Just saw Alien Vs. Predator - Page 2

I looked for a review of it in my paper today and it said that critics were not allowed to see advance screenings of this movie. My low expectations just dropped to zero.

Nomak totally offs himself in Blade 2. He pushes the, um, blade deeper into himself and through the bone casing into his heart and seems at peace doing so. I think that's what happens anyway. I'm going to go watch it and make sure.

And people, about AvP. Relax. I don't see the need for all the hate, it's only a movie.

I thought this was like a speed dating service.

Seriously, I get that some of you don't like the flick but from your posts it seems (to me) that a lot of y'all are offended by this film and that seems a little strange to me.

Hell, I've not seen the film yet so shouldn't have even joined in the conversation. When AvP is released over here then I'll wade into the debate with all guns blazing. I might even be as pissed off as you MM.

My sentiments exactly, except for A) DREAMCATCHER (but I wasn't drunk... wish I was, though) and B) I'm not a professional. I'm an amateur with some education.

Exactly. I can't stand the "it's just entertainment, enjoy it!" argument. We have to be stupid? Granted, some films are meant to be stupid, but they're handled well! I mean, look at THE JERK. This film is in no way logical, but it's well-done and entertaining! There are many more examples out there, too, probably better than this one.

Get out of my head! Seriously, though, my sentiments exactly.

Again, I suggest those of you upset by this film to check out some Dark Horse graphic novels. They're a little more graphic than PG-13.

Messiahman wrote:

Okay you can officially count me in the pissed-off crowd. What pisses me off you ask? The way that the execs at Fox seem to be so clueless about their franchises. The way the let this fucking HACK Anderscum come in and write a script that effectively takes everything that we know and love about these franchises and chucks it out the window. Noone at Fox could care less about the story content or if it is true to the respective series. All they see is $ signs. Kiss story continuity goodbye because according to Fox and Andershit it don't matter in the slightest. And gore doesn't matter appatrently either. PG-13 will allow the kiddies to flock in droves to this trash like the blind consumers that they are. Yeah Fox just has it all figured out don't they.

Fuck them I won't be supporting this drivel. I guess I shouldn't be surprised after the trainwreck that was Alien Ressurection but why did they have to go and fuck-up the Predator franchise as well?

I too saw the midnight screening last night, and I'm definitely with MessiahMan on this one, by saying the AVP was an extreme disappointment. Be forewarned, spoilers will be contained, as it's really the only way to express how upset i was with this movie, so this review is pretty much for people that allready have seen it.













Let's start with the beginning, shall we. Weyland Corp. Inc's satellite that is making its rounds over the Antarctica discovers an unknown heat source, about 2000 feet below the ice. Worried that someone will beat him to it, and to leave a legacy behind for a dying man, Charles Bishop Weyland assembles a rag-tag group of archeologists, scientists, a few marines and a survivalist. Pretty Ho-Hum run of the mill characters, the only recognizable one other than Weyland being the black marine(The Black "Checkered" guy from Resident Evil) who are given no backstory, and pretty dismissable lines. It takes us a good 20 minutes to get to the actual site of where the pyramid should be, and thus begins the descent into sucktitude. Now, i understand that the Predators being such and advanced and cultured species, that their technology will be greater than ours. But to be able to fly and 100 ton spaceship directly over the human campsite, with the humans making their rounds below a mere 20 feet away? Sense of disbeliefe streched to the max. Than, it takes us another good 20 mins to actually get inside the pyramid, and start the action. Finally, the queen is introduced, shackled by her limbs, and rejuveniated with electricity, she begins to lay her eggs. The eggs are than carried off and a conveyour belt to other rooms in the pyramid, namely, the sacrifical chamber. It is now, that the humans stumble across the predators weapon stash, and decided to take them back topside for closer examination. Instantly, Anderson cuts to a shot of the Pred's using a toned-down version of the earlier pred vision, witness this and begin trucking towards the human as a pack. All filmed in glorious Slow-Mo. Hence to say, it garnered quite a laugh from the crowd, and pretty much set in stone the rest of the cheesey-action to follow. So now, the pyramid is triggered by the removal of the weapons(which the humans can't decide what they are) and the rooms all start to shift and close, as one-by-one, each crew member is cut off from the rest. The eggs end up arriving in the chamber, where 3 of our memorable characters end up, and quickly are dispatched by the face-huggers, with quick cuts of them twitching, jumping, and implanting. And, as stated earlier, the gestation period for these little suckers has gone from hours, to mere minutes. And better yet, they become full xenomorphs quicker than they become chestbusters. Seriously, the whole prcoess took like 10 minutes, none of which we were treated to seeing really. So, now we have 3 xeno',s and 3 preds. The Xeno's make quick work of 3 of the scientists, dragging them back for impregnation, as the pred's make quick work of the all the marines. And finally, a good 45 minutes into the film, we finally see a Avlien/Predator face to face showdown, and the first battle. All in all, the action during this scene was pretty bland, with most of the cool stunts stolen from other movies. Such as the Predator grabbing the aliens tail and swinging it hard against the wall, ala Hellboy, Blade 2. And the scene ended too abruptly, having 2 Pred's get killed as The Net Head Xeno walks away in victory. Anderson could of had a real good set-up here with the net-head, but I'll get to that point later. Now, With the marines dead, and everyone else missing, our hero-trio(who just so managed to stay together in spite of everything else)Weyland, Lex and The Heiroglyphics reading italiano and being stalked by the last Predator. Finally, Lex comes to her senses, actually, its pointed out blantantly by the convient heiroglyphics, that what they are carrying are the pred's weapons. She plees to give it back to him, stating "The enemy of my enemy, is my friend" but Weyland refuses, he needs it to make his mark. AS the Pred slowly advances, Weyland decided to go out as a hero, and tries to torch the pred, only to get skewered by is wrist-blades. They start to hint that this Pred is one of honor, for he oringally passed on killing Weyland, as his vision reveleaed a very sickly man. Lex and the italiano get seperated when attacked by a xenomorph, with Lex killing a Xenomorph with a predator spear. The Pred advances on Lex, and she finally gives the pred his weapon, his shoulder cannon. Hestitant to her at first, even with the return, the Pred. warms up to her as he notices she was able to kill one of the Xeno's herself. Thus, begins the Buddy-Movie of Lex and Pred as they begin the hunt again. They even go as far as to having the Pred. making hand motions and gestures to make Lex aware of what is about to happen. I'm sorry, but just the ticking countdown would of been enough, anyone would realize that its a bomb. Anderson went Too Far in trying to establish a realtionship between the two, and at one point, it actually look liked they were going to kiss. So, with the bomb denonated, the xeno and face-huggers dead, and the queen allready free'd by her army, it looks like Lex and the Pred made it to safety. In what could be one of the worst monster reveales in history, The Queen comes crashing through 2000 feet of ice in just about the same time to took the other 2 to scale it on a moving platform. I really don't need to cover this scene, as my complaints about were allready covered, from the T-rex rampagaing queen, to the stupid demise. I'm sorry, but the alien is not an oxygen breething species, i'm sure it can survive underwater and in freezing cold water. It does have acid in its veins.
Basically, there was nothing new or original brought to this story at all. Everything that could of been cool, would of, had it not allready been done in both the comics and the videogames. What should of been a battle of epic proportions was middled down to standard action fodder, and the film shot inself in the foot by killing of 2 of the pred's withing 5 mins of the battle starting. As for the realtionship between Lex and the Elder, i'm sorry, no one is buying it. There was only one way Anderson could of made this work, had he just stopped and thought about it for a few minutes. Both of the Pred's were killed off early by the same Xeno, who i like to call Net-Head. Had this been the xeno that Lex killed, than I can see some respent and kinship between the two. I mean, to kill a creature that both of my strong allies died up against, I would respect that person. Instead, she just killed any normal Xeno, runiing any believable salvagable connection between the two.

And althought its a point allready covered, Freddy Vs Jason was able to make over 80 million with an R rating. AS a die hard horror fan, I can admit that AVP has more appeal than FVJ, so why the hell wouldn't fox follow suit, it would of been a proven blockbuster. If only the suits would do their god damn research!

10 years of build-up for an extreme disappointment. Well, guess its back to the PC game for the ultimate AVP experience.

Harry Knowles and crew didn't total shit on this film like they did Anderson's other films, so I still have some hope for this movie. Well, I won't know what to think of it until I see it for my self (unfortunately, it won't be tonight, damn you work). I just hope it entertains me.


Harry's review

two more reviews from AICN

This was the very first screenplay I ever read! Must have been in 1998 or thereabouts. It's a good read and Briggs takes the mythology and rules of both franchises seriously. It's set on another planet outside our solar system and what I liked the most about it was that they had all these strange animals from that planet in cages and once the Aliens started to spread they laid eggs into all these different kinds of extraterrestrial animals, which - because the Aliens always take part of their DNA from their host - resulted in all kinds of fucked up Aliens. For example an Alien that "hatched" from a huge extraterrestrial elephant-type creature would look very different from the Aliens that we are accustomed to and which all hatched from humans. Well, there was Cow-Alien and Dog-Alien (depending on which version you watch) in ALIEN 3 but Briggs took it to a whole new level. Very cool stuff! And I flipped for the ending, which, I am told, was taken straight from the comics. This could have made an awesome film and I wonder why FOX didn't go with it and instead hired Anderson to write one of his patented hack-scripts from scratch. Some have suggested that money was the reason but I don't buy this. Briggs' script may have been set on another planet but still most of it took place inside a facility. Sure, there would have been some different creatures and a few glimpses of the planet's dschungle but I don't think that it would have been more expensive than what was filmed by Anderson. I suspect that at least part of the reason FOX abandoned Briggs' script was that it was leaked and had become widely circulated on the interent. Studios don't want to film scripts that everyone can read. That's also the main reason why Protosevich's I AM LEGEND hasn't been made yet. Such a damn shame!

By the way, I realise this is a spoiler in itself, but I just want to know if there is one in the movie (and thats ALL I want to know, I don't want to know if you think it sucked, I don't want to know how it died, I just want to know: is there a hybrid in this movie?


And also, does Lance Henriksen give a typically great performance? Even if the rest of the film sucks noodles, I'm positive Lance will give a great performance. No matter what shit movies he has been in, he has never, seemingly, phoned in any of his roles.

Nick from CHUD pretty much agrees with Harry:

http://www.chud.com/reviews/avp.php3

Out of twelve reviews on RottenTomatoes, one is "fresh", and eleven are "rotten".

Ouch.

I always found that weird the studios feel that way. I mean the scripts you meant (Brigg's AVP and IAL) seem to get a lot of love from the internet fan base (where positive thinking is rare) so I would take that as a sure sign to use those scripts, myself. It's hard to fuck up a solid script everyone loves, so all they would have had to do was find a director with the right vision for the project.

Even after hearing all the negative reviews...believe me no offense to any regular members of the boards. I take ur opinion into consideration, however, I now just need to watch it to see how bad they f#cked it up and to solidify that Anderson should be STK!! STK!!!

Briggs was actually hammered for that script -- because it's almost word for word what the comic/novel was. Believe me, it wasn't just the ending. There are interviews and articles on the web that I've read with the original comic author (or someone, can't quite remember) saying he merely plagiarized. I found that interesting.

So is there a hybrid in this movie or not?

You mean he uses such a good idea as an alien-pred hybrid for all of five seconds?



Strike one.

JereloftheDead wrote:

Knowles is the biggest, fattest PLANT on the whole sight. This is coming from a guy who gave Van Helsing a favorable review and Catwoman an okay review but then said that The Punisher was absolute total shite because it opened the same weekend as Kill Bill Vol. 2, which he favored. The fact is that the guy is completely biased most of the time and is incapable of writing an objective review.

Now, all his other points might be valid because I haven't seen the movie yet, but:

"When a Predator shows mercy on a character because they're ill, I can't expect much more."

I dunno if Nick has seen Predator 2, but it's pretty much established that the Predator won't hunt what it doesn't consider a threat (the Pregnant cop shooting at it, the kid with the toy gun), so maybe he should rewatch that.

I keep hearing mention of a "hero" Alien, the one with the criss-cross scars on its head. How is it a "hero"?

It's not a "hero" in the usual sense of the word. Meaning, it doesn't do heroic stuff. It means that it has distinctive marks (the net scars) and more personality and depth than the other Aliens. I think this new meaning of the term "hero" came out of video games because you can find it in games like STARCRAFT where some of the creatures have like ten times the energy and are bigger than the rest of their kind and they are referred to as "heroes", no matter on which side they stand.

Hero is a term usually applied amongst effects companies. When they require a character to appear more often than others, which means it'll usually have to be more detailed and engineered, it's called the hero. Example: In the case of Savini's work on Romero's zombie flicks, you have the background zombies who usually have pullover masks on, then the 'hero zombies' with detailed facial appliances which are required to do close-up stuff on screen.

Reading this thread I noticed that many people praized the AvP comics and the Peter Biggs script. Well after checking the script out, I realised its a total ripoff of AvP: Prey. I mean theres a female asian character that joins the predators at the end, the lead predator is called Broken Tusk and even the planets name is the same. There are many others similarities. The truth is that Anderson also ripped off some of the elements in Prey.

Having read Prey I must say it actually sucks pretty bad like most of the AvP comics. The aliens are described as bugs, who are being mowed down wave after wave by predators and humans. The predators were rather incompetent as well. Theres a part is Prey where this shy doctor lady drives a swoop bike (yes, like in Star Wars) and notices a predator ship landing. Something happens to the breaks and after running over some predators who die she crashes into the ship, causing it to explode and killing more predators. I mean totally riddiculous. The Machico Noguchi (Prey, Hunters Planet, War) trilogy had some rather big plot holes as well. One minute shes joining the predators, next she founds out they are hunting humans (big suprise), then she turns against the predators to join the humans again!

The best AvP material IMO are the games, namely AvP Jaguar, AvP arcade by Capcom, AvP PC and AvP2. The first games dont have much of a story but they explain the situation nicely, theyve got the atmosphere of the films and great gameplay. AvP2 has a rather complex storyline combined with great gameplay and good multiplayer.

I hope it's better than the crapfests Van Helsing, Hellboy and The Village. I have very low expectations. All I want is to be amused and entertained. The franchises have died long ago so I wasn't expecting a revitalization of them at all. I would take your word MM but you seem to have some serious hatred for every other horror movie ever made. Sometimes I wonder how you can possibly be a fan of horror when 95% of it must be shite in your opinion.

Yep, I totally get you. And I agree to a point. I think I do lower my standards when it comes to horror because I just love it so much. I mean look at Fulci films. They're f'ing horrible. I love them though. I can't get enough of them. Same goes for Japanese horror films. If you watch alot of the Japanese classics I mean of every genre, then you know that the way the horror films are made is very different from the way a drama is. What I mean is they suck with the exception of Audition which is filmed very much like any of the greats. So what am I getting at? I'm not sure what it is but I can appreciate a horror film for the simplistic things. Like Fulci's eye gougings. I love them for those.

Maybe I'll dislike AvP just as much as you. We'll see tomorrow I think.

HELLBOY a crapfest?!? Seek professional help NOW!!

Hellboy was very boring to me. The same old monster/demon. I wanted a little more variation. More like MIB but with demons. I never read the comic so maybe that's my problem but the character did nothing for me. It was the same old superhero plotline.

rottentomatoes.com

26 rotten, 3 fresh.

I'm gunna take a lot of flack for this, but I enjoyed the movie. It might have been just seeing the Predators and the Aliens again. I think this is about a good a movie as Alien vs. Predator could be, considering the director and budget. Sure it would be good to have it be another Aliens, but I don't think there was ever a chance for that to happen. I love both these franchies,(this is the part i'm gunna take flack for,) and I enjoyed all the films in them,(yes even Predator 2 and ALien Resserection) so this movie had a lot to live up to for me. I went in with low expectations, but was suprised at how much I enjoyed it. You should give this a chance.

Also people say that the Predators like heat, so I think that's the point of setting it in Antartic. It's too make the hunt more difficult.

I just got back from the theater a little while ago. I got a medium Sprite, and some nachos with extra cheese. In hindsight, I have to say that the extra cheese was a stroke of genius, since it really is the cheese that makes the nachos. I mean, without cheese, they're just little round tortilla chips, and while they do have a nice combination of crunchy and salty, they are kind of bland. Add cheese to the mix, though, and you've got something special. Add extra cheese, and you don't even have to worry about running out before you've finished your chips; you're almost guaranteed to have some left over.

I think the chips were a couple of days old, since they didn't break as snappily as I like. Speaking of which, why do they insist on making the cheese cup narrower than the chips? If volume is a problem for them, they could always make it wider but shallower; it bothers me that I have to break the chips in half in order to get the cheese on them. It turns a mindless snack food into something that actually requires attention.

Anyway, once the cheese was properly applied to the chip, it was all good. Spicy enough to get your attention, but not spicy enough to send you running to the soda after every bite, and the crunch of the chip lets you know that you're really eating something. Better than popcorn, in my opinion.

Oh, Alien Vs. Predator was playing. That kind of sucked.

I agree with you about that, but he also hates Paul Anderson like he was made of slim fast or something. So I don't see him giving PA not completely shit review he didn't deserve.

I'm glad someone else mentioned this. From what I can Anderson stayed true to source material. This wasn't an Aliens movie, and it wasn't a Predator movie, it was an Aliens vs. Predator movie. If you want to blame someone for Predator/human team-up blame the comic writers.

You gotta be shitting me.

You do realize that this is a message board for a site that is dedicated to intense debate and discussion of movies, right? That it's peopled with film lovers and professionals who log on to post and read detailed critiques of all manner of films? And that this thread was created for discussion of ALIEN VS. PREDATOR which, hey, is exactly what we're doing?.[/QUOTE]


Since this is a debate what did you enjoy about it? You presented a lot of negatives, but there must have been some things you would at least get some enjoyment out of.

Also there is some confusion with me, because although Mark Verheiden wrote the original 3 series of the Alien comics, on my copies of AVP (the original series) the original writer and creator of the series is Randy Stradley.

brilliant

are you kidding? thats all the kid can do.. the way he littered rubbish like Soldier with director and movie references (homage to Bladerunner??? in Soldier????) was just fucking SAD. The guy's got the brain of a thirteen year old.

Oh thats cool I did not know that. I loved his first three series, though. They got me into comics, I would say, years ago.

And what about Lance? Even when he's not doing nothing he must still rock, right?

shite.

noted.

im a bit too pissed off to be posting now, anyway..

I keep hearing all the time how great the original Soldier script was. Is it online, or can you give an detailed description of what it was about and what was changed?

Am I mad like the most of you out there who've spent money on this film? Nah. The movie had its scant moments...

...but I was bored out of my mind.