Directed by Paul W.S. Anderson
Starring Sanaa Lathan, Lance Henriksen, Raoul Bova, Ewen Bremner and Colin Salmon
And so it has come to this. Let's flash back to 2004, back when I was 21 years old and had just moved away for my last couple years of college. So young, so vibrant, so full of life...and the first movie I saw in my college town was Alien vs. Predator, a.k.a. AvP. Words cannot express just how much I was anticipating this flick. Hell, it was the only Atari Jaguar game I ever bothered to play. Lo and behold, I get unpacked, spend a few days finding a job, walk around the campus for a little while, and then take this movie in as my reward at the end of a long first week in central Minnesota. And I hated it.
Yeah, at the time I thought this movie was a big steaming pile. Loud, overbearing and completely devoid of anything resembling the awesomeness of the story I had envisioned in my head, it didn't take long for me to swear this thing off and vow never to watch it again. Well, upon re-watching it again for this review, I can report that the movie is still pretty bad. However, it's that rare kind of bad that's actually kinda fun to watch at times. Call it the Paul W.S. Anderson charm. Yeah, his movies tend to be pretty unwatchable on the whole, but you can't say that the guy doesn't at least have a zeal and fighting spirit for his stuff. This one included. That kind of moxie is definitely needed when your acting brigade consists of Lance Henriksen and a bunch of no-names, but we'll get to them in due time. The movie was meant to be the springboard for a new side franchise that both the Alien and Predator series could vault from, but alas, all we got was one more film from that concept before it was sayonara, suckas. Again, more on that in due time (like, next week). With all of that said, let's go about exploring the epic scope of the film I saw on some dingy mall theater screen right around the time I was sweating Business Statistics 301.
Amazingly, the movie takes place in the present day. Or, at least, the present day of 2004 that makes me feel older every type I type that year. You know EvilCo, that long-running corporation that has been the human no-gooders for the entirety of the Alien series? Well, this is the ORIGIN STORY, baby. Meet Charles Bishop Weyland, head guy of Weyland Industries, placed by Lance Henriksen in all of his slimy no-gooding glory. It seems as if the company has detected a massive heat signature way below the Antarctic ice, and Weyland wants to claim the pyramid that the satellite finds at this site all to himself because reasons. I'll admit that I wasn't paying a whole lot of attention when I first popped in this DVD, so bare with me. Again, what I love about movies like this is that they almost always assemble a team of experts who universally hate each other, and this one is no exception. Of them, the only one who doesn't immediately stand out as future intergalactic creature fodder is Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan), the overall guide of the whole mission who is actually pretty likable in addition to being pretty damn hot. And this is where I will cut off the Skeevy Paragraph before it starts.
From here, a whole bunch of convoluted stuff happens that get us on the way to what we came for. See, a Predator ship is lurking in space waiting for something. If this were an episode of Star Trek, this would be the part where Captain Kirk hit the "f**k it, shoot 'em down" button, but alas we don't have William Shatner in sight here. The pyramid contains all kinds of clues that shock no one who has seen even one of the previous films, gradually cluing us in that this is some sort of ancient civilization where humans co-existed with both alien species and that the xenomorphs are there to serve as the ultimate prey for the Predators. They even have their own queen ready to go at the site to start pumping out those almighty facehuggers just for this purpose. See those last two sentences? It's rapidly becoming one of my favorite review cliches, but it's something like 30 minutes of this movie condensed. What you need to know is that the Predators soon arrive and kill off all of the secondary characters, which is then immediately followed by two of them (dubbed Celtic Predator and Ensign Ricky Predator by yours truly) immediately get dusted off by one of the freshly-hatched xenomorphs. Derp.
If you can't tell, the story of this movie is all over the place, but no theater audience was there in 2004 to see the epic scope of the story that this film had to offer. We wanted the showdown, and fortunately that's what we get from here on out. It should go without saying that the only human survivor is Alexa, and now she's caught in the crossfire of the Predators and their deadly prey (but not one that demands that you take off your shirt or else he'll cut you out from under it - and if you get that reference, you get 10 Fonzie cool points). Much like that other horror-ish smackdown that took place a year earlier called Freddy vs. Jason, the movie makes a kinda-sorta decision about which one we should pull for based on the human characters tying their fate to one of them, and that's the plot device here.
It's kind of an unsung role, but Sanaa Lathan really was good here; when it's down to herself, the scarred Predator, and a whole army of xenomorphs led by their gigantic queen, we're actually on her side. Especially during that nifty scene when the lone Predator gives her a shield made from one of the xenomorph craniums and christens her by burning her cheek with alien blood. That was pretty cool, even in 2004 when I was actively loathing this film. Sometimes, the story can get downright dopey. How so? I just realized that I completely left the OTHER surviving human character for much of the running time out of this review, and he's so inconsequential to the plot that I don't even feel guilty. Every time this dude is a part of the action the movie feels less, and when he gets captured...yikes.
As a film with a long development time of something like a decade, they definitely had plenty of advance notice to work out an awesome story for a movie where the two most vicious cineamtic aliens of all time got to go toe-to-toe. This was not that film. When I saw the movie in theaters, I thought that the story was terrible. I don't think that anymore, but Paul W.S. Anderson just has a way of making his movies feel very soulless. He was quoted once as saying that he watched Citizen Kane and was bored to tears by all of the talking, and that no one has ever felt that way while watching one of his movies. His career is a really strange beast, in that I absolutely love his one and only original property (the downright horrific 1997 sci-fi horror classic Event Horizon) and can pretty much tell everything else to screw. There's no soul or depth to anything that goes on here, and that shouldn't surprise anyone who has seen his version of Resident Evil or any one of its 17,000 sequels.
However, upon watching the movie again, something strange happened. Call it the nostalgic rose-colored glasses for a time when I was slightly younger, but this time around I thought the final trimester was fairly cool. That last word is a big key - cool, because the movie is still definitely lacking all of the hallmarks of the best of these series. Namely, any semblance of tension, shocks and even gore, which this flick was such a letdown with that it became the centerpiece of the sequel's marketing campaign.
< sigh > I suppose it's time to assign a rating to the movie described in this incredibly nonsensical review. I'll give AvP ** out of ****. All these years later, it's not the out-and-out disaster that I remembered it being. It's still a big disappointment, but compared to what would follow, it's a Patrick Bateman undisputed masterpiece.
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