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12-20-2008, 10:09 PM
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?
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?