Suckage
AvP really, really sucked. I mean, I certainly wasn't expecting a masterpiece, but was at least expecting something fun. What I got instead was perhaps the single laziest exercise in screenwriting I've ever seen.
Plot's like this. Weyland Corporation detects the heat signature of some big pyramid buried a coupla thousand feet under the Antarctic ice. Turns out this is a remnant of an ancient Predator rite of passage. See, turns out that the Predators are who taught humanity things like language and building, and were worshipped as gods. They used the Aliens as their own Most Dangerous Game, and every hundred years or so they'd do this ceremony where they release a queen, let her lay some eggs, let the eggs hatch some facehuggers, let the facehuggers do their thing on some poor humans, and then hunt the resultant aliens. In a big flashback sequence we see the aliens win over a group of predators, which of course nuke everything to hell.
So, it's time for the ceremony now. Predators turn on the pyramid, although it's never explained what it's doing down at the South Pole when the flashback scene showed everything going on in some tropical quasi-Central American tribal scheme. Humans discover pyramid. Humans trigger the pyramid. Queen gets thawed out. Queen lays eggs. Humans get facehugged. Predators show up. Predators kill some people. People discover the rite-of-passage-al weapons that the Predators are suppoed to find. Predators get disconcerted. Everything starts killing everything. Humans get munched, except for our heroine, who teams up with the surviving predator to kill the queen.
Lazy, lazy, lazy. There's already an established alien lifecycle, remember. From the 4 previous movies (okay, 2 of which were pretty shite), it takes days for the facehuggers to implant and fall off. Then after the chestburster does its thing, we're looking at weeks for the alien to reach a semblance of full growth. Stupid whore Paul Anderson couldn't cope with that complexity, so he just ignored it. We go from eggs, to full grown aliens in the space of just minutes of time. Okay, if I'm generous and credit the poor directing with somehow inserting passages of time without giving the audience any indication of them, hours. But that's tops.
Similar laziness oozes from every pore. In one fight, the same alien goes from being huge in comparison to the predators, which it has to be to make the fact that it spears one through the chest with its tail and then lifts the thing completely off the ground, to being little more than man-sized, which it has to be so that the predator can pull off cheesy pro-wrestling moves on the thing. When they have to, the predator's blade weapons are dissolved by the aliens' acid blood. When they have to, the predator's blade weapons are immune ot the aliens' acid blood. And it's somehow a "happy" ending that the heroine is left alone on the antarctic ice, in the dead of antarctic night, which also means it's the dead of antarctic winter, with no warm clothing, or even a hat. For that matter, I thought it was funny when, before all the shit hit the fan, she said something to the extent of "Let's head back to the surface, and start fresh in the morning." Dumb bitch, you're at the south pole. Morning might be 6 months away.
This is a bad movie. It wasn't even funny in an MST3K. It was dull, boring, unimaginative, lazy, and contemptuous to its subject matter, and there was no level on which you could possibly enjoy it.
Plot's like this. Weyland Corporation detects the heat signature of some big pyramid buried a coupla thousand feet under the Antarctic ice. Turns out this is a remnant of an ancient Predator rite of passage. See, turns out that the Predators are who taught humanity things like language and building, and were worshipped as gods. They used the Aliens as their own Most Dangerous Game, and every hundred years or so they'd do this ceremony where they release a queen, let her lay some eggs, let the eggs hatch some facehuggers, let the facehuggers do their thing on some poor humans, and then hunt the resultant aliens. In a big flashback sequence we see the aliens win over a group of predators, which of course nuke everything to hell.
So, it's time for the ceremony now. Predators turn on the pyramid, although it's never explained what it's doing down at the South Pole when the flashback scene showed everything going on in some tropical quasi-Central American tribal scheme. Humans discover pyramid. Humans trigger the pyramid. Queen gets thawed out. Queen lays eggs. Humans get facehugged. Predators show up. Predators kill some people. People discover the rite-of-passage-al weapons that the Predators are suppoed to find. Predators get disconcerted. Everything starts killing everything. Humans get munched, except for our heroine, who teams up with the surviving predator to kill the queen.
Lazy, lazy, lazy. There's already an established alien lifecycle, remember. From the 4 previous movies (okay, 2 of which were pretty shite), it takes days for the facehuggers to implant and fall off. Then after the chestburster does its thing, we're looking at weeks for the alien to reach a semblance of full growth. Stupid whore Paul Anderson couldn't cope with that complexity, so he just ignored it. We go from eggs, to full grown aliens in the space of just minutes of time. Okay, if I'm generous and credit the poor directing with somehow inserting passages of time without giving the audience any indication of them, hours. But that's tops.
Similar laziness oozes from every pore. In one fight, the same alien goes from being huge in comparison to the predators, which it has to be to make the fact that it spears one through the chest with its tail and then lifts the thing completely off the ground, to being little more than man-sized, which it has to be so that the predator can pull off cheesy pro-wrestling moves on the thing. When they have to, the predator's blade weapons are dissolved by the aliens' acid blood. When they have to, the predator's blade weapons are immune ot the aliens' acid blood. And it's somehow a "happy" ending that the heroine is left alone on the antarctic ice, in the dead of antarctic night, which also means it's the dead of antarctic winter, with no warm clothing, or even a hat. For that matter, I thought it was funny when, before all the shit hit the fan, she said something to the extent of "Let's head back to the surface, and start fresh in the morning." Dumb bitch, you're at the south pole. Morning might be 6 months away.
This is a bad movie. It wasn't even funny in an MST3K. It was dull, boring, unimaginative, lazy, and contemptuous to its subject matter, and there was no level on which you could possibly enjoy it.