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Old 12-20-2008, 11:09 PM
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AvP - What do YOU hate about it?

First of all, if you are someone who says "I hate this movie!!!" "Fuck off for liking this!!" etc., stay out of this thread.

I revisited the flick, and I must say it has grown a bit on me. Guilty pleasure, most definitely. Being a hardcore fan of both franchises since I was a kid, it was one of my life-long dreams come true on the big screen. Even after playing the original AvP game and reading around a dozen comics on the premise, my anticipation for the flick was tremendous.

Now, onto the flick's positives.

First, the setting. Trapped inside a pyramid which shifts every 10 minutes, closing old doors and entrances and opening new ones leading deeper into the pyramid, with hordes of Aliens running around alongwith cloaked Predators, dark brooding shadows on the walls, huge shrieking sounds from around the corners...it couldnt have gotten any better.

To add to it, an Alien Queen laying eggs and breaking free towards the end, all pissed off (ala Aliens), and not 1 or 2, but 3 Predators! Anderson borrows heavily from all 4 Alien flicks and both Predator flicks, and concocts a mishmash which should have been a BO smasher.

But it wasnt.

Sadly, the flick is overwhelmed with faults which even the normal movie-goer who hasnt seen any Alien or Predator flick previously, would find hard to swallow. The PG-13 cut made by Fox to cater to the young audiences obviously didnt help at all, either. Staunch supporters of Paul W S Anderson would argue that Fox's chopping resulted in the final product becoming a complete mess, but you cant take away the fact that Anderson DID make the entire movie, and a lot of the faults in it were his doing. Let's see if we can tweak them accordingly. We ll keep the comics and vid-games out of the equation here, and go with the franchises only.

FAULT - The choice of Antarctica was to inject the atmosphere of isolation, as in Nostromo, Hadley's Hope, Fiorina-1, etc. But that was a huge tactical error which backfired back on Anderson because Predators do their hunting only in the hottest months (referenced in both Predator flicks), plus Aliens dont like the ice either (they used the air-shafts for moving in the previous flicks, plus their hive was made right below the huge fusion reactor in Aliens, which shows their affinity for heat). Ergo, both species stay away from the snow.

TWEAK - What if Weyland's satellites had discovered the heat signature from the middle of the Amazon rainforests, in the deep jungle? Or even an African country near the equator? It would have made the pyramid angle much more believable, plus the setting would have been more perfect.

FAULT - If Predators had been hunting Aliens for centuries, how come they havent made better weapons to combat them yet? What were the plasma blasters doing inside a sarcophagus, instead of on the Predator ship? And how come the Queen Alien was chained and frozen with chains of a metal which could be easily dissolved by Alien blood-acid? If that was the case, the Queen Alien could have easily set itself free a long time back, and not in the hunt of 2004. It is not plausible.

TWEAK - An added scene, in which the Predators are stripped off all their latest weapons and given only a selected few, which would ensure their survival (if the whole proving themselves worthy warriors angle was to be taken into account). The net, the spear, the discs, the wrist-blades, and the Plasma Blasters (and the ticking hand-bomb, for the worst case scenario)...enough ammo to keep a horde of Aliens at bay. Heck, the Colonial Marines had a LOT more than that, but they still got their butts kicked. And all the Predators surviving for a much longer period than 2 of em getting killed in the very first fight scene itself.

FAULT - The Alien life-cycle was depicted as a very short and quick one here. No gestation period, nothing. Embryo in, chest-bursters out...in no time. In both Alien and Aliens, all eggs hatched do not open at the same time, just because the Queen Alien doesnt lay them all down at once, but one after the other. Another very obvious and glaring error. And what the fuck was the slo-mo Matrix-esque scene of facehuggers jumping doing in an AvP flick?

TWEAK - They should have shown it as two separate teams. One team stumbles across the hole which was already dug, and asks the other team to stay back while they investigate the possibility of another drilling "opponent" team below. If all was right, they would signal the second team to come in. It would be this first team which got impregnated with the embryos, and when they came back to their senses, send a SOS to the second team to come pull em out. When the second team arrived, the chestbursters would come out. A simple 10-minute added scene such as this would have solved yet another big flaw. The slo-mo should have been scrapped.

FLAW - The Predator becoming a sidekick to the human character. This is the hardest plot angle to swallow. Even if Anderson argued that he was following that one comic's story (where a Predator acknowledges a female human as a "fellow warrior" when she kills an Alien), the whole scenario of the entire scene is somehow hard to fathom, given the Predator's "set of guidelines which it follows during a hunt". Even Ripley, inside the Loader in Aliens, was having a hard time keeping herself away from the jaws of the attacking Alien Queen. Our heroine here doesnt even flinch or move her head side-to-side to protect herself, (even during the climax) and neither gets a spot of acid-blood on herself when she "accidentally" impales the Alien on the Predator's spear.

TWEAK - The Predator should have blasted her to smithereens right then and there, and the rest of the plot should have followed the Predators hunting down the Aliens, till the end. There are no dialogues once the human group is dispensed with, anyway. It would have made the whole climax a lot more believable, and would have catered to the audiences' appetites.


I can think of 4-5 more tweaks, but I ll give it a rest now. The whole purpose of making this thread, is because after watching AvP: Requiem, AvP looks like a masterpeice in comparison. Requiem is easily the worst of the entire lot.

So what are your thoughts, fanboys and movie-lovers of HDC alike?
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Last edited by _____V_____; 12-20-2008 at 11:13 PM.
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Old 12-21-2008, 06:57 AM
Phalanx Phalanx is offline
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I think in a lot of cases your observation about this movie having to live up to a lot is what's working against it.

I don't HATE the film as such...just don't like it all that much.
The human characters, not great, ok, but...whatever.
Could be just me but I felt the "black chick" seemed to just be an effort to one-up Ripley as an anti-stereotype, wait...they already had a tough chick, oh hey, make her black?
I was a bit disappointed at the fight the predators seemed capable of holding up - I mean, is this not a species they've been training to kill? I know it's a bit of a right of passage, but they pretty much got slaughtered for the better part.
Atmosphere is largely what it comes down to, not say, as little (or non-existant) as the atmosphere was in AVP2, but still, a little lacking for my liking.

But other than that, I didn't mind that they might've messed with the continuity of the series as a lot of people seem to bitch about...I didn't mind the whole "pyramid" and "alien trap" thing...nothing big against this film, but I wouldn't buy it, or recommend it to anyone not interested in the series in the first place.
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Old 12-21-2008, 07:35 AM
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I actually felt very dissapointed at the wasted potential this film had. 2 of the 3 Predators were killed way to quickly and the face offs between the 2 breeds were much too short. I can sort of understand the teaming of the woman/Predator as it was drawing influence from one of the comics but I take your point about it being a little unbelieveable. I think one of the main problems is the Paul Anderson is such a hack director and watching AvP one wonders if he actually saw any of the other films or just decided to ignore the 'rules', such as the Alien gestation period. Newcomers to the film series would have enjoyed this more then hardcore fans.
AvP2, whilst not a great film by any stretch certainly improved on the first, finally people actually got to see what they wanted, the Predator kicking 10 shades of shit out of the Aliens.
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Old 12-21-2008, 12:38 PM
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alkytrio666 alkytrio666 is offline
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I'd really like to hear from a lot of people on this because the levels of hatred may vary depending on the person.

I haven't seen it since I saw it in theaters, but what I remember being the most dissapointed about was the ending- so obviously this next bit contains SPOILERS! :

A human-predator team-up? Are you kidding me? It seemed like such a juvenile way about things, and it alienated (pardon the pun) the Aliens so that they were the bad, beastly monsters and the predators were the creatures who have to dig the humans out of the shithole.
Like I said, I haven't seen it in a while, but wasn;t there even a little human-predator handshake towards the end, and then the predators left in peace? I felt cheated.
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Old 12-21-2008, 03:29 PM
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V - what, you trying to one-up me on my Generous Critic challenge? ;)

...

And to Alky's observation,

***CONTINUES SPOILERS***

Quote:
Originally Posted by alkytrio666 View Post
I'd really like to hear from a lot of people on this because the levels of hatred may vary depending on the person.

I haven't seen it since I saw it in theaters, but what I remember being the most dissapointed about was the ending- so obviously this next bit contains SPOILERS! :

A human-predator team-up? Are you kidding me? It seemed like such a juvenile way about things, and it alienated (pardon the pun) the Aliens so that they were the bad, beastly monsters and the predators were the creatures who have to dig the humans out of the shithole.
Like I said, I haven't seen it in a while, but wasn;t there even a little human-predator handshake towards the end, and then the predators left in peace? I felt cheated.
I agree. I was actually slightly offended that screenwriter/director Anderson obviously thought his audience so riddled with spineless MORONS that we would appreciate such tripe. I was OFFENDED.

Also, I remember the movie's TAGLINE: "NO MATTER WHO WINS, WE LOSE."

The human/predator team-up completely negated that delicious hyperbole... WE WON! THE HUMANS WON! ARGH!

I wish that he had been more balls-to-the-wall-hunt-em-all instead of this cliched crap. That bothered more than anything else. I was incredibly disappointed that the Alien was the Big Bad while the Predator, well, was just a big scary teddy bear.
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Old 12-22-2008, 05:22 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Phalanx View Post
I think in a lot of cases your observation about this movie having to live up to a lot is what's working against it.

I don't HATE the film as such...just don't like it all that much.
The human characters, not great, ok, but...whatever.
Could be just me but I felt the "black chick" seemed to just be an effort to one-up Ripley as an anti-stereotype, wait...they already had a tough chick, oh hey, make her black?
I was a bit disappointed at the fight the predators seemed capable of holding up - I mean, is this not a species they've been training to kill? I know it's a bit of a right of passage, but they pretty much got slaughtered for the better part.
Atmosphere is largely what it comes down to, not say, as little (or non-existant) as the atmosphere was in AVP2, but still, a little lacking for my liking.

But other than that, I didn't mind that they might've messed with the continuity of the series as a lot of people seem to bitch about...I didn't mind the whole "pyramid" and "alien trap" thing...nothing big against this film, but I wouldn't buy it, or recommend it to anyone not interested in the series in the first place.
You actually nailed it on the first line itself, Cheebs. Look at what this flick had to stand up against - Alien, Aliens, Alien 3(loved a lot more today than its initial release), Alien: Resurrection, Predator & Predator 2. Not to mention the hype generated by the vidgames and the comics themselves.

Which brings me to one of the points I want to make here...did people reject this because it went against what they knew in the franchises? Or did it generate so much criticism because Fox scrapped Alien 5 with a possible Cameron/Scott/Weaver team-up to make this?

Remember, it generated plenty of cash so Fox wont be complaining.

But where does it stand for the fans? Because we still laud mindless entertainers like Wanted, but we get our axes out when AvP is mentioned?


Quote:
Originally Posted by Rodus View Post
I actually felt very dissapointed at the wasted potential this film had. 2 of the 3 Predators were killed way to quickly and the face offs between the 2 breeds were much too short. I can sort of understand the teaming of the woman/Predator as it was drawing influence from one of the comics but I take your point about it being a little unbelieveable. I think one of the main problems is the Paul Anderson is such a hack director and watching AvP one wonders if he actually saw any of the other films or just decided to ignore the 'rules', such as the Alien gestation period. Newcomers to the film series would have enjoyed this more then hardcore fans.
AvP2, whilst not a great film by any stretch certainly improved on the first, finally people actually got to see what they wanted, the Predator kicking 10 shades of shit out of the Aliens.

See, a preconceived notion can actually kill whatever potentially entertaining moments a movie has. Paul W S Anderson is actually a competent director...not great or brilliant or awesome, but his Event Horizon and Resident Evil have been entertaining, for the most part. And thats what he is.

One shot of Alice standing in a empty city is enough to take the breath away.

He might not have any sort of potential, but I seriously doubt that he has made a flick which was totally his. Studios do have a pretty big say in the flicks they pump money into, and if you arent a director who's got an ass full of power, you cant do much but sit back and let em manipulate stuff to their liking. Not to mention, the expectations of the fans of the franchises he has dealt with, so far.


Quote:
Originally Posted by alkytrio666 View Post
I'd really like to hear from a lot of people on this because the levels of hatred may vary depending on the person.

I haven't seen it since I saw it in theaters, but what I remember being the most dissapointed about was the ending- so obviously this next bit contains SPOILERS! :

A human-predator team-up? Are you kidding me? It seemed like such a juvenile way about things, and it alienated (pardon the pun) the Aliens so that they were the bad, beastly monsters and the predators were the creatures who have to dig the humans out of the shithole.
Like I said, I haven't seen it in a while, but wasn;t there even a little human-predator handshake towards the end, and then the predators left in peace? I felt cheated.
Same here. We never had an AvP thread open for discussion before, because there was never much of a need for one.

"Whats to discuss here? The movie sucked, it got critically bashed, we hated it, said "FUCK YOU!" to Paul Anderson, and moved on."

Thats the attitude this flick left behind in its wake.

But...do me a favor. If you happened to purchase it (by mistake, or got it for free whatever), pop it in for a spin in your DVD player. Watch it (keeping my suggested tweaks in mind), and tell me if the movie hasnt grown on you. Even a li'l.


Quote:
Originally Posted by ChronoGrl View Post
V - what, you trying to one-up me on my Generous Critic challenge? ;)
...

And to Alky's observation,

***CONTINUES SPOILERS***

I agree. I was actually slightly offended that screenwriter/director Anderson obviously thought his audience so riddled with spineless MORONS that we would appreciate such tripe. I was OFFENDED.

Also, I remember the movie's TAGLINE: "NO MATTER WHO WINS, WE LOSE."

The human/predator team-up completely negated that delicious hyperbole... WE WON! THE HUMANS WON! ARGH!

I wish that he had been more balls-to-the-wall-hunt-em-all instead of this cliched crap. That bothered more than anything else. I was incredibly disappointed that the Alien was the Big Bad while the Predator, well, was just a big scary teddy bear.

There are plenty of nods Anderson leaves throughout the movie to all the predecessors of both franchises. So he did his homework. What he lacked, was proper insight into the script handed to him. He obviously had some sort of ideas but they werent effective because they didnt fit into the atmosphere left behind by both Alien and Predator franchises.

Notice my 4 tweaks? It already sounds (and looks, if you can visualise them) so much better just with those 4. Anderson obviously wasnt a fanboy, and he knew just what sort of expectations he was under when he took charge. I think it boils down to this...did those expectations ultimately get the better of him?

Or, put in even more plain terms, would he have done a better job if Fox wasnt involved? Or if he had a second chance at reviewing the PG-13 package which came out of Fox's labs?

Anderson - "Hey...no, no, no I dont like this stuff. Lets do this all over again."

FOX - "Fuck you...we dont have that kind of money to scrape an entire flick. Let's shove it down their throats. If they swallow it, we got our moneyspinner. If they dont, too bad. We ll get some other (FvJ anyone) crossover flick and mint some money out of it."

I still say the studios get as much blame for this as Anderson himself.

What do you say, Urge?

Vod?

Return?

Anyone else?
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Old 12-22-2008, 06:49 AM
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Despare Despare is offline
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Tough to say much more, especially when I had fun with it. What I saw was a mindless creature feature with lots of cheesy humor but I guess that's because I try to judge movies like that as non-canon features and not part of either movie series.
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Old 12-22-2008, 07:35 AM
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i didnt hate it - i didnt love it ...

it wasnt as well structured or fun as any of the alien or predator films ... and i found it hard to readjust my expectations as i'm a big fan of both those franchises (i like all 6 films)

I thought AVP felt rushed and lazy ..

there were some things i liked about it - the creature effects were up to par ... but the cast was weak and the story was goofy.

the only reason this thing took place under the ice is because they obviously didnt have the budget to do the jungle or the streets again....

All in all it just didnt have the impact any of the alien or predator films had - and considering this was a combination of the 2 franchises - expectations were high - and not met.


i think the worst crime was in the casting. Every single alien and predator film to this point had a strong stellar cast.

this was not the case in AVP ... just a bunch of pretty kids ... it might as well just had been a cheap slasher film.
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Old 12-22-2008, 08:36 AM
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Actually _____V_____ you do make a very fair point about studio interferance, stuff like Resident Evil and AvP could be huge money spiners so in all fairness he did probably suffer from a lack of 'power' in the film making process.
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Old 12-22-2008, 09:22 AM
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Vodstok Vodstok is offline
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I really disliked it. It was filled with references, which i typically love, but it was done with the ham-fisted ineptitude i have come to expect from Anderson.


A quick note for the human/predator teamup naysayers... It happened in the comic books, so you cant really blame Anderson for that. Even the lead predator dying, carving his symbol on the human chick's forehead thing was pulled directly from the original series.

The gratuitous use of bullet time annoyed the shit out of me and moved Anderson from being a poor film maker to retarded Uwe Boll territory in my estimation.

All told, i am glad I saw it, and even more glad I got to see it on a Free HBO weekend so all i spent was the time it took to watch it.
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