Caught Alien Vs. Predator the other night, and wow...seriously, that's the worst flick I've seen in theaters for a loooong while. I've waited a few days before commenting in hopes that the feeling would subside a bit, but nope -- that was one terrible movie. Keep in mind, I'm far from married from either of the franchises at play here. I like them both, but I'm never going to seek out posters or anything. I probably had much lower expectations than most, but the film still somehow failed to come close to the barrel of shit I'd anticipated. First off, the level of exposition in AvP is absurd. It wouldn't be honest for me to say that neither Pred nor Alien did anything for the first half of the movie, but absolutely truthful to say that they did almost nothing. For kill-fodder human characters with such half-assedly defined personalities and motives, they sure spent a lot of time letting us get to know them.
When we finally get to the central battleground -- an ancient pyramid maze buried under ice in a cold penguiny place, the film gets so literally dark that you can't follow anything that's happening. I'm serious -- there's minute-long action stretches where all you see are vague flashes of light and obscured objects moving about. The CG fight scenes down in that pyramid have some cool moments, but they're outweighed by the negatives: in what should be one of the most money money money scenes of the movie -- and you should be able to guess which -- there's long portions where the CG is so dark and haphazard that you're totally taken out of the movie. At one point, the battling monsters seemed to form an almost perfectly spherical, marbleized bowling ball.
You've probably heard about this PG-13 thing, and how the movie was trimmed by the studio to fit that rating. Frankly, for a PG-13 flick, it's still pretty gory and violent. I still heard cursewords, I still saw people impaled, blood splattered and creatures bursting through chests...I'm sure the movie suffered from that greedy late trim, but it just seems impossible that this alone is what caused AvP's problems.
There was a weird "twist" near the movie's climax -- it's probably been the biggest focus of every complaint thrown at the film. I won't spoil it, but only mention it to say that I really didn't mind it. Sure, it was fucking stupid, but at least it was somewhat interesting when compared to the dreck beforehand. More so that anything else, the twist was hilarious. Seems like the filmmakers cut their losses a long time ago on trying to create a film all the diehards would enjoy -- it was the kind of plot development that seemed to almost by design make longtime fans of these franchises hate the story. I wish I could say more, but let's leave it at this: after seeing all of the unintentional comedy provided by that infamous twist, I'm certain that there was a much bigger market for an outright AvP spoof film than the serious effort thrown at us. It's potentially the funniest movie you'll see this year.
Anyway, in celebration of things that should not exist, here's an article on Italian Thumb Wrestling.
Posted by Matt on 08/22/2004. E-mail me!
Chestnuts roasted by 
I have this strange attraction to the Predator. mmm… yummy.