Alien vs. Predatorreview by Peter T. Chattaway | posted 8/13/2004 12:00AM
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Alien vs. Predator
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MPAA rating: PG-13
(for violence, language, horror images, slime and gore)
Theater release:
August 13, 2004
by 20th Century Fox
Directed by: Paul W. S. Anderson
Runtime: 1 hour 27 minutes
Cast: Sanaa Lathan (Alexa Woods), Raoul Bova (Sebastian de Rosa), Lance Henriksen (Charles Bishop Weyland), Ewen Bremner (Graeme Miller), Colin Salmon (Maxwell Stafford)
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Homer Simpson once declared that alcohol was the source of, and the solution to, all his problems. 20th Century Fox might have something similar to say about diehard fans of the Alien and Predator franchises, who have waited 15 years to see these sci-fi beasts duke it out onscreen, ever since the two biggest space monsters of the Reagan era were first pitted against each other in a Dark Horse comic book. Frustrated by all the delays, hardcore Alien and Predator fans have stirred up some pretty bad buzz over Alien vs. Predator, yet they are also the most likely to brave the bad buzz and check the film out for themselves.
This guy's apparently looking for trouble—eggs-actly!
The reason for all the bad buzz? First, fans were put off by the news that, while earlier films in the Alien series were directed by stylish innovators and technical wizards like Ridley Scott, James Cameron and David Fincher, this new film was assigned to Paul W.S. Anderson, whose best-known films to date, Mortal Kombat and Resident Evil, are little more than cheesy video-game flicks. Then, fans were annoyed to learn that this film would tone down the violence—and presumably dumb down the political, sexual and philosophical subtexts of the earlier films—in order to earn a teen-friendly PG-13 rating, whereas all four Alien films and both Predator movies had been intended for adults and were given hard R ratings. And finally, the studio refused to show the film to critics before it opened last Friday, which is usually a sign that the film in question is going to stink.
Fortunately, entering a movie with low expectations sometimes makes for a better viewing experience. Alien vs. Predator is certainly not the worst movie to come out this summer—I would argue that Thunderbirds and Van Helsing were duller and more exhausting to sit through—and there are times when the new film pays just enough respect to its source material that you can almost taste the good movie that it might have been.
'You ugly!' 'No, YOU ugly!' 'No, YOU ugly!' And so on …
To bring these two franchises together, one has to somehow address the fact that the Alien films have a somewhat female identity and tend to deal primarily with feminine issues—maternal instincts, the fear of rape—while the Predator films reflect a more macho emphasis on killing for sport and being initiated into a warrior culture. The film version of Alien vs. Predator, like the original comic book, unites these sensibilities to some degree by telling the story of a woman who fights to save herself from the Aliens and, in doing so, wins the respect of the Predators.
The woman in question is Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan), an intrepid mountaineer who takes satellite phone calls even when she's dangling from an icy cliff. Alexa is one of several explorers hired by a billionaire named Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) to explore a vast, ancient pyramid with a huge, modern-style power source that his satellites have discovered under the ice in Antarctica. ("Weyland" is the name of the evil "company" that will make life difficult for Ripley years later in the Alien films, and "Bishop" is the name of the good android that Henriksen played in two of those films.) In this pyramid, the explorers discover a sacrificial chamber, where human victims used to be "impregnated" with Alien embryos every hundred years so that the Predators could begin their ritual hunt (it's confusing; you'll have to see the film to fully understand). And amidst the runes, symbols, and artifacts, Weyland's team finds some rather high-tech weaponry, which prompts one man to exclaim, "This is like finding Moses' DVD collection!"
Something very wicked this way comes …
Oh, and wouldn't you know it, it happens to have been a hundred years since the last time the Predators visited Earth, so they must be on their way right now, and they must be preparing to thaw out the Alien Queen so that she can pop out a few more eggs and claim the humans as hosts for her children. Let the hunt resume!
Much of what follows is fairly silly, and the laughability of the film is amplified by Anderson's video-game sensibility. The Aliens in the original films were dark and scary, always lurking in shadows or attacking their victims with lightning-fast speed, but occasionally, when a creature leaps at someone in this film, Anderson switches to slow-motion in mid-shot, thus killing what should be the terror and mystery of the moment so that he can bask in his special effects. The dialogue is also full of howlers, many of which are delivered by Sebastian de Rosa (Raoul Bova), an Italian archaeologist whose statements tend to be embarrassingly obvious ("He's marking himself," he says after we see a Predator mark himself) or drawn out for embarrassingly dramatic effect ("The enemy … of my enemy … is my friend"); he also gets to explain such cheesy plot points as the fact that the pyramid's walls and floors reconfigure themselves for no good reason "every ten minutes."
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