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Post 17 written Jan 20, 2008 at 12:49
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Allright, here follows my own, quite lengthy, review of this movie.
First off, I really have to say (all brown-nosing aside) that I sincerely thought the Strause brothers did a really good job directorially with this movie, a lot of the angles they choose, the effects and all that really does keep the movie fairly interesting, at least for the first half to two-thirds of it. Sure, it just can't compare to Ridley Scott's "Alien" but come on, this is from what I've understood their first attempt at doing a major feature film on their own. That taken into consideration, I'm predicting a brilliant future career for the brothers and they'll likely in 5-10 or so years time be making movies that'll manage to impress even the most hard-core critics of AvP-R, at least given that their projects get the budget they deserve/need.
What I felt they didn't do so good is, especially towards the end, the movie felt very chopped up, rushed, and hard to understand what was going on in any of the action scenes. I feel that the major problem here is not even so much short choppy cuts, but rather the camera doing way too many close-ups all the time. It should have been pulled back a bit at times for scale and to give a bigger picture of what's going on. The rushed feeling might be a lot due to being forced to cut so many minutes out that'll hopefully be made better in the DVD release (even a few extra seconds do a lot for pacing of a scene) but as somebody has stated, the theatrical should still of course "work" on its own as well. I also can't help but to second what most have said about it being way too dark. It was.
The big, big problem with this movie though, IMHO, is the shitty-ass idea of setting it on earth in the first place. This is a point both movies failed on (even though not as horribly in the first one due to it being set in a pyramid under ice) and I feel no matter what influence the brothers may have had on the final script, an Alien vs Predator movie based on the "war on earth" concept has to fail, and they do.
The reason it will fail is the Alien part of the franchises. Ridley started something off with an epic film that's grand, beautiful, eerie and majestic in a truly otherworldly creepy sort of way. The feeling in alien is a real bone-chiller (well, by those days standards) in everything from the brilliant initial build-up with the ancient derelict ship and hinted origins onto the whole crew being taken out one by one until you're left with loneliness, desperation and panic in a cold, empty spaceship with something frightening and truly alien possibly lurking around every corner until the very end.
Taking something like this to earth in a small-town setting will leave you with a parody at best. Gosh darn me, there's an alien in our back yard, isn't there? Oh look, there's an alien in little Timmys lunch box. Oh dear, there's an alien in the trunk of our car, what WILL we do? Let's run, shall we? It just doesn't work, and it never can. I know the Strauses said they really wanted to avoid making it ridiculous like aliens dancing in front of a McDonalds, but a big part of this movie still felt exactly that way for me (rubber suit guy climbing out of manhole anyone?), simply due to the setting - no amount of hiding the aliens in darkness is going to save that. It'll just create a film that's both too dark AND silly looking.
For the predator side of the story, earth is a great setting because they're all about coming to us, as nomadic hunters. With alien, the story is rather that humanitys greed and desire for an ultimate weapon got our fingers stuck in the cookie jar as a big monster suddenly taps on our shoulders. We messed with something we should have left alone, and now we're screwed. A predator blowing a hole in his own ship and spilling out a bunch of facehuggers to randomly start attacking homeless toothless hobos on earth doesn't quite live up to its legacy. It horribly cheapens the film, and when you start mixing in a genetic cross-breed of these two alien species in the middle as well, you've made a conscious choise to head for disaster, which this film does.
I believe that if the brothers had been hired to do a Predator 3 instead, we would have hordes of predator fans cheering (for an end result that would have been truely good) and the poor alien fans would be left unscarred. In this case, unfortunately, we get a film that really screws both franchises over and leaves us with something that for the most part only the younger predator-only fanboys can get overly excited about. The vast majority of those of us who grew up with these movies and saw most of them as they were gradually being released over the years, one by one, eagerly anticipating the next chapter in each franchise, are likely to be very saddened by where they have gone today. I know I am.
This is also coming from a person who has really ultimately hated the concept of an Alien vs Predator movie from the very start. It works in the games, and it works in the comics maybe, but I just don't feel that mixing the two on the big screen was ever, or will ever, be a good idea. Get us a decent AvP3 game and get Ridley started on a final chapter of the Alien saga instead. The Strauses would be a great pick for P3.
I don't blame the Strauses at all for this movie being a disappointment to me though, on the contrary I stand by my initial statement that I feel they did remarkably well for a first feature film, and I'll be keeping an eye open for any future projects of theirs. I just personally feel that both "AvP" and "AvP:R" are films that simply should have never been made. But then again, I feel similarly about for example "Alien: Resurrection" and I have to admit I cringed more in my seat when the newborn popped on screen, than I did at any point throughout AvP:R. But Resurrection had strong characters with strong acting and that "sci-fi feel", due to being set in a spaceship, that'll still keep you fairly interested. Anything "Alien" set on earth is going to suffer from lacking that.
All rambling aside, I feel the brothers ultimately did "sort of" deliver -- the Wolf and the homeworld shots DO make this a must-have in my DVD collection, and I'm also holding on to the hope that the longer edition can still make it more enjoyable -- but I feel the horrible script, the low budget, the poor acting (thinking mostly about homeless people and other B-grade characters here, not the leading girls and boys so much) and the very concept itself of Aliens, Predators and a Predalien together on earth, fails miserably.
I think the Strauses got screwed over by Fox with this deal almost as much as the rest of us fans did. I'm still not mentally ready to grade this movie, but it ends up on the bottom somewhere along with the first AvP and Resurrection. If the homeworld sequence is (from what I've understood) closer to the Strauses own vision of how things should be made, then Fox made a HUGE mistake by not giving them a much, much larger budget.
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