Amazingly good for a fifth sequel, even surprisingly fresh

Rating: 9/10 (7 November 2006)

What a challenge ! To take two characters like Aliens and Predators to invent a new story that could make them meet is more than a challenge. It is unimaginable. Each one has to be better than what they were before and yet both together have to be even more dramatic and formidable than each one may have ever been. Then you have to keep the human beings as the real center of the film, those who are really going to transfer their fear onto us, the audience. The situation has to be believable and has to allow no single minute of respite or lack of tension. The film-makers behind this adventure have revisited their good old mythology books and ransacked the back shop of the store known as « The Old Curiosity Shop ». So we revisit pyramid civilizations (three : Aztec, Egyptian and Cambodian) and the great myth of all times : the Antarctica from which all these pyramid civilizations are supposed to have come from. Then they revisited all the stories that are ranting and raving about some space visitors who would have taught the animals of the homo erectus species how to become homo sapiens. The general idea is that the space-visitors are the Predators, that the aliens are prisoners in a pyramid two thousand feet under the ice of the Antarctica and that every one hundred years some young predators are sent on earth to hunt these aliens in the pyramid. Of course some human beings have to accept to be the sacrificial victims from whom the aliens are going to be born, for the hunt. Easy since these human beings of old are not yet homo sapiens but only homo erectus. That's what we are told happened on October 10, 1904 and is going to happen again on October 10, 2004. Unluckily some crazy human beings get in the way of the hunt. In a way that was lucky since these human beings set the whole machinery of the pyramid to work and they become the sacrificial victims who will carry the aliens to life. Of course things are not going to go exactly the way it was planned by the predators. The result is absolutely perfect. The human beings are going to be reluctant and resisting victims and one will manage to go beyond simple hostility and disgust and help the predators, hence saving the world and the human race. The details are to be discovered in the film itself which is spectacular. It reveals the vanity of human beings who get into an adventure without even knowing what it is all about and without any proper preparation. All those vain people who believe in money, guns, science or whatever will get to the end of their vanity and the only survivor will be the one who was best prepared and also least vain, so little vain that for her the enemy of my enemy is my friend. This is a dangerous principle that led many people into unbearably absurd situations with incalculably lethal and uncontrollable consequences. But at times it is safe to believe it and it is safe to practice it. Though when the first round is finished my enemy who is the enemy of my enemy and has been my friend in an alliance to defeat this common enemy goes back to his basic definition and becomes my enemy again and the war goes on for one more round. The film-makers decided not to go in that direction but to genetically cross the alien and the predator for a sequel some day in a few years that will be tried and tested first as a comic book, I guess. The DVD has numerous and very interesting extra resources which are quite welcome.
Dr Jacques COULARDEAU, University of Paris Dauphine & University of Paris 1 Pantheon Sorbonne