Those of you who think the first ALIENS VS PREDATOR is a better movie need to get yourselves to a neurologist STAT! In my professional and drunk opinion, the synaptic nerves in your brain aren’t make a full connection, but rather sending off only intermittent arcs of electricity causing you to just barley be able to patch thoughts together. Alright if you need further proof, let’s just look at the facts. The first movie was rated pg-13, the second, R! Now if that alone doesn’t convince you, you might want to consider out patient counseling after that visit to the neurologist. Further the title of both movies was after all ALIENS VS PREDATOR…well we didn’t really see a whole lot of that in the first one. Really all we saw was one glorified WWF style match between the two species…and after that the pulse faded. But we got plenty of low budget close up hand-to-hand combat in the second movie.
This movie in 5-6 years will be hailed as a cult classic! It’s like the script writers took every ALIEN movie, every PREDATOR movie and threw them all into a blender and hit puree, then dumped it onto the film and released it to the unsuspecting public. The result is a splendidly awful mish mosh of loosely connected ideas and themes. The bottom line is that this movie is so bad that it’s good!
The movie makes a sincere effort to start out where the last movie left off. A new species of Alien bursts from the chest of the fallen Predator from the first movie, and then, as Van Leuwen would say….for reasons unknown….a predator ship breaks from the mother craft and heads back to earth. Well naturally all kinds of pandemonium ensue on this lone Predator ship, and though we’re never really clear on why the ship was heading back to earth in the first place, it nonetheless crashes setting up the premise of the movie for us. Face huggers escape, a distress call is sent out to other Predators, and for the next 15 minutes we are subjected to poor character development.
This is where the movie really begins to shine. One of the main characters is named Dallas (a throwback tot the first Alien movie). Another main character (Reiko Aylesworth….Kelly) is supposed to be like Ellen Ripley and hold a Ripley-Newt dynamic with her estranged daughter. It never for a second comes off as believable, but is nonetheless charming. Then we march in the secondary characters such as Ricky (Dallas’s younger brother) and his love interest Jessie (Kristen Hager). We get to see her in mismatching undergarments right before one of her ex boyfriend’s entourage gets eaten in a swimming pool by an alien. By the way guys she’s real hot and you can buy a framed, signed photo of her nude on E-Bay for about $44.95. But you better get to it before I do because it’s almost black out time here for me on the east coast and I love not remembering what I order. Anyway back to the review. A lone Predator comes to Earth homing in on the distress call and proceeds to erase any evidence of either Predator or Alien with a seemingly inexhaustible vile of blue goo that dissolves everything it touches. Then we come to the sewer battle. It is the one scene in the movie that completely legitimizes this movie for me. It’s dark , creepy, and ratchets up the suspense properly. If the rest of the movie had maintained the tone of this scene we would’ve had more than just a cult classic but a perhaps a genuine classic…wishful thinking, I know. The movie goes on to portray an otherwise quiet mid-western town descending into horrific chaos. The problem here is that we never actually see it, we only hear the shrieks of Aliens and the pathetic cries of humans…budget issues I’m sure. The movie ends with survivors making a desperate run for the last remaining helicopter in town and the Predator and Pred-Alien trying to out cliché each other with concentrated amounts of references from all other preceding movies in the franchises.
So does this movie work drunk…I say yes. I saw an intended vision in this movie while under the influence. Perhaps it wasn’t communicated effectively but it was there. Furthermore you must consider that the Strauss brothers aren’t directors but are really visual effects artists…so they’re carnal not spiritual people and lack the means to properly communicate they’re vision to you…the paying audience.
This movie is such a mess that it is impossible not to appreciate it…. I give it 5 out of 6 empty bottles. Let me know what you think!