AVP: R

Alien Versus Predator: Requiem is by no means a good movie. But if Juno left an unduly upbeat & happy taste in your mouth, the old-fashioned bloodiness of this romp does help cleanse the palate. What's more, unlike the catastrophic Alien Versus Predator, the sequel really does deliver on the basic promise of lots and lots of fighting and killing. Exposition is kept to a bare minimum -- you're supposed to just know all the backstory, sit back, and watch a whole bunch of acid blood fly around while tons of people are killed.

On the flipside, it's hardly worth pointing out the many, many, many levels on which this movie didn't really make sense. I will note, however, that it's a bit unfortunate to see them appear to screw around with the alien life cycle such that the time elapsed from when a facehugger grabs you to when a new alien pops out of your head appears to be greatly compressed. In a larger sense, it's really too bad that all these silly sequels now can't help but detract from the fact that Alien and Aliens are both legitimate good movies that don't really deserve to have been conscripted into this low-grade franchise.

Comments

Is there a predator / alien hybrid in it? Given the last one's ending, I am going to be pissed if there isn't.

Posted by Drew Miller | December 26, 2007 5:04 PM

What we need is someone to put an end to this series. Maybe we can get that Terminator guy, if he's not too busy doing something else . . .

Posted by rea | December 26, 2007 5:08 PM

You forget that the first Predator is an excellent action movie as well, perhaps one of the best action movies ever.

Posted by Arthur | December 26, 2007 5:11 PM

You forget that the first Predator is an excellent action movie as well, perhaps one of the best action movies ever.

Posted by Arthur | December 26, 2007 5:11 PM

Arthur: I'm with you. I think Predator was arguably a better movie than the second Alien movie.

Drew: you won't be disappointed.

Posted by Tom | December 26, 2007 5:28 PM

"Alien and Aliens are both legitimate good movies that don't really deserve to have been conscripted into this low-grade franchise."

It's pretty much inevitable that 2 good movies back-to-back will lead to a franchise, and it's pretty much inevitable that the franchise will turn low-grade from that point.

Posted by Chris | December 26, 2007 5:28 PM

I thought Alien 3 was pretty darned good too--very flawed, but there were some really awesome parts, and the edition that came out recently was much better paced. Fincher directed the hell out of it, and the movie had some really clever plot twists and some powerful emotional moments, too.

Predator was a decent action movie, but I find it difficult to declare any Arnold Schwarzenegger movie objectively good. He adds a ton of campiness to every movie he's in.

Posted by Lev | December 26, 2007 5:31 PM

Alien and Aliens are both legitimate good movies

I'll give you Alien, which is a really good little horror movie set in space. But Aliens is really standard mediocre action movie fare, complete with lameass "little girl in trouble" scenes and inane hardass one-liners.

Posted by Christmas | December 26, 2007 5:42 PM

Out of curiosity, is there any that the subtitle is "Requiem"? I think of "Requiem" as a title for a somber, elegiac, reflective movie but I gather that that's not exactly what this movie is like.

Posted by Matt Weiner | December 26, 2007 5:42 PM

I've read Joss Whedon's original Alien: Resurrection script. The movie could have been good, but they were too committed to high-concept continuity (it was supposed to be Newt, not Ripley, that came back), and then gutted the thing for lack of budget.

Posted by Senescent | December 26, 2007 5:51 PM

is there any reason that the subtitle is "Requiem"

Posted by Matt Weiner | December 26, 2007 5:52 PM

Juno sucked and left nothing but a bad taste in my mouth. Name dropping the Melvins and Sonic Youth was embarrassingly ridiculous. Plus, the title character was practically completely unlikable. Saying "hells yeah" and liking Mott The Hoople doesn't make you edgy. Daria was canceled in the 90's.

Posted by xjerryx | December 26, 2007 6:04 PM

It's pretty much inevitable that 2 good movies back-to-back will lead to a franchise, and it's pretty much inevitable that the franchise will turn low-grade from that point.

That explains why sequels of Species are still being made. Or maybe not.

Posted by Dan the Man | December 26, 2007 6:06 PM

I think the sequel to "National Treasure" is pretty good. Top notch actors - except they didn't give Harvey Keitel much to do.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 26, 2007 6:14 PM

Speaking of franchises, the first "Highlander" movie, although trashed by the critics, became a cult classic.

The second one was probably the worst film since "Plan 9 From Outer Space".

The third one went back to the first one's premise, but was too similar.

The fourth one was based on the intervening spin-off TV series and was excellent - although they killed off the movie's main character in order to transition to the TV franchise. Thus, they've essentially invalidated the original movie's conclusion which is a bit odd.

There's a fifth one in development which will continue the TV series - although the synopsis I've seen indicates that they kill off most of the TV series characters as well - which would be unfortunate.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | December 26, 2007 6:19 PM

Got to agree with Christmas here. The original Alien was an excellent horror movie, while the second was, for lack of a better word, meh.

But the whole point of an excellent horror movie is that it has to dole out the scares in little bits and pieces. Too much, too soon, and you just become innoculated to the whole thing.

Hence, when the guy gets jumped by the egg-implanter: Holy Shit! that was scary. Then, a little lull, and then all of a sudden Holy Shit! there's a thing jumping out of him. Crazy chase scene, then it's gone. Slowly ramping up the tension as the alien grows, and the frequency of encounters increases, until you get to the last half hour of continuous action. You never see the whole alien until the very end of the movie, and even then it's only glimpses in the dark, which leaves you in suspense the entire time.

Aliens, on the other hand, makes the classic mistake of 'bigger = better.' More aliens, more people dying, bigger fight scene at the end. But no tension, no suspense, hence no caring. Plus the little girl, who you just want to die from the first minute she's onscreen.

It seems to be a rule of Hollywood that you can only up the ante in sequels; hence the first AvP movie had even more gore than Aliens, and the second incarnation is even worse, as an entire town eventually eats it.

Clearly, the only way to actually save the franchise is to get a highly-touted young director to come in and reinvent things, with a new spin, new storyline, maybe even a reboot a la Batman Begins. That's the only way to get off the hedonistic spiral staircase of ever-increasing gore/action leading to ever-decreasing quality of movie.

Although, they have to be asymptotically approaching the absolute zero of quality, so maybe they ought to try again under the 'nowhere to go but up!' philosophy.

Posted by David Samuels | December 26, 2007 6:59 PM

See "I am Legend." EOS.

Posted by Gore/Edwards 08 | December 26, 2007 7:06 PM

But the whole point of an excellent horror movie is that it has to dole out the scares in little bits and pieces. Too much, too soon, and you just become innoculated to the whole thing.

You mean suspense?

"There's a bomb under the table, and it doesn't go off." --from the guy who made Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman descending a flight of stairs riveting.

Posted by ThresherK | December 26, 2007 7:20 PM

"Horror" does not equal "suspense". Most people prefer suspense, because the self-control required to watch 90 minutes of amputations or beheadings. Horror is about disgust, revulsion, so it makes sense for people to say the waiting is the best part. But the waiting isn't horror.

Horror is to suspense as porn is to romance. Very few good horror movies get made.

Posted by bob mcmanus | December 26, 2007 7:48 PM

Fair enough criticism about my general commentary, although I would argue that Alien is a horror movie, in addition to being suspenseful. Can't a movie be both?

Posted by David Samuels | December 26, 2007 8:17 PM

Since you did mention it, and forgive me if I missed prior comment, but a post/thread about "Juno" would be welcome.

Posted by Andruw | December 26, 2007 8:30 PM

Since no one seems to be sticking up for the critical consensus, I would like to throw in that I liked Alien, loved Aliens, and did not particularly like Alien 3 or Alien: Resurrection.

Posted by Drew Miller | December 26, 2007 8:31 PM

Daria was canceled in the 90's.

Never say something like that on the Internet without Googling it first.

Daria ran 1997-2002

Posted by rea | December 26, 2007 8:50 PM

Horror is about disgust, revulsion, so it makes sense for people to say the waiting is the best part.

But most horror movies are not all about that. There's the subgenre of torture porn (e.g. the Saw and Hostel franchises), which pretty much fits that description, but there are also lots of good horror movies as well. Guillermo Del Toro, for example, is obviously a horror movie director (Cronos, The Devil's Backbone, etc.) and I think the well-regarded Pan's Labyrinth is characterized as dark fantasy rather than horror mostly to avoid the stigma of a ghettoized genre.

Posted by RSA | December 26, 2007 8:58 PM

Most movies are a mix of many different elements, including romance & humor.

To me it is important to distinguish the two elements of horror, the suspense and disgust. The raised machete is suspense is suspense, the hand falling & arm spurting is horror. Greeks read the Iliad and watched to the Pankration, Romans went to the games, the medieval went to bear-baitings and witch burnings, the early moderns had picnics at hangings. Use your imagination for modern equivalents.

Now I can extend the feeling of disgust. Among the religious, the very idea or existence of the vampire or ghost or demon is horrific. Similarly, both the Alien & Predator are objects of horror. In general, the alien, the exotic, the Other can be horrific in the sense of disgust or repulsion. Quasimodo. But this "disgust at the non-human" is an important definition of horror, and it bothers me when prefer the first Cat People, or when they compare Hitchcock to Wes Craven.

Want a true "horror movie?" Tod Browning's Freaks At least at the time, as intended. Want another one:Wall Street ?? History of Violence ?? Alien as horrible.

But ya know, the connection of horror to bodily fluids (blood, vomit, slimy oozing Martian thingies) and disgust has relevance to feminism.

Posted by bob mcmanus | December 26, 2007 9:20 PM

Predator also had the unique title of having two future governors on its cast. I'm still waiting for Governor Carl Weathers.

Posted by Mo | December 26, 2007 9:24 PM

AVP2 wasn't a bad little flick. You certainly get what you paid for, unlike the first AVP which just made no sense at all.

It's frustrating though because watching it I had the feeling that there was a pretty good movie hiding somewhere in the script. It's almost like they filmed the first draft. If they tightened it up a bit, dropped some characters who had no real purpose, played up some of the relationships a bit and structured the action set pieces a little better it would have actually been a decent movie, not just a passable alien monster flick.

Posted by Chuchundra | December 26, 2007 10:13 PM

I thought the second Predator was pretty good and more interesting than the first one.

Posted by alkali | December 26, 2007 10:15 PM

Very few good horror movies get made.

Two movies have given me nightmares: Repulsion and Spoorloos. Tod Browning's Freaks probably would as well, but it's too terrible to watch. The unbearable scene in Grizzly Man where Herzog listens to the last moments of Timothy Treadwell and friend is beyond the horror movie genre.

Posted by Jeffrey Davis | December 26, 2007 10:21 PM

I second the second predator. I think. I'll be damned if I can remember, actually, if it was any good. Seemed alright at the time.

Posted by gerontion | December 26, 2007 10:29 PM

I can't think of horror movies that have given me nightmares, probably because I tend not to enjoy psychological horror like Spoorloos very much. Weird and supernatural for me, if at all possible. The Exorcist, Cemetery Man, that sort of thing. Also the classic Dracula and Frankenstein movies, along with their campy successors. I also love the odd subgenre of comedy horror: Dead Alive, Shaun of the Dead, The Host, etc.

Posted by RSA | December 26, 2007 10:53 PM

@bob mcmanus

"But the waiting isn't horror."

True. I didn't try to equate the two, or Hitchcock and Wes Craven. I fell prey to the old saw about "write what you mean or you'll only mean what you write".

As far as disgust at the non-human, did anyone else get the heebiejeebies for those giant bugs in "Starship Troopers"? IIRC, the squad battles heroically to slay just one of them, the camera turns a corner, and they're swarming in as far as the eye can see. Good piece of buildup and payoff.

Posted by ThresherK | December 26, 2007 11:00 PM

RSA,

How can you list comedy horror greats without mentioning the Muhammad Ali, the Champ: Army of Darkness.

Also, I'll put in a good word for Event Horizon as a truly frightening space horror film. The same claustrophobic vibe as Alien with a much darker premise. Nice slow buildup of suspense too. Worth watching if you're into that sort of thing.

Posted by heedless | December 26, 2007 11:10 PM

I really don't know why people compare Alien and Aliens. They really are two totally different pictures. Different themes, different goals, different structure.

Posted by NBarnes | December 26, 2007 11:28 PM

I thought the second Predator was pretty good and more interesting than the first one.

Alkali, I don't believe there are enough psychoactive pharmaceuticals in the world to justify that statement. Were you awake during that steaming pantload (sorry Jonah) of a movie?

Posted by Col Bat Guano | December 27, 2007 12:33 AM

"Pops out of your HEAD"? All good xenobiologists know that Aliens pop out of your CHEST (although the question of what they eat to grow so big during the period between that and the time when they kill the Second Victim remains a scientific mystery).

I thought the first Alien movie was terrific until after John Hurt bought the farm at his Last Supper -- a scene which I wasn't expecting in advance, and which is my generation's version of the shower scene in "Psycho". Unfortunately, after that it was just cliche "Eeee!" and "Arggh!", although with excellent cinematography to conceal the cliches. (They even cut out one whole filmed scene in which Sigourney Weaver discovers her captain hung up and still alive in the alien's den and impregnated with one of its offspring -- which explains why she suddenly tries to abort the ship's self-destruct countdown, which thus was left as a complete mystery in the final cut.) The second movie wasn't too bad as an adventure flick. For that matter, neither was "Predator", which was that rare SF flick that assumes the audience has a modicum of brains (to figure out things such as the alien's light-transferring invisibility suit and his digital wristwatch with alien numerals), and in which Aanold actually served as a halfway-creditable hero who wins through his wits (plus a large dose of obvious pure luck at one point) instead of his Mighty Thews.

But I'll agree that good horror movies are extremely rare, maybe for the same reason that good horror novels are -- it seems to be a specialized form of entertainment that works only as a short story. And maybe the main problem is explained by someone else (can't remember who) quoted by Ramsey Campbell, who during his golden age in the 1970s was the best writer of scary stories the human race has ever produced: "Horror writers used to strive for awe and achieve fear. Now they strive only for fear and achieve only disgust." (Footnote: Joss Whedon reportedly burst into tears when they discovered what they had finally done to his screenplay for "Alien 3".)

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | December 27, 2007 12:34 AM

"Senescent" is right: Joss Whedon wrote the script for the fourth Alien movie, not the third. My bad.

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | December 27, 2007 12:37 AM

Also: "...when HE discovered", not "they".

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | December 27, 2007 12:42 AM

"As far as disgust at the non-human, did anyone else get the heebiejeebies for those giant bugs in "Starship Troopers"? IIRC, the squad battles heroically to slay just one of them, the camera turns a corner, and they're swarming in as far as the eye can see. Good piece of buildup and payoff.

Posted by ThresherK | December 26, 2007 11:00 PM"

The ironic thing is that we were supposed to identify with the bugs in the movie version. The director said reading the original book reminded him a lot of his childhood in Nazi Germany, with the militarism in everyday society, the military expansionism (we were encroaching on the bugs' planet first), the tendency to see one's enemies as inhuman due to their race, etc. That's why the humans in the film had things like televised executions, to make us disgusted. However, he did a poor job of making his point.

Posted by Reality Man | December 27, 2007 4:25 AM

You're right, heedless, Army of Darkness is a gem.

Also, I'll put in a good word for Event Horizon as a truly frightening space horror film.

I found it pretty scary, too. (For me, the best horror movies are scary movies.) For the first two thirds, I thought it was going to be a take on Solaris that emphasized the horror aspects, so I was a little disappointed it didn't follow through in that direction. There are lots of horror movies that I think would be improved if they stuck with suggestion rather than overt horror, from Curse of the Demon to. . . well, most of the more graphic horror movies out today, probably including AvP: R.

Posted by RSA | December 27, 2007 10:04 AM

Wow- some great comments about the difference between 'horror' and 'suspense'. I almost feel bad about the lameness of my comment (though obviously not *so* bad as to prevent me from saying it...)

The thing that bugged me the most about AVP II was not the shortened time for face-hugger maturation (though I did notice it...) nor the scale of destructiveness (though it was a little over the top...) but rather the movie takes place in Colorado, yet there's a nice temperate rainforest and the last half of the movie is nothing but rain! Colorado is *arid* - so the movie would be better placed in some town in the pacific northwest.

Oh well- I am looking forward to the next one, and hoping that they'll work a little more *story* into the gorefest.

cheers

Posted by Eric | December 27, 2007 1:07 PM

RSA is bang on. When Jacques Tourneur made "Curse of the Demon" -- based on one of the best stories by the famous M.R. James, who was an absolute master of creepy suggestiveness (and who, by the way, is one of Ramsey Campbell's main influences) -- he wanted to copy James in leaving the Horrible Thing summoned up by the rune curse unseen, but (you guessed it) got overruled by the producers. (One reason the original 1963 version of "The Haunting" worked so well is that its director, Robert Wise, WAS allowed to leave the Horrible Thing unseen and indeed largely ambiguous in its mysterious nature. Something half-seen sneaking up on your from behind through the corner of your eye is always more artistically effective than something that runs straight at you howling

Posted by Bruce Moomaw | December 27, 2007 2:17 PM