AVP

Awful Visual Punishment

For the time beiing one of my favorite personal in-joke catchphrases continues to be "My Little Predator Buddy!" That phrase about sums up my feelings about this, ahem, eagerly anticipated...er, sequel, of sorts. Make no mistake about it: this reviewer exemplifies that old school devotee of not only loving pretty much all four installments in the Alien series, but could give the thumb's up to both Predator flicks, as well. Oh yeah, homey here's been there, done that. That is why homey wants more, and that is why homey is writing this review, to make sure all of you hear loud and clear that this new monstrosity ain't the same one we learned to fear. Back in the day, there was this unwritten standard that can be reflected to varying degrees in the Alien movie series, and perhaps most prevalent in the first two installments, of a concept that could be referred to as the Believability Index. I feel that this standard, utilized to different magnifications by both Ridley Scott and James Cameron respectively, is what kept audiences glued to their seats on the verge of holding their breaths merely awaiting the next scare or thrill. Back when we first learned of the extraterrestrial being, we were transfixed with a certain horrified curiosity as to the strange reality of its existence: the way in which it molted through various stages of development, and thrived off a blood type which to us humans was a kind of molecular acid. There was a fascination with the reality of such an alien Ichneumon dwelling out there in the cold depths of space...

...welcome to the future, the real future, of the year two thousand and four. The 21st century has dawned with the war on terror being smugly conducted in ways a tad too analogous with certain Orwellian prophecies, and the power vested in these United States Of America has watered down most commercial fare to the point where not even the eagerly-anticipated Aliens versus Predator movie has been able to survive the fallout. To be honest, I should've seen it coming (like a loyal contingency out there already did); but, I wanted to give it that chance, and I'm afraid instead I was baited and suckered into paying, on opening night, full price for a real stinker. Yes there was an element of ritual sacrifice to the proceedings, only the twist on this one was not of the usual pleasant variety.

The Alien Series = AOK ; AVP = Asinine Vapid Putrescense.

When you find yourself laughing so hard for so long that the tears are literally burning your eyes to the point which you can no longer tell what is happening up on the screen, and it's not supposed to be a comedy mind you, that's when you know this should have nothing whatsoever to do with any Alien or Predator movies in and of themselves.

"You know what 'AVP' stands for don'tcha", my friend had warned me the night before I went out to become ritually subjected to being tortured in a darkened chamber, "Artists Vs. Producers". I told him I expected as much, but I was at least prepared to give the thing a chance. Little did I know what lied in wait for me deep below the surface of our icy conversation that evening. It was an awful visual punishment indeed, for what I thought would have been at least the film's one redeeming aspect being the inclusion of Lance Henrickson (of course), the strange and unsettling truth turns out to be his character in AVP is just an over-weary and asthmatic elderly statesman bent on being credited with an esteemed archaelogical discovery, and in no fashion does the film elicit any sort of inspiration out of his performance. It's not enough that he represented ownership of a corporation that would later come to represent his image in an exclusive line of their androids; in this one he's just meat there for the ruthlessly bred alien warrior drones (read: Executive Producers, and so forth) to take a slavering chomp out of. If you go and see this movie for whatever desperately justifiable reasons you might wanna conjure up, don't forget I warned you, that should you start feeling like the crew of humans in the film itself who find themselves repelling down a two-thousand-foot tunnel bored through solid ice by inexplicably advanced technology to the buried ancient pyramid below, might you be asking yourself a tad too late if this was a good idea after all?

The mistake Aliens Vs Predator makes is assuming modern audiences are all daft, or at the very least, assuming we simply don't care about realism anymore. Regardless of how outlandish a science fictional premise may happen to be, it is one of the principal jobs of the discriminating director to somehow present that outlandish concept to the audience in a manner in which they can accept as being believable. This is the core, and I'd even dare to say the unspoken truth about a solidly-executed piece of science fiction cinema. Can you imagine, even for an instant, what a director like Stanley Kubrick would have done with the Alien premise (given that he would accept such an honour)-? Only imagine to yourself the original H.R.Giger conception of what the alien more or less truly appears to be (a psycho-sexual hermaphrodite anthropomorfication), and our imaginations alone might conjure up a darkly suggestive shadow of what someone like Kubrick could manage to achieve in pushing the envelope of groundbreaking cine-noir horror given this material.

As for AVP, if the flimsy premise upon which this artless exercise in guaranteed demographic box-office baiting is to be taken to heart, then you might consider doing the same in taking my word for it: this film in no way deserves to be a part of the Alien or Predator universes and/or continuums; rather, it depicts what a brute tribe would do given their best approximate knowledge of the alien, in a self-serving ritual designed to accrue a guaranteed percentage of revenue, which is to say, feed off a major financial artery in one fell, unforgiving swoop (read: opening weekend). And you know what they say about a bite like that. You wouldn't want to find yourself having gradually transformed among the living dead collectively feeding their newfound Master, now would you? Because if the box-office success of AVP is enough to warrant a sequel to it along a similar trend and vector...then I'm afraid this ball was dropped when they lost Sigourney Weaver.

AVP: a disappointment for the hardcore ALIEN fanatics; yet another soporific for the multitudes.