Monday, February 7, 2005
Alien vs. Predator

The DVD is out. I had the chance to watch AVP again, a movie that I was disappointed in when I saw it the first time in the theatre. The main problem I had with this movie when it first came out was the fact that they mad an attempt to create characters that you were supposed to care about. In most movies, I look for them to develop meaningful characters and let me live through them or at least kill them in some meaningful way that is important to the story, but not when the movie is Alien vs. Predator. I don’t care about the characters and I don’t want to. For all I care you can forget even having characters at all. For that matter you can also get rid of the story as a whole. I don’t care how the Aliens met up with the Predators. All I want to see is when they throw down and fight, and they do, but not until 55 minutes into the movie. What they do with the first 55 minutes of the movie is waist my time with poor character development. Not only do they do a bad job of developing characters, by the time they develop them they kill them off. Granted it took them an hour to do it. This is how you make an AVP movie. Take some aliens, then take some predators, put them in a room, and let them rip each other to shreds. There are 2 good fight scenes in this movie and they are short.

Then there is the acting. Not that I would care about acting in a survival horror movie. But when you spend so much time trying to build characters and story, at least you could hire someone we have heard of, with some small drop of acting talent. The only character I recognize from this movie is Weyland (played by the same actor who plays Bishop in Aliens), which by the way makers of the film add a one second gag with Weyland that Alien fans will have a least one second of enjoyment out of. I am most likely making this movie sound worse than it is, but when you combine two franchises and try to create a movie that people have wanted to see for a long time (Star Wars Episode 1) you better come through big time. Needless to say they dropped the ball on this one. There is one thing that was good about this movie, the ending hints at a sequel. Maybe they can get something good out of this “series” if indeed they make a follow up. One last thing, the DVD promises a “NEW BEGINNING” not seen in theatres. If you’re wondering if you should rent it just to see this “NEW BEGINNING”, don’t bother. It is about 30-45 seconds long and adds little to the story or lack there of.

Posted by Jeff Domer 2005-02-07 16:03:06