Sunday, 03 February 2008
If this film were a child, everyone associated with it would be prosecuted for abuse and neglect.
You would be surprised by how bad it is. More accurately, unfortunately, you wouldn't be surprised. We've been trained by years of nonsensical boo! levels of intellectually vapid, creatively bankrupt wastes of the Earths resources to now accept as standard a low level of intelligence in the popular arts. Where AVP2 goes wrong is.. well, everywhere.
Remember the classic era of Sci Fi for people of certain age? Between 1977 and 1987, the world was populated with some fabulous film-making. (Lets not mention Battle Beyond The Stars though). Film-makers approached their work as artists. They worked to create artistically satisfying, self contained wholes. Plots unfolded like origami, and the long lost art of the gradual reveal enabled the audiences intelligence to work in suggesting something far more threatening than the potential reality. The power of suggestion has been lost in modern culture : the short attention span seems geared towards a level of instant gratification. Logic? Plot? Artistry? All are irrelevant when you strip this kind of film-making to its base core.
There's a rule you should remember : to the businessman, a dumb cunts money is worth just the same as a clever persons money.
In the other films - Alien, Aliens, Predator, Alien3 - one of those films strong points was the slow burn. Events were hinted at, the moment was slowly unveiled bit by bit. In a strip club it would be the slow art of the tease. AVP meanwhile, rubs its balls in your face then slaps around you a bit whilst making whoop noises : any half-assed bedroom director with an AVID and a video cam could do a better job than this, and probably already has 10 times the imagination and 1% of the budget of this turgid piece of insulting, idiotic, lowest common denominator crap. The only redeeming feature this film has is its ending, and that's 94 minutes overdue.
In films like Alien Vs Predator : Requiem (Requiem for what, exactly? The lost and ancient art of making films that don't fucking suck, I suspect), there is no tease. If this film was porno, it would open with a naked woman being called a fuck slut and being pissed on by an overweight thirty something. This film is horror / sci fi porno. About as subtle as a brick in the face, and opening with several sequences of blatant gratification. No one involved with this half-assed, ill-thought abortion of a film ever sat for one goddamn moment and considered what good film-makers did and still do. Instead The Brothers Strause (on the base of their poor performance, their first names are presumably Tweedledum and Tweedledee) just sit around thinking wouldn't it be cool if.... and what if we did this... and how about this?
This film shows you everything and tells you nothing. Violence is telegraphed with a tedious inevitability. Every opportunity the film-makers have to show restraint and tact is bludgeoned by a CGI-infested brainless pronographic display in forensic detail of Things That Look Cool. In the first few minutes, a spaceship orbits earth, a dead predator gives birth to an alien hybrid chestburster, the alien hybrid turns into a fully fledged adult in the space of a few seconds, the Predalien (or Aliedator) manages to dispense with a Predator in a handul of seconds, the Predalien manages to crash land the spaceship (convieniently enough in redneck hick America - how come they never land in Newcastle?), and we see the Predator AlienHomeWorld recieve the transmission from the crashing ship and send in a hit squad to tidy up the mess.
In 1982's The Thing, roughly the same narrative is displayed in one shot lasting a few seconds. Less is so much more.
I don't often say this, but even I could make a film that would suck less than this vapid, insulting nonsense. For example, if I were making this film, I would present a 120 minute piece which started with letting a 6-10 minute vignette about life in a small nowhere town, and the main characters being something more than mere brainless, blank ciphers. I'd open the film like a documentary on Life In Nowhere.. and then, about 20 minutes in, the ground would shake with the impact of Something Happening. One by one, a hunting party is picked off and slowly the survivours find themselves trapped in the woods where they unwittingly stumble - lost and desperate as night falls in the woods with their friends being picked off one by one - upon a strange coven where they find their friends cocooned with Facehugger pods around them. What the hell is going on? What is this strange ship they found a burnt out hulk in the trees? Remember these are regular urban slobs, nobodies on a hunting trip in the Middle Of Nowhere playing at being hunters and suddenly find themselves incredibly out of their depth, cut off from reference points, and shit bloody scared... like a cross between Deliverance and a documentary... which suddenly switches genres to become a horror movie.
By the way, that premise took me about 20 seconds to think up, which is exactly 20 seconds more than the 'brainstorming' meeting which birthed Alien Vs Predator : Piece of Crap.
But in the meantime, the film-makers just chose to hit you over the head with the Hammer Of Obviousness. Look! Here's Some Weird Shit! Fuck the Chronology!
The target audience in the minds of this film-maker are clearly 16-22 year old boys who would spend all their time avoiding this fogey, 30-year franchise nonsense like the plague, instead being too busy driving in circles round ringroads, texting Becky, listening to some tinny and badly-compressed MP3 of Jay-Z on their Mobile Fucking Phone, and trying to get fingers and tops with Shez. They wouldn't be dead seeing a film like this.
Fundamentally, this is akin to someone taking The Man In The High Castle, casting Lindsay Lohan and Shia LeBouf in the high-hitting heavy roles, getting Uwe Boll as director, and asking Pete Doherty to write a soundtrack score. It's tantamount to artistic abuse of a much-loved franchise with immense potential. Anyone and everyone involved with this film in any respect should immediately be barred from the film industry with immediate effect, if only to lessen the crimes of humanity against the universe. This film is appalling, idiotic, base nonsense and I am embarassed to even belong to the same species as the creatures that birthed this redundant insult. It is without doubt, at best contemptious of the audience and the previous films. At worst, it is a shameful waste of the Earth's precious resources.
If Alien was the Bible, this film is the celluloid equivalent of graffitti or a 1 panel cartoon on page 17 of the Bumblefuck Advertiser.
If this were a child, anyone involved with it would be prosecuted for abuse, and the child itself secreted to social services at birth. Under no circumstances whatsoever, should any human being ever part with any money in return for viewing this selection of images you could never describe as a 'film'. If anything, the film-makers should be paying you, and apologising for wasting your time. I think I would rather have spent at work than seeing this film.
So overall.... don't EVER watch this movie if you respect yourself as a human being. You will feel stupider afterwards. But no matter how stupid you will feel, you will never be as dumb as the half-formed mouthbreathers that made this film.Only registered users can write comments.
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