I'm not sure if I can properly explain just how disappointed I was with Alien vs. Predator. When it was released in 2004, I was excited. Paul W.S. Anderson might have screwed up Resident Evil, but he couldn't possibly screw up a crossover between the Alien and Predator franchises, could he?
Turns out that's exactly what he did. Alien vs. Predator was a big stupid mess wrapped in a PG-13 bow. But I guess it was successful enough to warrant a sequel, because 20th Century Fox released Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem in 2007. While the movie is a marked improvement over its predecessor, it's still a mind-numbingly bad movie.
The movie begins mere seconds after the conclusion of the first Alien vs. Predator, as a Predator spaceship retrieves the body of the Predator who was killed defeating the Alien queen. A chestburster emerges from the dead Predator's body as the ship leaves Earth's atmosphere, quickly maturing into an adult Alien/Predator hybrid. It starts creating all kinds of violent, bloody havoc, eventually causing the ship to crash in the woods outside the small town of Gunnison, Colorado.
A lone Predator (Ian White) is sent to respond to the ship's distress signal and handle the situation. And there's going to be one hell of a mess for the Predator to clean up, as the "PredAlien" (Tom Woodruff Jr.) and a number of facehuggers have started breeding. A small army of Aliens have soon amassed, and a full-scale war between they and the Predator puts all of Gunnison's citizens in danger.
Let's cut to the chase: Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem isn't a very good movie at all. It has its moments, but its inadequacy is overwhelming. The real problem with the movie is that nobody involved seems interested in making a movie that doesn't suck. They just want to make the thing, period. Thus, it never rises above mediocrity. And that's terrible.
Sitting in the director's chair are Greg and Colin Strause, the sibling duo who brought us last year's alien invasion flick Skyline. The "Brothers Strause," as they're credited here, made names for themselves in Hollywood as founders of the visual effects company Hydraulx, and cut their teeth as directors on music videos and commercials before moving to movies. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is their first feature film, and I thought they could have done a lot better. Their biggest problem is that the movie is almost unbearably dark. No, not dark in tone, but dark in that you honestly can't see anything. Their cinematographer apparently convinced them that not having any lights on during the big action sequences would be a good idea. And the weird thing is that the movie's cinematographer, Daniel Pearl, has thirty years of experience. You'd think he'd know that was a bad idea.
Seriously, though, what good is making an action/horror movie if you can't see anything going on? I saw it theatrically and at first blamed it on a shoddy projector. But then I watched the movie on Blu-ray with the brightness on my TV turned all the way up, and I still had a hard time telling what the hell was happening. The real kicker is that all of the boring scenes with the human characters are crystal clear and filmed brightly, but the scenes that would bring in an audience — monsters kicking the crap out of each other — are murky and practically unwatchable. It's like watching a Godzilla movie with only the scenes with humans and the audio of the monster fights.
It doesn't help that the Brothers Strause are working with a tremendously awful script by Shane Salerno. And when I saw awful, I mean awful. This thing is so crappy that I can't believe a major Hollywood studio actually signed off on it. Do you want to know why I think it sucks so much? It's because Salerno tries so damn hard to make us care about the human characters despite how blandly he's written them. I honestly didn't give a crap about any of the characters' problems or if they lived or died.
The most boring part is the subplot about the dorky pizza delivery boy who constantly gets his ass handed to him by some jock douchebag because he's caught the eye of the jock douche's girlfriend. This subplot is not only clichéd but badly written to boot. You can see this exact same story told even the tiniest bit better on a million teen-oriented soap operas. It doesn't have any sort of place in a movie where extraterrestrial monsters devastate a small town in the middle of nowhere.
The acting isn't much better either. When I sat down to write this review, I honestly couldn't remember anyone standing out as contributing either a bad or a good performance. How bad do you have to be to make absolutely no impression at all? I'm actually watching the movie right now, as I write this, and I'm forgetting about people while they're actually onscreen. If you can't make any impression, even a negative one, then you suck at what you're doing.
Until I started writing this review, I'd forgotten just how bad Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is. I'd actually convinced myself that it wasn't too bad. But it's an awful, awful, awful mess of a movie. You'd think that they'd have learned from the first Alien vs. Predator movie and made something better. But nope, they went the opposite direction and made something worse instead. It actually made me resent the other Alien and Predator movies. This could have been something really cool, but what we've got is a 101-minute sack of crap that in no way lives up to what it could have been. I just hope that if anyone ever decides to try to make another Alien vs. Predator movie, they won't screw it up so badly.
Final Rating: **
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