Whoever Wins, We Lose

Aliens VS. Predator ought to have been an easy home-run. No studio would have the (ripped-out) guts to make an AVP film without any humans, but with that as the primary limitation, the plot ought to have been easy. A team of heavily armed, highly trained marines/space pirates/futuristic private security badasses crash-lands on a planet that turns out to be teeming with aliens, which we quickly discover is the alien homeworld. They run into a Predator hunting party, have a series of escalating battles with both species and along the way discover some of the secrets of how the alien race lives, culminating in a Predator/human team-up against the alien hordes and a final escape on a Predator shuttle. Not many survive and those that do are beaten and bruised. Lots of machine guns, gigantic explosions, macho dialog and general mayhem—a high-velocity acid bloodbath.

But of course, with Paul “I am the worst genre director alive” Anderson at the helm, we got 90 minutes of snoozeworthy incomprehensibile PG-13 rated drivel--the kiddie friendly after school special version of the film. This is not surprising coming from the director behind Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, and Soldier, a man whose best movie is the Sam-Neill-is-the-Devil-on-a-spaceship film, Event Horizon. Sci-fi Channel original pictures are high art compared to this guy’s output. Now Anderson is at it again with an AVP sequel, and from the looks of this lengthy AICN script review, it promises to be as hideous as all the rest of his films.

I continue to be at loss for why Hollywood is so awful at creating good, solid genre films. A film like Doom, for example, ought to be an instant muscles-and-machine-guns man-movie classic; Space marines versus demons seems like a pretty hard concept to screw up, especially when you’ve got The Rock involved. I don’t expect every genre picture to be as fleet as say, Serenity, but we could really do with a lot more Hellboys and a lot fewer Silent Hills. Score infinity plus one for the brain-dead Hollywood machine.