From: (No Email available)

Date: 2004-08-18 07:47:21

Comment:

just saw AVP... at first i was indifferent. now i've had 12 hours to let it soak in.... now it really burns.

where do i begin?
Let me start with my first love, the aliens.
Luckily they went back to the smooth-domed Giger version,complete with back tubes and long tail.
There were jaw-drooling scenes that were straight out of the first alien movie, part of me thought 'they've done it right!', but mostly i just thought, 'seen it!'.....they showed the intelligence they should've, and the group mentality to rescue the queen (the kind of self-sacrificing that was the only trait i liked from 'resurrection'). the queen was a bit large, but the speed and movements were done very well for cgi/model work. hell, i'm just glad they went back to propwork!
when i think about it, the aliens were the only solid, unaltered things in this film, yet we know nothing new about them- unless you consider that a frozen queen can be revived with a few jolts of electricity.......the biggest gripe is the alien/host germination and growth time, and how it's been sped up for the purposed of this extremely rushed movie.

and then there's the predator.

here's where my geek is gonna show. you see, i have studied the other two predator movies tirelessly,(something this director obviously hasn't) while i was making my (award winning!) predator costume for halloween/dragon-con '95.........yes. i know. o.k, stop laughing.

...when i saw the E! special on the making of AVP, the art directors nervously admitted they had 'taken some liberties' with the predator's face, to make it more of a 'leading man' and less 'insect like'...(what? insect? are we talking about the predator?)....however all of the animatronic heads they showed were dead on and looked awesome.........i guess because they were showing the head from the FIRST movie.
let's just say that when the mask came off in this one, my first thought was- 'so that's what a predator with down syndrome would look like'........my wife, who could give a shit about predators, said out loud during the movie that it looked fucked up.
they've added teeth to the inner mouth, pushed it out more, pulled the outer mandibles back-and the mandible skin, when not stretched,folds like curtains...so if they were afraid that the other predator mouths looked too much like 'a pussy with teeth', then they have accomplished making this one look like 'your grandma's pussy with more teeth'....

most of the other inaccuracies fall with the predator, so let's continue.....

alien blood eats predator's weaponry. well.... sometimes.
if you were too distracted by the choppy direction during the fight scenes, here's the count:

-blood eats through the hand blades, but not the spears or the spinning blade comprised of hand blades, apparently.
-it eats through body armor, but not the net gun (the alien's tail got it free)
-when it's weaker, it can still eat through flesh enough to scar,- so what did the chick Lex wrap her arm in in order to use the alien head as a gauntlet (which, while looking COOL, just didn't make sense.)

other predator stupidity:
the digital heiroglyphics scattered throughout the temple, etc....that would be like if we wrote everything based on our digital watch. the red digital shit is the DIGITAL INTERPRETATION of the predator alphabet/number sysytem, not the way it would be written or carved anywhere.
Heat vision.....that red blurry shit you saw on screen, was supposed to be the predator's high tech way of seeing heat in darkness. Apparently we can make that look cool in 1987, but not in 2004. In 2004, it looks like shit, not to mention, the pred's only see all red when without thier mask (see pred 1's fight w/arnie)..and you would think it would be even easier to see warm people on the surface of fucking ANTARCTICA, but no, the are merely red-orange blobs on a red background.
The temple itself. nice and dark. i think the director thought that if it was dark enough, we wouldn't notice how many facehuhgger/pred mask reliefs were reused in every fucking background.
-we get it, it's an alien-predator temple. can we see some architecture?

SPOILER ALERT- endings-
so when all is said and done, how do we end the film?...we can't think of anything good, so we'll do an 'homage' to predator 2 and the danny glover weapon handoff...and not even a cool weapon handoff that alludes to anything....no wait, we need MORE.. something BIGGER, more HOLLYWOOD! we'll have a chestburster come out of our dead hero predator! ...ooh ooh, and it'll be sort of an alien/predator hybrid too, right fellas?
i can see the writers jerking themselves off in that L.A. office over that one. while i'm torn about the alien taking on characteristics of the host,as first shown in alien3 (i.e, how will we ever know what a 'pure' alien looks like?), this shot was just totally bullshit...like every 80's monster movie where an eggs cracks open or a hand comes out of the ground at the end, it was a slap in the face that makes you embarrassed to be there when the lights come up.
if the preds can see inside pregnant women (pred2) or cancer victims (weyland) couldn't they see inside their own guy? you could say that maybe they knew and wanted to carry on for the next battle, but they would have put him in a better place than the table of the bridge.
Alot of people (online reviews) can't even figure out how he got impregnated, which speaks highly of the shitty editing/directing. it was when he had taken his mask off for his 'marking ceremony', and a second facehugger jumps down before the bad edit. Also another sign that the alien growth cycle can be stretched or shrunk to fit your shitty story. Alot of fans then say, if he had an alien in him, why did aliens and the queen still attack him- if the alien didn't attack ripley in alien3? my guess is that in alien3, it was because it was the only solitary alien, and kept with that whole preservation instinct, or because it sensed she had a 'queen' in her.
long story short, just an xray zoom into the predator, showing the alien would have been enough.
but again, technically, it should have come out upon his death, or, you know, when that queen tail impaled his chest too..... or maybe that was his stomach. dunno. bad filming.

final gripes.
-what did weyland want? a cure for cancer? to live as long as the predators? did he and his corporation have any idea what was down there? surely there's record of the events from pred1 or pred2 out there, i mean, the gov't in pred2 knew about the predators....is it knowledge or technology taken from this discovery that boosts weyland/yutani into being the large space faring corporation of the future? no. everything but a spear has been destroyed. we can only assume that the 'yutani' in weyland-yutani now comes from a shareholder or partner taking over, making it into the eveil megacorp we see later, but we don't know. As far as we know, weyland was a decent guy that wanted to do something before he died. There's no other motive explained.
-preds bleed green and wound and scar greenish too, as seen in pred2...so why does this guy's forehead scar look as red and scabby as my knee when i fall off a bike?
-the queen convieniently drags this dingleberry of a chain (yeah, the preds use chains,it seems)
that ultimately does her in...while she's getting dragged over the cliff, she couldn't break the chain with her tail, or one of those many arms?
- now we have an alien queen in the antarctic sea. we've just been shown they can be re-awoken with electricity if frozen. yet no alien movies have us scouring the seas for aliens, just outer space. so weyland-yutani develops spaceships to look for the elusive alien, meanwhile, there's one on earth....and has been for centuries. also, anyone that has seen dave letterman's 'will it float' could tell you that a water tower, even if frozen solid, will float, not pull the queen down. .....if anything, it should have been the other way around. the tower pulling her in, but then her sinking.
really. i could keep going on and on. suffice to say, that two icons of my youth and teendom have been raped by paul anderson, the genius that brought us 'mortal kombat' to the screen.