Aztec cultures, which would mean the timeline of alien successor states is between 2600 BC and 1600 AD. These civilizations share nothing in common except that they built monuments in a pyramid-shape, which is not the most sophisticated construction. You're just building upwards by securing most of the mass at the bottom, like how a child makes a sandcastle. Why were Mesopotamian ziggurats excluded? Why leave out the mounds of North America? You're telling me San Francisco didn't come from the South Pole too??
So let us talk about Erich von Däniken and Chariots of the Gods? and all this psuedohistory and pseudo-archaeology. There's an entire system of alternate narratives of the human story coming out of the Sixties and Seventies. This has the air of a kind of alien religion, where instead of the Abrahamic God creating our humanity and giving us knowledge, there's extraterrestrials. Believe whatever you want to believe, if you worship aliens, I do not begrudge you. There's darker implications though when this presents itself as "history". A lot of this gets wrapped up in White Supremacists theories, it is only a hop and skip to truly nasty Aryan Thule culture nonsense. And even then, the very assumption that "primitive cultures" could not be capable of major works of monumental architecture has a very paternalistic bent to it: "the aliens had to colonize apes to make us people, so we must do the same to lesser peoples". Finally, all this has an aggressive and toxic bent to it, that "established" history is some great conspiracy to hide the truth from us. There's plenty of guys making documentaries like Graham Hancock with big chips on their shoulders, with seemingly more interest in disproving skeptics than performing an actual scholarly process of finding evidence and testing theories.
Let me tell you, the increasingly-poorly funded history departments at universities are not your enemy. Historians are not a monolith, they disagree about everything, and will freely tell you how little they know. Narratives and interpretations change all the time. New evidence can radically shift assumptions. I can tell you within my lifetime the scholarship around the Second World War has shifted drastically thanks to access to Soviet Sources, freed up after with the fall of the USSR. And those are events still within living memory. Due to a lack of written records, we know a lot less than we'd want to about the Khmer Empire that Alien vs Predator claims descended from an Antarctic nation bred by Predators. All we have are the inscriptions on the ruins to go by. That history is going to change radically as more and archaeological work is done or new sources are discovered, if we're lucky. That's how you do the work of history, not by coming up with a theory you like and running around the world pointing cameras at bundles of stone in Malta to prove Atlantis was real or something for Netflix.
This is all ultimately irrelevant for Alien vs. Predator, which is pure schlock, it doesn't even do anything ultimately with these concepts. But it is more interesting than the movie itself. AVP gets close at times to being more than junk. At one point Anderson shoots a scene like our heroine Lex is about to fall in love with the Predator she allies with to fight the Alien Queen. And you know what? If Lex had stuck her tongue down the Predator's "pussy face" as Danny Glover called it, I would change my opinion entirely. 10/10 movie, masterpiece.
But no.
There was a sequel in 2007, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, a movie I have bashed for decades due to its awful dark lighting. There are a lot of sequences in the sewers which are almost fully black, you cannot see anything. That one was Rated-R and tried to be more violent and nasty. But also, it is a fully generic creature feature. I have nothing to say about it. The Aliens and the Predator crash land in Middle America and kill a lot of people in a remarkably unremarkable cast. That's it. Even its big gimmick "the Predalien", the fusion of a xenomorph and Predator, is not that cool.
Because let's face it: xenomorphs are way more awesome than Predators. This is not even a competition! What does a Predator body bring to this? Nothing. Ash told us that they were "the perfect lifeform" back in Alien 1. They're sleek, iconic, gorgeous dragons with a terrifying life cycle with disturbing psycho-sexual elements. Predators are guys in costumes with a cool rock lobster face, that's it. Aliens win. It isn't close. Freddy is cooler than Jason, Batman is cooler than Superman, "Roe" was cooler than Wade. Fucking waste of time.
Next time! Mars attacks! 9/11 returns in War of the Worlds.
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