Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

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: **

Predators (2010)

It seems like Hollywood has taken to rebooting a franchise rather than try adding a new sequel into the mix. More than a few superhero movie franchises have been relaunched, and both James Bond and Star Trek had decades of continuity wiped clean with recent movie releases. But oddly enough, when Robert Rodriguez's Troublemaker Studios was entrusted to breathe new life into the Predator franchise after two clumsily-made Alien vs. Predator movies, Rodriguez bucked the trend and produced a sequel. Titled simply Predators, this sequel is a damn fine flick that's a lot more fun than you might think.

The movie immediately introduces us to Royce (Adrien Brody), a mercenary who awakens to find that he has been dropped into the middle of a jungle. He is quickly joined by seven others from around the world, each of them heavily armed and having no idea how they arrived. They are quick to discover that they are on another planet, one that serves as a game preserve operated by the Predators. And I'm sure you can guess who the prey is.

The Predator franchise has had a pretty rough go of it, at least as far as movies go. Predator 2 sucked, and that was it for about fourteen years. Then there were the two Alien vs. Predator movies, and they sucked too. And that brings us to Predators. Whether it's technically Predator 3 or Predator 5 is probably a matter of debate, but there's no arguing that the movie is a fresh change of pace from the other sequels and spinoffs. It's a marked improvement over them, as close as anyone could have gotten to replicating the first Predator movie without simply Xeroxing some film reels. Yeah, Predators is that kind of sequel.

In the director's chair is Hungarian filmmaker Nimród Antal, who had only made two English-language movies prior to this one. Considering that I loved his work on Vacancy, I was really looking forward to seeing how he'd handle a Predator movie. And after watching it a few times, I can say I thought he handled it pretty well. Antal's direction is sound enough that one could think that John McTiernan picked up right where he left off with the first movie in 1987.

Antal actually spends quite a bit of time building some serious tension, not letting any Predators appear until nearly forty minutes into the movie. That's not to say there isn't any action during that time; there's a really cool scene where the humans are flushed out by what I guess would be a Predator's answer to hunting dogs. But Antal's decision to build tension for so long makes the action scenes feel like a greater payoff.

He also does a fantastic job at establishing atmosphere, utilizing Gyula Padros's cinematography and John Debney's music to get us in the proper mood. Padros's camerawork is wonderful, making you feel like you're actually in this alien jungle with the characters. And as for Debney's music, it's fantastic. Debney replicated Alan Silvestri's music from the original Predator for quite a bit of his score, and it works. It fits the movie perfectly. I liked Predator's music a lot, so yeah, I can say I enjoyed Debney's work on Predators.

Moving along, let's touch on the script for a second. Credited to Michael Fitch and Alex Litvak, the script is actually rather unimportant. You aren't really go into a movie about intergalactic big game hunters and expect Hemmingway, are you? Of course you aren't. There's no need for a story, and the characters are just there to provide a body count for the Predators. Some of them get a little development, but most of the characters could have been listed in the credits as variations of "Guy With Gun #5" for all they're worth. But really, the movie didn't need a strong script, just a serviceable one. And that's exactly what it has.

This brings me to the cast, who I thought got the job done. Rodriguez and Antal made the bold decision to cast against type and hire Adrien Brody for the lead role, a choice that I felt paid off. He'd be one of the last guy's you'd expect to see as an action hero, after his work in stuff like The Pianist, but he's not bad at all. Brody comes to the role with a certain gruffness, which I felt was effective in establishing who his character is. He makes it feel plausible. I also really liked Topher Grace, who plays a doctor who has been dropped on the Predator planet for seemingly no reason at all. Up until the big twist that reveals just why he's there, Grace plays his character as how I imagine I'd act if stuck in this situation. He's cowardly, easily frightened, and generally unhappy to be there. And I can say that I totally bought it.

Among the other memorable performances are Walton Goggins, who plays a smart-ass death row inmate, and Laurence Fishburne, who has a glorified cameo as a soldier who's spent several years on the Predator's planet. Goggins is really entertaining in his role, while Fishburne gets to play his character as having completely lost his mind. I'm not sure exactly why Fishburne is in the movie, though, as it feels like the character was written for somebody else. He probably just had a few days away from shooting episodes of CSI and asked if he could be in the movie. I'm not complaining, since he's a lot of fun, but it's weird seeing him here.

Long story short, I thought Predators was a great way to try reviving a sagging franchise. I can't say that it's a perfect movie, but it's exciting, a ton of fun, and a movie that anyone who calls themselves a Predator fan should have already seen by now. If you haven't, it's most definitely worth seeing. And after Predator 2 and the two Alien vs. Predator movies, I'm just happy somebody made a follow-up to the first Predator that doesn't totally suck.

Final Rating: ***½

Predator 2 (1990)

It's a sad truth, but sometimes great movies end up with lousy sequels. The Jurassic Park sequels sucked, the Matrix sequels sucked, and Superman and Batman have had their fair share of bad sequels. Unfortunately, the same can be said for one of my favorite '80s movies, Predator. The movie that saw Arnold Schwarzenegger battle an alien big game hunter in the Guatemalan jungle is a modern classic in both the action and science fiction genres, and made a ton of money to boot. So naturally, a sequel was bound to happen. Hitting theaters three years after the original, Predator 2 is sadly a lesser movie than its predecessor. But what makes it that way?

As the movie opens, the city of Los Angeles finds itself stuck in the middle of a violent and bloody turf war between rival Columbian and Jamaican drug cartels. Throw in the fact that this turf war is taking place during the worst heat wave in recent memory, and L.A. isn't a great place to be. But things go from bad to worse when a Predator (Kevin Peter Hall) arrives in town and begins slaughtering both cops and members of the drug cartels.

Police lieutenant Mike Harrigan (Danny Glover), a key member of the LAPD's efforts to stop the war, soon finds himself face to face with the Predator after it kills some of his colleagues. Lieutenant Harrigan is forced to team with stubborn federal agent Peter Keyes (Gary Busey), who leads a task force dedicated to catching the Predator for scientific research, in order to combat the alien threat before it can butcher the entire city.

The truth is that Predator 2 is really more disappointing than anything. I absolutely love the Predator franchise, but Predator isn't quite as successful in inspiring the same level of excitement and entertainment as either the first one or the one that Robert Rodriguez produced last year. The movie is a total letdown, as sad as that is to say.

Helming the movie is Stephen Hopkins, a director whose résumé includes such flicks as the Lost in Space movie, the fifth Nightmare on Elm Street movie, and twelve episodes of 24. His work with Predator 2 is actually pretty good, keeping things moving at a steady pace with impressive cinematography, tight editing, and some really cool action sequences. The only problem I had with it is that it doesn't really feel like a Predator movie. It doesn't have the same kind of presence as the other two movies in the trilogy. Maybe it's the change in setting to an urban jungle instead of a regular jungle, I don't know. But Predator 2 feels a lot different from the other two movies, and I can't say that's a good thing.

It's weird, too, because Predator 2 was written by Jim and John Thomas, the writers of the first movie. You'd think that the guys who created the Predator in the first place would be able to write a kickass sequel. But no, Predator 2 doesn't kick ass. The script is weak, frankly. What little story there is is stupid, the dialogue is crap, and the whole thing translates into a movie that ends up being more of a chore to watch than anything else. Okay, yeah, Predator wasn't the paragon of thought-provoking screenwriting or anything, but at least it didn't make you want to go watch something else instead.

And this brings us to the cast, which is forgettable to say the least. Danny Glover plays the movie's resident hero, and he's... well, he's less than impressive. I generally like Glover's work, but he just seems like the wrong person for the role. He's playing the role like your typical "reckless cop" action hero, but it doesn't suit him. It's like Glover went from playing Roger Murtaugh to playing Martin Riggs. He's a bad fit for the movie, and both his performance and the movie suffer for it. The rest of the cast isn't that great, either. Bill Paxton is annoying beyond belief, María Conchita Alonso is just plain bad, and Gary Busey is Gary Busey. I'm just sad that Busey doesn't go completely over the top with his overacting. It would have the movie just a little bit more entertaining.

Predator 2 didn't have to turn out this way. It could have been awesome. But it's not. It's just another incident of a lame sequel following an awesome movie. I hate when that happens, but you can't really change things twenty years after the fact. It's at least a watchable lousy movie. It has that going for it, at least. But I can't give Predator 2 anything higher than two stars. Really, how sad is it that it took 20th Century Fox over two decades to make a movie with the Predator in it that was worth watching?

Final Rating: **

Alien vs. Predator (2004)

Fictional characters crossing over to either team up or do battle is nothing new. It happens in comic books all the time, and can be seen in movies like Frankenstein Meets The Wolf Man, King Kong vs. Godzilla, and Freddy vs. Jason. While many are intended to be one-time-only ideas, one crossover has become a full-fledged media enterprise. Following the first publication of Dark Horse's Alien vs. Predator comics in November 1989, the clash between the two extraterrestrial beasts went on to spawn novels and numerous video games, along with its own comic spinoff featuring another cinematic killing machine from the '80s, Alien vs. Predator vs. The Terminator.

After New Line Cinema scored big business with the release of Freddy vs. Jason in 2003, Twentieth Century Fox unleashed its murderous monsters onto the big screen the following year. There was much rejoicing in the fanboy community, but Fox ultimately decided to anger those fanboys by hiring relatively unpopular director Paul W.S. Anderson and released it with an unimaginable PG-13 rating. But does it manage to be good as its R-rated predecessors, or is it just a great big letdown?

Our story takes place in Antarctica, where a satellite owned by the Weyland Corporation has discovered an unusual heat signature on Bouvet Island, a remote island off the coast of Antarctica. Upon further investigation, the Corporation discovers what appears to be an immense ancient pyramid buried two thousand feet beneath the island's surface. The pyramid apparently has characteristics of Egyptian, Aztec, and Cambodian pyramids, which is pretty amazing considering that it predates each of those civilizations. But the thing is, they never really make a credible attempt to explain the how's or why's of it. If you're not going to explain it, why bother even bringing it up in the first place?

Anyway, corporation founder Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriken) and his assistant Maxwell Stafford (Colin Salmon) assemble a team of scientists and archaeologists to check the place out. The team is mostly comprised of faceless nobodies, with three exceptions: Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan), who is drafted as the team's guide for some reason known only to the filmmakers; Sebastian de Rosa (Raoul Bova), an Italian archaeologist who can read hieroglyphics; and Graeme Miller (Ewen Bremner), a naïve archaeologist with a penchant for photography. (And truth be told, Bremner's character only stands out because of his thick Scottish accent.)

Weyland and Stafford inform the team at a briefing that the expedition will be getting underway as soon as possible, but Alexa objects. Turns out that the team will need at least three weeks of training because they don't exactly have the proper survival skills to survive the kind of environment they'll be up against. Yeah, essentially calling the crew a bunch of pansies is a really nice way to endear yourselves to everybody.

Weyland informs Alexa that time is a luxury not afforded to them, so she quits. So what does Weyland do? He threatens to hire her closest competition if she doesn't accompany them on their fantastic voyage. A harsh businessman, Weyland is. Alexa knows that nobody can do the job as well as her and really isn't in the mood to lose out to a rival, so she reluctantly rejoins the team as they set sail.

The team arrives at an abandoned whaling station and prepare to drill down into the pyramid, but they soon learn that a passage has been neatly carved out at a perfect 30-degree angle. The passage wasn't there the day before and nothing on Earth could have carved it that quickly, but nobody in the team questions it. The team ventures down the tunnel and enter the pyramid, but a few rash decision on their parts unleash the bloodthirsty Aliens from their crypt in the pyramid's basement. And to make matters worse, the scientists are also intercepted by three interstellar hunters we know as the Predators.

Thanks to Sebastian's skill at reading hieroglyphics, we learn that the pyramid is a hunting ground for Predators, where they bred Aliens every hundred years so young Predators could engage in a ritual rite of passage. And just their luck, the humans are the bait. The squadron of Aliens soon wipes out pretty much everyone, leaving only Alexa and one Predator (Ian Whyte) to band together and fight there way to safety.

What a sad, sad, sad state of affairs Alien vs. Predator is. The movie is one of the most disappointing sequels I've ever seen, and everyone involved should be ashamed of themselves for ruining a movie that had such wonderful potential. There's something going on all the time while nothing really happens, resulting in a film that's all effort with no results. Not once during the course of the movie is any sort of coherent story told, the movie is too poorly shot and too tightly edited to make any sort of sense on a visual level, and the cast brings nothing to the table. Not even the effects can save the movie, because everything has been reduced to get a PG-13 rating. Instead of the straightforward violence we're used to in the Alien and Predator movies, the violence here is broken into three parts...

1. Show the monster swinging a sharp object.
2. Show the victim anticipating the death blow (and screaming, if the victim is human).
3. Show blood splattering nearby.

Simple as that. Oddly enough, the movie is rated PG-13 for violence, language, horror images, slime, and gore. Slime?! If the MPAA can give a movie a PG-13 rating for slime, then I'm surprised Ghostbusters 2 didn't get an R. That movie is about slime. Just add that to the list of things that made absolutely no sense at all in this movie.

Speaking of confusing things, we don't see the Aliens and Predators onscreen together until 53 minutes into the movie. When you see a movie called Alien vs. Predator, you expect to see monsters fighting each other, not occasional monster fighting interspersed with a bunch of worthless cannon fodder people walking around like a bunch of morons. I can understand wanting a human element in the film, but it shouldn't be at the expense of the title characters. The two species of extraterrestrial killers do square off, yes, but by the time they get around to fighting, the poor direction and paper-thin characters will have probably bored you to death.

Seriously, what kind of idiot thought it was a good idea to give the quite inconsequential research team more screen time than the Aliens and Predators combined? Oh yeah, I know who that idiot is: writer and director Paul W.S. Anderson. Anderson's screenplay is ungodly bad, immediately evidenced by the fact that the movie was set on Earth circa October 2004. That's about as lazy as Anakin Skywalker living on Tatooine in The Phantom Menace. Why not just set it in space in the year 3000, or something like that?

The movie just plods along, not really bothering to explain what's going on at any given time. How do the little Chestburster Alien guys grow so fast, when it took days in the previous four Alien movies? I guess the Predators had the Alien Queen hopped up on steroids in order to speed up their hunt, but since they never say one way or the other, all I can do is make assumptions. It's one thing for a movie to make the audience think about it, but it's another to force the audience to guess what's happening at any given time. Sometimes even the brightest viewer needs to have things spelled out for the movie to make any sense. And then there's the "surprise" coda that was so expected, it wasn't even a surprise at all. I'll admit that it was cool, yes, but it could be seen coming from a mile away.

And am I the only one who noticed a few large jumps in logic? Take, for example, the scene in which we are introduced to Sanaa Latham's character. She's hanging from the side of a cliff on a clear day with nobody and nothing around, yet is surprised when she discovers a helicopter at the top. I may be jumping to conclusions here, but wouldn't she have, you know, heard it flying overhead? I could understand if she was so focused on scaling the cliff that she didn't notice, but how do you not notice a helicopter landing right above you? They aren't exactly a stealthy type of transportation.

Another bizarre moment sees Latham's character telling everyone that the first rule of business was that everyone should stick together. So what does everyone do? They split up and go off by themselves. And then Latham goes off by herself to yell at everyone for going off by themselves. The insanity of the movie's screenplay culminates in a scene where we learn about the ancient civilization that populated the pyramid getting decimated by one of the Predator wrist-mounted nuclear bombs. If the entire civilization was wiped out, how could they write hieroglyphics about it? Were they doing it from beyond the grave? And what was with the pyramid walls intermittently moving around? There's no real rhyme or reason to anything. The whole movie is a vicious cycle of stupidity.

And let's not forget about Anderson's trite, hackneyed direction. With Alien vs. Predator, Anderson appears to have no grasp on what made the first two Alien movies and the first Predator so enthralling. The movie suffers from uneven pacing and lighting that's too dark to really get a grasp on what we're seeing. Alien vs. Predator also suffers from the same problem plaguing many action movies nowadays: lightning fast editing and shaky camera work. During many of the one-on-one fight scenes involving the Aliens and Predators, the camera is all over the place and each cut lasts only a few seconds. What ever happened to the good old days, where filmmakers would just film a fight scene from two or three angles and let that be that?

While I have no doubt that Anderson can make a movie that is visually stimulating, he seems to forget all the important stuff like story, decent scripting, good characters, good actors, that sort of thing. He is very much a director that favors style over substance, and while a "style over substance" type of film can be good in the hands of a competent director (e.g. John McTiernan's work on the original Predator), Anderson has yet to prove himself as either a credible writer or director. I don't hate Anderson with the same vitriol of others online, and I do think he has a good movie in him somewhere, but he needs to realize that just because you make a movie with style doesn't mean you've made a good movie. Even the musical score, composed by Harold Kloser, is unremarkable. It's just way too generic to make any sort of mark on the movie.

I also found the cast to be a tad lackluster. It seems like almost every character has an overstated foreign accent, but the funny part is their accents are all real. With the exceptions of Sanaa Latham and Lance Henriksen, just about everyone in the main cast is from Europe. The cast reads like a who's who of European countries; England, Scotland, France, Italy, Denmark, and the Czech Republic are all represented. Maybe the movie's very British director wanted a cast full of Europeans because he didn't want to feel lonely, I don't know. I don't have anything against Europe, but hearing almost every character speak with an accent threw me off.

But in any event, Sanaa Latham has nothing resembling the screen presence or strength as Sigourney Weaver would have. Latham has all the charisma of a brick wall, and for the majority of the movie, she's an annoying harpy that just bogs the movie down. There's absolutely no reasoning given to make we the viewer want to see her survive. The rest of the cast is nothing but fluff and filler, with only Lance Henriksen being of note because he rules no matter what project he's working on.

The movie's tagline is "whoever wins, we lose," and I don't believe they could have picked one that was any more fitting. Alien vs. Predator is stupendously bad, a disappointment on the grandest scale. It's one thing to not live up to Predator and the first two Alien movies, because those three movies are classics no matter how you slice it. But when your movie makes people pine for Predator 2 and Alien: Resurrection, you may want to rethink your career. It's a sad, depressing waste of potential, and it's a shame that it couldn't even achieve mediocre status as a film.

Final Rating: **