D.C. MOVIE GUYS

Movie critics see movies in a variety of ways. There are press screenings usually held during business hours in smaller venues with only a few colleagues in attendance. Often critics are informed of “word-of-mouth” screenings held in the evening at regular theatres in which the few critics in the house are surrounded by regular folk who have been invited so as to become water cooler critics with the hope that they will be more dependable endorsers of the movie. Rarely do major releases open as did Alien Vs. Predator with the movie unscreened for reviewers leaving them to either ignore the movie or scrambling to see it over the opening weekend.
I normally do not attach much significance to a movie opening unscreened. After all, the same people who will happily screen dreck like Sleepover despite its lack of any shred of entertainment value are the same ones telling you by their inaction that they do not think much of Alien Vs. Predator. I do not believe them on the good and see no reason to take their word for anything else (I am not from Missouri, but my motto is still “Show Me”). So on the opening weekend, I trekked off to the multiplex with the rest of America’s moviegoing horde to make Rupert Murdoch just a bit richer (though to be honest I got in on a pass and saw the movie at one of the country’s few remaining single screen theatres).
Not surprisingly, the movie is a good deal better than its unscreened status would indicate. Ranking all six Alien and Predator movies would lock in AVP solidly ahead of the repulsive Alien3 and hardly among the summer’s worst movies.
Although the combining of creatures whose individual franchises had become exhausted is almost as old as horror movies themselves (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man [1943] is one of the earlier examples), the seeds of AVP were sown in Predator 2 when Danny Glover gains entrance to the space hunters’ ship and walks past a trophy case which contains an alien head (cue appreciative laugh from the quick of eye). But though both are the corporate property of Fox and News Corp. (which including Bill O’Reilly gives 20th Century Fox the ownership of three uncommunicative horror icons), it has taken nearly 15 years of fanzines, video games, and graphic novels keeping up the drum beat before we are finally left with this movie.
As with the two most recent Star Trek movies, that is an awful lot of effort and concern being paid off with damn little story and entertainment. For those who came in late: The Predators are hunters from outer space who have come to earth in 1987 and 1990 to hunt humans (or at least Arnold Schwarzenegger and Gary Busey). They are aided in their most dangerous games with stealth-type camouflage and an array of bladed weapons. The Aliens are just big, nasty bugs that use humans (or any other living thing) as incubators. A few hundred years from now, the aliens will be discovered on an uninhabited planet by a passing mining ship and will make reappearances on three other occasions. They grow very quickly, bleed acid, and seem to have a particular disaffection for Sigourney Weaver.
Let’s see, I think that covers just about everything. Oh, wait the movie. Later this year, a satellite owned by the Weyland Corporation (cue, first knowing laugh, the Weyland-Yutani Corp. will run the ore ship that discovers the aliens in the future and their founder Charles Bishop Weyland—a leader in robotics—will be the face and namesake for their very popular Bishop line of androids which are well known for their loyalty and ingenuity) will discover an inexplicable heat bloom in Antarctica. An expedition will be hastily assembled to dig under the permafrost and uncover a pyramid. It turns out that the Aliens have already come to earth and the bug queen is just waiting for some suitable hosts to arrive before she can begin the new colony hatching.
The humans show up, the bug eggs start hatching, and the face huggers start flying. Meanwhile, the predators show up for what we are told is a centennial hunt that dates back to prehistoric times. A lot of very resilient species seem to have a great deal of time to waste sitting around waiting. The predators attack the humans, the aliens attack everything, and the predators start attacking the aliens. Characters explain everything before getting capped and because this is an Alien movie first, only a girl (Sanaa Lathan) is left to carry on the fight.
B-level horror director Paul W.S. Anderson (not to be confused with the A-level director named Paul Thomas Anderson who directed Magnolia) is of no help here as the characters race around poorly-lit sets, fight a great deal, and never seem to get much done. Although the predator was never anything more than a villain in an Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle (making Arnold positively glib compared to the mute predator), it is sad to see the Aliens degenerate to this after having been so successfully resurrected as a franchise.
While not the worst movie of the summer, Alien Vs. Predator never rises above the most formulaic levels.

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