Wednesday, August 20, 2014

AVP: Alien vs. Predator Review





Forty five minutes into this film, and the intensity was unbearable. I break into a pretty serious sweat, and my nerves are fried. Where is the creature? It could be hiding behind any nook, any cranny...it could be waiting for the perfect time to strike. My skin is crawling just typing this because I am reliving the experience all over again. It will be a miracle if I can get any sleep at all tonight. This will haunt me for quite some time.

You know, I am reading that first paragraph again and I just realized it might be a tad misleading. AVP: Alien vs. Predator is a terrible film. I mean holy shit, it is a film about the Xenomorphs from the Alien franchise fighting the Predators from that amazing action film appropriately titled Predator, and yet the final product is absurdly boring. Remember that time when Ripley saved Jonesy? Remember when Carl Weathers' arm went flying off in Predator? Cherish these moments, because nothing even remotely interesting happens during this entire film. Not one thing. I will never discuss this film with someone. What would we talk about? Nothing happens. Way too much time is spent following these bland human characters, none of which are developed in any way so when they die, I thought "oh hey, that guy died" because why would I give a shit to learn his name?

Why waste so much time on poorly written people? Just have the damn aliens fight the damn predators. No one seeing this film needs any semblance of a plot or reason to become emotionally invested, especially when Paul W.S. Anderson is in charge. Alien vs. Predator never had a chance to be a film with any real substance, so just skip it and stop pretending to craft something worthwhile. The opening scene should have been a Predator throwing some sort of weapon at an Xenomorph and then they just sorta kill each other for 90 minutes. At least then I would have given credit to Anderson for knowing how stupid this film was destined to be and thus embracing some non-stop poorly executed action sequences.

I should clarify the way I started this review. Exactly 45 minutes into this film, my wife called for me in the other room because a giant moth was loose, flying recklessly through the air, dive bombing anything in sight. I grabbed a shoe and prepared for battle, and my oh my what a battle it was. Ten epic minutes later and I stood over the corpse of my enemy, laughing at its dumb dead body as I tasted the sweet flavor of victory.

After I walked back into the living room, I glanced at the paused image on the screen and reality set back in. I was about to watch the rest of AVP. Perhaps the moth had seen a moment or two of the film and that was why it went all batshit kamikaze. The moth no longer wanted to live, it could no longer justify inhabiting a world that contained such awful cinema, so it went out in a blaze of glory.

Godspeed, my disgusting recently deceased enemy. You were a worthy opponent and, in the end, you were the winner all along.




0.5/5

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