Aliens vs Predator (REPOSTING)

Rating:	★★
Category:	Movies
Genre:	Science Fiction & Fantasy

I should have figured it out from the start. What with a cheesy tagline like “Whoever Wins, we lose” and a lousy acronym for its title, I should’ve read the context clues and immediately determined that it would be a waste of time and money.

AVP, or so aptly named, Aliens vs. Predator (or better yet, Agonizing and Vituperatively Painstaking), was a masterpiece in failure. The story was so poorly constructed and full of obvious loopholes and lapses in character, and the action was only interesting enough to be gory.

I mean, the idea that these pyramids where these battles were conducted to initiate a predator-being into warriorhood came from ancient civilizations is completely, and nonsensically farce! I mean, if the Aztecs and the Egyptians and the what was the other ancient civilization came together to build these things to “revere” the predator race, wouldn’t it have come up in some form of ancient text? Wouldn’t it have at least been like some sort of theory or long-held superstition by the archeologists that came with the expedition?

I mean, it tried to be interesting by mixing and matching “specialists” from different fields of study, like a super genius bio chemist or something, to a world-renowned archeologist to a skilled ice expedition trekker-slash-guide… but the character development and background story (not to mention each character’s involvement in the progression of the story itself) was so lacking that it failed to fill the lapses in the story and kept me wanting so much more.

I mean come on… they did establish that the archeologist dude was well-versed in ancient text... but they themselves said that the writings and hieroglyphs in the place were from the three different civilizations… and the guy could read it all and thus give away the whole plot in one sitting… gee-zus what the hell was the director thinking?!

I admit, seeing Aliens battle it out with the Predators was very cool, but everytime the movie came back to the characters it just reeked of unprofessional screenplay writing. I mean, even if I was an idiot with an IQ of a 2 year old buffalo named Bubbles I’d still think the story was stupid!

The one thing that could’ve made my day was seeing Lance Henriksen do something cool versus the Aliens, thus establishing his foothold as the model for a new line of cybernetic human beings for the future… namely a Cyborg named Bishop. They only hinted that he was the father of robotics by showing, for a split second mind you, a magazine on robotics with his face on the cover and the heading reading something like this dude is the revolutionary new robotics whatchamacallit.

I mean, it even lacked romance… which is essential for a B movie action flick… it could’ve drawn more crowds if maybe the other characters that died immediately showed their boobs or something. Call me chauvinistic, but Hollywood’s losing its touch with the testosterone-driven, male-dominated market for action flicks.

In sum, AVP failed to even pique my interest. The story was wholly predictable and completely implausible, the cast, entirely blasé, and the action, uninterestingly ho-hum. It had its few movie moments, like when the bio chemist dude was already entangled and then the things started to you know… (hehehe… no spoilers here folks, sorry!)… well, that was a moment built for the B movie history books. But even the action sequences which humiliatingly and pathetically tried to John Woo-slash-Matrix its way into extravagance, flopped miserably and only made it look like a cheap photocopy of an already overused original.

I only rank it at 2 stars because, mercifully, it comes with a Hollywood ending (complete with twist and that tried-and-tested formula of leaving you with more excitement, or a bad taste in your mouth, which ever comes first), it showed some awesome cloaking special effects and brutally effective weapons and high class alien-predator gore, and lastly, because Lance Henriksen was in it.

In the end, I am left with only Bishop’s final words to Ripley… “Not bad for a human…” Not bad is right… it should actually be “terrible”, “lousy” and “garbage of a movie”!

P.S. If the director or the writer gets dragged out into the street and shot I won’t be at all surprised.