I went to see Alien vs. Predator last night. This should not come as a big surprise. My interest in both franchises is intense, but subdued, like acidy blood that boils just below the chitinous surface of a hard organic carapace. This is to say that while my investment in these movies is consistent, it's not overwhelming; it's not like I'm out there buying a full-size cast of the predator helmet or have Giger's Alien poster hanging on my wall or anything. Hell, I don't even own any of the Alien vs. Predator comic books. But all the same I do debate the finer points of the Alien reproductive system with friends and I won't pass up an opportunity to see one of the movies, should it present itself. It was, therefore, a foregone conclusion that I would see this movie on its opening night.
I didn't expect AVP to be good per se. Let's be honest here: both franchises are effectively B-movies with A budgets and some good art design. Not exactly high cinema. I was expecting nothing more than Aliens and Predators duking it out in an extraterrestial grudge-match, with a bunch of humans caught in the middle who die horrible chest-bursting deaths at various points. In this I was not disappointed. The Predators had stealth technology and wrist-blades and shoulder-mounted pulse rifles with three-dot laser targeting. The aliens had acidy spit and face-huggers and mouths-within-mouths. Both creatures made the noises appropriate to their kind. The movie was cloaked in the trapings of its origins and that cloak was cool. But it was only a cloak. The beauty was no more than skin-deep.
Alien and Predator, even at their most action-oriented, are slow movies. They build tension up through quiet moments, slow movements and dripping sweat only to explode in a sudden flurry of activity and shouting that leaves someone dead and someone else crying. AVP didn't really have that. It leaned much more towards straight action.
Likewise, Alien and Predator each have a mythos associated with them and it's largely one of inference. Aliens breed by infecting other life-forms and spread and spread and spread if left unchecked. Predators are bad-mother-fucking hunters who collect trophys and go after the biggest, most dangerous game they can find. These are things that you understand by watching the movies. No one tells you these things. You witness it first-hand. You pick it up as you watch. In the best traditions of storytelling, you are shown and not told. AVP wastes time in exposition, including a pre-historic flash-back. The movie flat-out tells us things that, even if we had never seen the movies it's based on (and let's face facts: if we're going to see AVP, we have), we would have figured out ourselves.
Last, the human pressence, the human agency, in the last twenty minutes of the movie could've been cut down a little and the movie only would have been better for it.
Had I made the movie I'd have added another half hour, to bring it up to a full two hours, and all of that would've been time with our favorite two extraterrestial species in the foreground. Sometimes they would've been fighting, sometimes they would've been watching the humans from creepy vantage points. But they always would've been there. I would've also cut the exposition.
To sum up: a fun and worthwhile movie to see, and one which fulfilled the promise of its title, but one which didn't quite go far enough towards matching the style and spirit that made its forebears great.