Minute44 - Dan Schonhaar

Directors: Colin Strause, Greg Strause

Starring: Steven Pasquale, Reiko Aylesworth

When I saw the HD trailer for AVP:R a few months back I was so excited, I swear I peed a little. Over the months that followed I learned more about the story and remained quite excited. After all, it looked, from the trailer, to be the film that we wanted the first time around, i.e. with the gore we wanted. It also had glimpses of James Cameron’s classic Aliens in that the creatures had the ridges in their heads as seen in the 1986 sequel.

What I got last night however was not at all what I’d hoped for. It started out as fairly standard fare; introduce a few characters, set the scene for the aliens and predators fight and explore the location a little but after that the film never really got going. I can see exactly why it went wrong. The brothers Strause who directed it were obvious fans of both franchises, and rightly so, but rather than come up with an imaginative story or premise for the film they just strung together features that they liked about the other films and wove them through a story that seems to have been written by a six year old.

Seriously, the list of things wrong with this movie could go on forever but I’ll summarise: I couldn’t tell you a single one of the characters’ names without looking at IMDB, that’s how unmemorable they were. The whole film was far too dark, I couldn’t tell what was going on and who was fighting who. The “Predalien”, if you’ll pardon my french, was a fucking joke. Aliens and predators are classic movie monsters with more than enough of a following to sustain a film. Creating a third, super-monster was completely unnecessary. Some of the predalien’s abilities were utter garbage as well. For example, it could impregnate victims with multiple alien embryos, none of which looked like the asexual offspring of the predalien… they were just normal, bog standard warrior aliens. Daft. The sound of the aliens dying consisted of one borrowed and hugely overused sound effect which sounded more like an elephant being hit with a tranquiliser dart. Finally, I don’t want to give anything away but the ending was rubbish, very abrupt and with little or no build-up and the “twist”, if you want to call it that, pissed me off so bad I could barely contain myself.

Just coming back to the main villain, the predalien (God, I hate saying that), whoever designed that obviously had very little understanding of the mythology that came with Aliens. It is understood that warrior aliens do take on some of the physical characteristics of their hosts but there was always a limit and the alien always looked more Xenomorph than host. This ridiculous creature blows that right out of the water. It’s just a predator with pipes in its back, a tail and no eyes! It doesn’t even have acidic blood, a trait we’ve seen passed down to even the most diluted alien specimen in Alien Resurrection. This being the case I feel that “predalien” is the wrong word entirely for this creature. A name far more suitable would be “The Alienator”.

As the name suggests, this will probably be the last we see of this crossover franchise and I can’t say I’m sad to see it go. Even at their low points the franchises did far better on their own than they ever did together. If someone is ballsy enough to attempt this again and, indeed if a studio is ballsy enough to give such a project the green light, I hope they have a damned good story and some decent characters because AVP:R sure as shit didn’t.

Verdict: