Alien vs Predator

Whoever wins, we lose goes the tagline and sadly that’s confirmed with this hogwash of a horror film that is supposed to combine twice the fear but ends up being a bit of a bore-fest.

Who is at fault here ? Probably writer and director Paul Anderson who claims to be a big Aliens fan but ends up squandering his chance to make anything inspiring here.

For those wanting some semblance of a story, humans pick up weird signals from the artic and a team is sent out to investigate. Naturally there’s a spunky lady at the heart of the team but sadly its not Signourney Weaver, instead make do with Sanaa Lathan who adds nothing of her own personality, perhaps she was on strict orders from the studio to act as if she were a Ripley clone for fear that fans would have severe withdrawal symptoms if there wasn’t someone playing that role.

The humans find out to significant cost in lives early on (naturally ..) that deep in the core of the earth, Predators have been using Aliens as a form of entertainment or training, breed em and make them fight their young Predator bucks in the knowledge that the best young predators will survive in some sort of major gladiatorial contest.

Minor plus points in terms of continuity go to the casting of Lance Hendricksen as a Wayland Corporation chief but the whole thing goes into contrivance when the writers have clearly forgotten (or forget at convenient moments) that aliens have acid for blood. We are shown for example, a fleeting (it has to be fleeting because it doesn’t add up) image of hundreds of aliens heading up a hill toa summit where Predators are supposedly successfully slashing them. Wrong! Couldn’t happen. Hundreds being slashed like that, would have resulted in large sprays of acid hitting Predator warriors who then injured would have been killed in seconds. End of story. Yet we’re supposed to believe Predators have been doing this for decades– hogwash.

The film borrows elements from previous Alien films (crew members being put in webs for when the eggs opened etc) but it does not borrow the best ideas from previous films such as.the use of robotic androids or a scene when humans are held in a tight spot with lots of Aliens/Predators converging on them. Result, little suspense.

I could go on. Poor dialogue, look out for pap about early mythology that doesn’t seem credible and no its difficult too to believe that crucially the Predators would be a good enough match for the Aliens.

It began ok though but then goes downhill. A better story, better use of characters might have made a big difference.

Matt Arnoldi