AVP (Anderson's Very Predictable)

Rating: 4/10 (10 July 2005)

Paul Anderson makes movies that start off incredibly well. Every time I see a Paul W. S. Anderson movie, I watch the first twenty minutes and think "Hey, this might actually be good!" He raises expectations, gets you excited, pulls out all of his best tricks... and then somewhere around 30 minutes in, it turns to garbage. If you think about it, all of his movies from Event Horizon to Resident Evil suffer from this malady. AVP is no exception.
In the opening scene, I watched an incredibly stylized alien-like silhouette turn into a satellite. And then it cut to a high tech lab, and then out to the desert, and then out to some glacier. As Paul Anderson assembled his team of protagonists, the movie had a distinct "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" or "Jurassic Park" vibe. In fact, now that I think about it, it had all the trappings of a Spielberg movie. The cherry on top of the sundae was when the wealthy tycoon Weyland, who was organizing the search party, turned out to be the actor who played "Bishop" in Aliens. I was on for the ride. I gripped my popcorn, I buckled in. I thought Paul Anderson had finally come into his own as a filmmaker... and he couldn't have picked a better time. Here was the unification of two of my favorite Science Fiction/Horror characters. If ever Paul Anderson was going to step up and be a real director, the time was now. I smiled, I squeezed my date's hand. This was gonna be great...
And then, it started to suck. Gradually at first, almost as if Anderson was thinking that if he just gave us a great opening we might forget about the fact that the rest of the movie was terrible. I figured things were going badly when the heroes enter a pyramid that they've found thousands (millions?) of feet beneath an arctic whaling station. Hokey, yes... but I'm still buying it. And then, our heroes venture inside this ancient edifice and are trapped inside the pyramid because they decided to take some Predator guns. You'd think these people never saw Raiders of the Lost Ark. I kept waiting for someone to bust out a bull whip. The only thing that was missing was the flying darts and the big boulder.
At this point in the movie, I got a really vivid mental picture of Paul Anderson standing in his living room, with DVD copies of Alien, Predator, Raiders of the Lost Ark and Cube laid out on the floor, and he's standing there taking a leak on all of them and laughing maniacally. I'm not kidding. That image flashed through my head.
Anyway, so when I finally shook myself out of it, there were people that were getting attacked by face-huggers that were bullet-timed a la the Matrix (and every other action movie since). I mentally added The Matrix to the DVDs on Paul's floor, covered with urine. These same people give birth to aliens a mere five minutes later. Suddenly the gestation period for aliens shortened by like three days. I think that might have made me angrier than anything. I just wanted to drive to Paul Anderson's house in the middle of the night, grab him and say, "There are rules to think about here, Paul. Not a lot of them, but you do need to respect the movies that came before. I understand that it makes your job a little tougher because you want to tell a story about an alien, and you need to have it bust out of somebody's chest pretty early in the story... but you're getting paid a lot of money to figure out a clever way of making it work."
But even so, I kept watching. I had come this far, I needed to see the title bout. I watched clunky Predators with ridiculous dreadlocks fight with equally clumsy Aliens. All I could think was, "Gee, I bet it's hot inside those suits." You could practically smell the latex. Still, there are some fun moments, so I keep watching.
And then the protagonist becomes best friends with a Predator and they go off to hunt Aliens together like Butch and Sundance. All of this comes at great expense as you are forced to watch our heroine playing a goofy game of charades with the Predator. When Predators start acting, you know you're in trouble.The end fight scene with the Alien Queen Mum is pretty good. I actually started to enjoy myself again in the last ten minutes of the movie. And then I remembered that I felt the same way about Resident Evil. That last shot with Milla in the city was great. It made me rethink my P.W.S. Anderson theory. Maybe he makes movies that begin and end really well, and then fills them with processed meat. If I ever choose to see another one of his movies, I'm going to walk out after twenty minutes, go get something to eat, and then come back for the last ten and see how I feel about it.