S
Soiffeur
Guest
Hi, i wrote this 'analysis', i guess, of AvP and thought i'd post it here to get some in-depth opinions. It's definitely not a review and shouldn't be read by anyone who hasn't seen the film.
Alien vs Predator
What a wanky film. This is the kind of film I wouldn’t even bother hating if it wasn’t cashing in on one genuinely great franchise of cinema history, and another very decent addition to its particular genre. Exploiting these great franchises to pick the pockets of gullible teenagers and brain dead fanboys is a crime against humanity; it’s another example of sacrificing the integrity of an admirable piece of work by a master of his [their] art in exchange for cold, hard cash. I understand that the movie industry isn’t government funded, but that isn’t an excuse to give up any artistic integrity. Selling out genuine ideals or principles for money isn’t always monstrous, but it generally is. Make rubbish cash cows if you like, but don't sell out genuinely great films in the process. So, that out of the way, onto the actual film.
This film fails on every level, and even the things it does well it still does badly. I’m not sure if the blame should fall on Paul ‘I will ruin other people’s work’ Anderson or the studio execs who obviously said “fuck the integrity of these great films, how can we extract the most cash from them?” And it’s fucking disgusting. Less than one-dimensional, showing little-to-no interest in developing characters whose fates we actually care about, poor pacing, poor characterisation of the protagonist species and their environment and rubbish set pieces. And the galling thing is, all Anderson has to do is look back to the previous films to see what they did right. But i think he was incapable of looking beneath the surface to see why they worked.
The Predator films are hardly classics, but they’re decent enough. What sets them apart is the predator, who succeeds because of its mystery, its unfathomableness, its ‘honour’ system and its array of cool weapons. Both films succeeded (I don’t understand those who rubbish the second one, what was wrong with it?) because they play on the mysterious, invincible predator angle. Cranking up the tension with prolonged scenes of it observing its prey, only showing the aftermath of the carnage it causes initially, and then showing it brutally massacre heavily armed soldiers with consummate ease. It gives the predator a kind of mythic status. It’s the cocktail of brutal lethalness, mystery and an unfathomable alien intelligence that makes the predator work.
Now let’s see how AvP completely fails to use any of this effectively, and worse still, actually undermines it. The predators observing the humans before striking is badly used, with no essence of impending doom (they just strike without any decent build up of foreboding), and a perfunctory nod to the strange habits of the predator when taking trophies from its prey; in this case stringing them up. In the first two films this practice was bizarre, brutal and inexplicable; here it adds nothing to the film (other than continuity, maybe). Then when the predators do go toe-to-toe with the aliens, the predators are made to look vulnerable and a bit impotent. What should’ve happened is the predators initially mash up the aliens in really cool ways, only to be caught out by particularly wily ones or maybe overwhelmed. The predators die too easily, and because of this are underused. When you see humans die, you’re supposed to sympathise with them and wish them to survive, but since the predators weren’t humanised (until later on) you’re not really fussed if they die, it’s just a spectacle. If the predators had kicked some more arse we would’ve been rooting for them a bit more, and then their deaths might have served some purpose other than to completely destroy the image that the first two films built up. There’s just not enough of predators doing cool stuff.
The aliens are supposed to be sleek and absolutely terrifying. The monsters from your nightmares, the one creature you’d least like to be stalked by. They lurk in the dark, keeping you permanently on edge because they can strike at any time and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. The perfect killing machine. Well, that’s how the first and third Alien films portrayed them, and the second one certainly didn’t make them lightweights when the human has a gun. They were terror creatures that paralysed humans with fear. AvP failed to play on any of this, because most of the time the aliens are stalking the predators and as has been discussed, there was no connection with the predators, no concern for their wellbeing and hence no fear generated.
There was one scene that really should’ve worked but didn’t: when that scarface guy found himself in the long, dark, narrow triangular corridor and he can just make out something lurking in the darkness up ahead. That should’ve been utterly terrifying; the audience’s knowledge of what the alien is coupled with the bloke’s deep fears despite not knowing what’s going on and having no chance of getting away. But it just wasn’t scary.
Alien 3 suffered from poor characterisation since everyone was bald and pretty similar, but what did work was the brutal, creeping fear of knowing that the alien was lurking in the tunnels, could strike at any time and these poor, depraved bastards had no chance of defeating it. Who could keep their heart-rate completely normal when the alien is slavering all over Ripley? AvP completely failed to use the alien as the tension cranking, nightmarish creature that’s always just lurking in the shadows not far away. In fact, despite all the guns that the humans brought with them, I don’t think they used them to kill a single alien. Aliens should either be the unstoppable monsters that lurk in the shadows, or an overwhelming swarm of cannon fodder. In this film, they were neither. The predator should either have been the mysterious, brutal hunter or the cool, ass-kicking humanoids from outer space. They were pretty much neither.
Now we come to the human characters. What kind of a joker writes characters that just don’t seem like real people, and then casts unconvincing actors to play them. The makers must’ve known that was the case. In these kinds of films, you need characters that seem real, not just pre-packaged victims, and you need people that the audience can connect to or at least like/dislike. The characters in AvP left me with absolutely nothing, they might as well have been mannequins. Alien had a collection of average joes, no one special but at least people that you could meet in real life. Aliens had characters that left an impression upon you (such as Hudson and Vasquez, and even Burke). Even Predator did a fairly good job of getting the audience to know and interested in Dutch’s crack team of commandos.
Tarantino is the master of writing characters who just bounce random bullshit back and forth at each other, but this gives you a sense that his characters are real. This film never once did that, and if you don’t care about the characters then you don’t care about their wellbeing and no tension can be generated. The scariest part, in fact, was when Spud got spooked by that penguin. Anderson obviously knew of the tension-cranking merits of such devices, yet never bothered with anything like that afterwards. Take Spud, the loveable, slightly weasley character with two kids and an infectious outlook. That’s your best effort for writing a character that we might care about? If that’s so then why didn’t he do anything, other than wet himself when it all started going pair-shaped and then get taken by an alien. Considering the characters were discovering stuff that was re-writing the origins of the human species, and then discovering two different alien species, they didn’t seem to phased by the enormity of this. The film completely missed the boat when illustrating the gravitas of the circumstances. An utter lack of depth in all respects.
Yet another gripe: Most of the characters did nothing. They didn’t really use their ingenuity and courage to escape from seemingly hopeless situations, or do anything that might make us root for them. They didn’t do anything admirable. Most of the previous films had some kind of plot-twist or sub-plot that gets revealed a bit after half way through. This film didn’t bother; it didn’t bother doing anything with what it had. The characters were all entirely pointless and served no purpose in the plot, other than just being characters for the sake of characters because you can’t have a film without them. Margh. What was the point of Weyland’s character, other than continuity with the previous films? Ooh we find out he’s not well, surely that’s going to be developed into some kind of plot-twister. And surely he’s going to do something nefarious like the unethical, unscrupulous company man that he represents from the previous films, right? No, he’s going to be a bit annoying and then die by picking an unnecessary fight with a predator.
And then there’s the overall pacing of the film. If you look at any great action/horror film, as it progresses the tension mounts and the set-pieces get more spectacular. And boy, did Jim Cameron know that particular maxim. Anderson doesn’t know anything, especially not that. Alien was all about the tension generated by the down-beat first half. The highlight of the film was undoubtedly the mid-point hand-to-claw fight between the predator and the alien. That was quite cool, but I didn’t like it because it made the predators look weak. There just wasn’t enough cool stuff going on (cool things can be cheap and just thrown in – eg. In one of the Star Wars when a Jedi kicks ass, or in Terminator 2, when Arnie shoots up the entire LAPD with a minigun without killing anyone, or in ROTK, when Legolas takes down that olephant single-handedly; not cinematic genius or anything, just cool).
The characters started dying without doing anything, which was just a bit boggling really, because you think ‘what was the point in them being in the film then’, and because of this apathy the film has nothing to build on, so you end up watching it just in the hope that some cool stuff will happen (aliens fighting predators is cool – but somehow Anderson did it in the least cool way, with the aliens fairly easily decimating the predators with as much ease as they eat up humans). Only once does a predator just kick the shit out of a load of aliens.
And what’s that crap about all their gear being completely useless against the aliens, with wrist blades melting in the acid, and facemasks easily being punched through by the alien’s shooting jaws. You don’t even have to look to the comic to think ‘that’s a bit stupid’, especially when the predators develop all these cool weapons and cloaking devices to fight humans. Since they went to fight aliens, you’d think they’d take the right tools for the job. Even the queen rampage at the end was a bit of a damp squib.
It maybe that one of the problems was that the scenes rarely overlapped. It was a case of ‘then this guy dies, then this happens, then that alien does that, then the queen breaks free, yadda yadda’ so it seemed very formulaic and linear. If the scenes overlapped, then they can enhance and augment each other (eg. Ripley rescuing Newt overlapped with her trashing the queen’s nest (and that’s another thing – how much film-making skill does it take to create a character like Newt and not only stop her from being annoying, but actually work so that you really hope Ripley finds her alive and saves her and stuff. Imagine if Anderson tried to deal with an angle as delicate as that!)).
This film is terrible in a totally inexcusable way, because it has so much weight behind it just showing it how it’s done. How Anderson took all these ready-made gimmicks and managed to break them I don’t know. Just imagine if the film had characters of the calibre of Hudson and Vasquez, with aliens as horrific as in Alien, and predators as mysterious and brutal as in Predator. Ally that with an intelligent plot, competent handling and a terrifying atmosphere and it could’ve done its predecessors proud. But no, they went with the money spinner, completely pissing over the originals in favour of a cheap and sullied dollar. Those *****.
Alien vs Predator
What a wanky film. This is the kind of film I wouldn’t even bother hating if it wasn’t cashing in on one genuinely great franchise of cinema history, and another very decent addition to its particular genre. Exploiting these great franchises to pick the pockets of gullible teenagers and brain dead fanboys is a crime against humanity; it’s another example of sacrificing the integrity of an admirable piece of work by a master of his [their] art in exchange for cold, hard cash. I understand that the movie industry isn’t government funded, but that isn’t an excuse to give up any artistic integrity. Selling out genuine ideals or principles for money isn’t always monstrous, but it generally is. Make rubbish cash cows if you like, but don't sell out genuinely great films in the process. So, that out of the way, onto the actual film.
This film fails on every level, and even the things it does well it still does badly. I’m not sure if the blame should fall on Paul ‘I will ruin other people’s work’ Anderson or the studio execs who obviously said “fuck the integrity of these great films, how can we extract the most cash from them?” And it’s fucking disgusting. Less than one-dimensional, showing little-to-no interest in developing characters whose fates we actually care about, poor pacing, poor characterisation of the protagonist species and their environment and rubbish set pieces. And the galling thing is, all Anderson has to do is look back to the previous films to see what they did right. But i think he was incapable of looking beneath the surface to see why they worked.
The Predator films are hardly classics, but they’re decent enough. What sets them apart is the predator, who succeeds because of its mystery, its unfathomableness, its ‘honour’ system and its array of cool weapons. Both films succeeded (I don’t understand those who rubbish the second one, what was wrong with it?) because they play on the mysterious, invincible predator angle. Cranking up the tension with prolonged scenes of it observing its prey, only showing the aftermath of the carnage it causes initially, and then showing it brutally massacre heavily armed soldiers with consummate ease. It gives the predator a kind of mythic status. It’s the cocktail of brutal lethalness, mystery and an unfathomable alien intelligence that makes the predator work.
Now let’s see how AvP completely fails to use any of this effectively, and worse still, actually undermines it. The predators observing the humans before striking is badly used, with no essence of impending doom (they just strike without any decent build up of foreboding), and a perfunctory nod to the strange habits of the predator when taking trophies from its prey; in this case stringing them up. In the first two films this practice was bizarre, brutal and inexplicable; here it adds nothing to the film (other than continuity, maybe). Then when the predators do go toe-to-toe with the aliens, the predators are made to look vulnerable and a bit impotent. What should’ve happened is the predators initially mash up the aliens in really cool ways, only to be caught out by particularly wily ones or maybe overwhelmed. The predators die too easily, and because of this are underused. When you see humans die, you’re supposed to sympathise with them and wish them to survive, but since the predators weren’t humanised (until later on) you’re not really fussed if they die, it’s just a spectacle. If the predators had kicked some more arse we would’ve been rooting for them a bit more, and then their deaths might have served some purpose other than to completely destroy the image that the first two films built up. There’s just not enough of predators doing cool stuff.
The aliens are supposed to be sleek and absolutely terrifying. The monsters from your nightmares, the one creature you’d least like to be stalked by. They lurk in the dark, keeping you permanently on edge because they can strike at any time and there’s nothing you can do to stop them. The perfect killing machine. Well, that’s how the first and third Alien films portrayed them, and the second one certainly didn’t make them lightweights when the human has a gun. They were terror creatures that paralysed humans with fear. AvP failed to play on any of this, because most of the time the aliens are stalking the predators and as has been discussed, there was no connection with the predators, no concern for their wellbeing and hence no fear generated.
There was one scene that really should’ve worked but didn’t: when that scarface guy found himself in the long, dark, narrow triangular corridor and he can just make out something lurking in the darkness up ahead. That should’ve been utterly terrifying; the audience’s knowledge of what the alien is coupled with the bloke’s deep fears despite not knowing what’s going on and having no chance of getting away. But it just wasn’t scary.
Alien 3 suffered from poor characterisation since everyone was bald and pretty similar, but what did work was the brutal, creeping fear of knowing that the alien was lurking in the tunnels, could strike at any time and these poor, depraved bastards had no chance of defeating it. Who could keep their heart-rate completely normal when the alien is slavering all over Ripley? AvP completely failed to use the alien as the tension cranking, nightmarish creature that’s always just lurking in the shadows not far away. In fact, despite all the guns that the humans brought with them, I don’t think they used them to kill a single alien. Aliens should either be the unstoppable monsters that lurk in the shadows, or an overwhelming swarm of cannon fodder. In this film, they were neither. The predator should either have been the mysterious, brutal hunter or the cool, ass-kicking humanoids from outer space. They were pretty much neither.
Now we come to the human characters. What kind of a joker writes characters that just don’t seem like real people, and then casts unconvincing actors to play them. The makers must’ve known that was the case. In these kinds of films, you need characters that seem real, not just pre-packaged victims, and you need people that the audience can connect to or at least like/dislike. The characters in AvP left me with absolutely nothing, they might as well have been mannequins. Alien had a collection of average joes, no one special but at least people that you could meet in real life. Aliens had characters that left an impression upon you (such as Hudson and Vasquez, and even Burke). Even Predator did a fairly good job of getting the audience to know and interested in Dutch’s crack team of commandos.
Tarantino is the master of writing characters who just bounce random bullshit back and forth at each other, but this gives you a sense that his characters are real. This film never once did that, and if you don’t care about the characters then you don’t care about their wellbeing and no tension can be generated. The scariest part, in fact, was when Spud got spooked by that penguin. Anderson obviously knew of the tension-cranking merits of such devices, yet never bothered with anything like that afterwards. Take Spud, the loveable, slightly weasley character with two kids and an infectious outlook. That’s your best effort for writing a character that we might care about? If that’s so then why didn’t he do anything, other than wet himself when it all started going pair-shaped and then get taken by an alien. Considering the characters were discovering stuff that was re-writing the origins of the human species, and then discovering two different alien species, they didn’t seem to phased by the enormity of this. The film completely missed the boat when illustrating the gravitas of the circumstances. An utter lack of depth in all respects.
Yet another gripe: Most of the characters did nothing. They didn’t really use their ingenuity and courage to escape from seemingly hopeless situations, or do anything that might make us root for them. They didn’t do anything admirable. Most of the previous films had some kind of plot-twist or sub-plot that gets revealed a bit after half way through. This film didn’t bother; it didn’t bother doing anything with what it had. The characters were all entirely pointless and served no purpose in the plot, other than just being characters for the sake of characters because you can’t have a film without them. Margh. What was the point of Weyland’s character, other than continuity with the previous films? Ooh we find out he’s not well, surely that’s going to be developed into some kind of plot-twister. And surely he’s going to do something nefarious like the unethical, unscrupulous company man that he represents from the previous films, right? No, he’s going to be a bit annoying and then die by picking an unnecessary fight with a predator.
And then there’s the overall pacing of the film. If you look at any great action/horror film, as it progresses the tension mounts and the set-pieces get more spectacular. And boy, did Jim Cameron know that particular maxim. Anderson doesn’t know anything, especially not that. Alien was all about the tension generated by the down-beat first half. The highlight of the film was undoubtedly the mid-point hand-to-claw fight between the predator and the alien. That was quite cool, but I didn’t like it because it made the predators look weak. There just wasn’t enough cool stuff going on (cool things can be cheap and just thrown in – eg. In one of the Star Wars when a Jedi kicks ass, or in Terminator 2, when Arnie shoots up the entire LAPD with a minigun without killing anyone, or in ROTK, when Legolas takes down that olephant single-handedly; not cinematic genius or anything, just cool).
The characters started dying without doing anything, which was just a bit boggling really, because you think ‘what was the point in them being in the film then’, and because of this apathy the film has nothing to build on, so you end up watching it just in the hope that some cool stuff will happen (aliens fighting predators is cool – but somehow Anderson did it in the least cool way, with the aliens fairly easily decimating the predators with as much ease as they eat up humans). Only once does a predator just kick the shit out of a load of aliens.
And what’s that crap about all their gear being completely useless against the aliens, with wrist blades melting in the acid, and facemasks easily being punched through by the alien’s shooting jaws. You don’t even have to look to the comic to think ‘that’s a bit stupid’, especially when the predators develop all these cool weapons and cloaking devices to fight humans. Since they went to fight aliens, you’d think they’d take the right tools for the job. Even the queen rampage at the end was a bit of a damp squib.
It maybe that one of the problems was that the scenes rarely overlapped. It was a case of ‘then this guy dies, then this happens, then that alien does that, then the queen breaks free, yadda yadda’ so it seemed very formulaic and linear. If the scenes overlapped, then they can enhance and augment each other (eg. Ripley rescuing Newt overlapped with her trashing the queen’s nest (and that’s another thing – how much film-making skill does it take to create a character like Newt and not only stop her from being annoying, but actually work so that you really hope Ripley finds her alive and saves her and stuff. Imagine if Anderson tried to deal with an angle as delicate as that!)).
This film is terrible in a totally inexcusable way, because it has so much weight behind it just showing it how it’s done. How Anderson took all these ready-made gimmicks and managed to break them I don’t know. Just imagine if the film had characters of the calibre of Hudson and Vasquez, with aliens as horrific as in Alien, and predators as mysterious and brutal as in Predator. Ally that with an intelligent plot, competent handling and a terrifying atmosphere and it could’ve done its predecessors proud. But no, they went with the money spinner, completely pissing over the originals in favour of a cheap and sullied dollar. Those *****.
