A truly mediocre experience

Rating: Null/10 (21 October 2004)

I had really low expectations for this film, but as it started I thought I was going to be pleasantly surprised. The initial effects, the mildly funny "spaceship overhead" shot which turns out to be of a tiny crevice in a standard earth satellite, and the hackneyed but serviceable sequence assembling the team raised my spirits. Something at least workmanlike seemed to be on the way.
Sadly the film quickly nose-dives into the imagination-free franchise sausage factory exercise I was expecting all along. When the characters arrive at the big pyramid set, any sense that there was a plot or guiding intelligence just evaporates. The machinery grinds out statutory Alien and Predator moments. Chest-burster follows Face-hugger with no tedious hanging around to build up silly suspense. A number of full size aliens not even remotely based on the number of dead people appear out of shadows or haul screaming bodies into light-wells. "Shimmer effect" Predator (soon to be available as an 8 inch action figure) uses its genuine retractable claws to gut over half the admittedly built-in-obsolescent human cast. After an interminable delay one of the predators finally removes its hockey goalie mask and does the team hiss, as if this was a really special moment worth waiting the full hour and a half. There are a number of what were presumably intended as "iconic" face-to-face moments between masked and unmasked predator and alien, that in fact seem as managed as a movie poster photo-shoot.
Most of the action takes place in a huge stone building that changes its internal structure on a timer every ten minutes. Walls open or close, the floor turns into pits or lifts, exactly in the way incongruous traps and elevators enable the gameplay in every first-person shooter since Doom. We're supposed to accept the premise that ultimately the building is supposed to be an Predator paintball alley, but the entire backstory is so juvenile it's an insult to the creators of the original Alien, which alongside Blade Runner always seemed to be one of the few really intelligent science fiction films. This isn't even a comic book. It's not a fresh observation, so I'm sorry, but it has all the charm and intelligence of a video-game without the replay value.
Like most of the people who'll read this I have a crap job grinding thanklessly through routine tasks for a pitiful wage. A privileged minority of people have access to vast sums of money to make the bread and circuses to entertain us coal-face workers, and I have no complaint when that results in whiz-bang popcorn movies like Bad Boys 2. It's a crime and an insult, though, when someone just grinds out mediocre corporate franchise pap like this. If he can only raise his game to the level of this sort of production line pap maybe the writer/director should have his bread and circus privileges revoked, and taste life away from the swimming pool and beach-house community for a while.