The easily bamboozled Predators

Rating: 1/10 (15 August 2004)

Spoiler alert
Lets see. We have three predators, six aliens, and about forty or so humans. The result? Only ONE human survivor. I guess the Tag line "Who ever wins, we loose" Gave away a little too much, because neither the Aliens or the Predators win. Since I don't want to spend too much time talking about how much I despise this film, I'm going to go over some fun FACTS about the Alien and Predator franchises that were either changed, or completely ignored in this movie.
1. Aliens life cycle. It took probably two to three days for the Alien in the first film to develop into a mature Alien after Kane got face hugged. Here, it takes about five minutes. That's like having a new born baby grow up to be a thirty year old man in about thirty minutes. James Cameron ran into this situation when he was editing Aliens. There was a scene with Ripley finding Burke cacooned and him begging Ripley to kill him. Cameron cut that out because the timing compared to the first film was wrong. Paul W.S. Anderson however, puts a lot of those scenes in.
2. Predators. Probably the biggest complaint I have. The Predators in this film have been down graded to dumb, unintelligent, overly bulky, easily surprised, mass-murdering hooligans. They don't kill humans for hunting purposes anymore. They kill humans just for the sake of killing them. If a predator sees a human who is obviously not a threat, is seriously injured, unarmed, and is literally standing still, the predator kills him. Why is that? There was no sport in that. That's like seeing a deer hunter spotting a deer sleeping, killing it, and leaving it's body. Nobody would do that. And don't get me started on the whole mythology thing. Having Predators come to earth thousands of years ago, and teaching us all that we know today really ruins their dangerous nature. Just seeing Predators exposing themselves to human society just makes them look dumb. The Predators I know wouldn't reveal themselves to the creatures they were hunting like that. Oh, Did I mention that the predators in this movie are easily to kill, fool, and surprise?
3. Aliens. Again on the Mythology. We're supposed to believe that Aliens have been on Earth for as long as humans have existed. That ruins everything. I've always believed from the movies I've watched that if one Alien got on earth, it's over. One Alien. Yet we see thousands of Aliens attacking predators on Earth in a flashback. Great. Now the Alien is not as mysterious in the way we liked it. Now we don't have to worry about Aliens being a threat on earth anymore. I guess the infested human Colony from ALIENS is just unrealistic now. THEY SHOULD NOT HAVE SET THIS MOVIE ON EARTH!
4. The characters. Every human, Predator, and Alien in this story suffers from the Ensign Red Shirt of death curse. Any human that comes into contact with our main character Lex, dies. And heres the kicker, every character in the whole movie is a lot more interesting and likable then Lex is. The movie tries to have some development with the other characters like having them say that they have kids they want to get back to, but 2 minutes later, they get killed off. Oh, well. I think we're supposed to be happy with just Lex. Heres what makes her character funny. She's supposed to keep everyone in her team alive, yet by the end of the movie, she's the only THING that survived. I'm betting that will look great on her job resume.
This, to me, is just another Alien movie where the director wants to make it his own thing regardless of what's been established. Of all the things I hated about this movie, there is still one thing that pains me the most. What are new comers gonna think of the Alien movies after they watch AVP first? Boring is what they're gonna think. This movie established that the aliens are these fast, ninja like killing machines. I guess when they want to see the same thing in ALIEN, they'll end up disappointed, which is sad.
Paul W.S. Anderson, Congratulations. You've killed two birds with one stone. That's a hard thing to do.