Godawful

Rating: 1/10 (5 May 2006)

AvP appeared on a movie channel tonight, and despite the dreadful reviews it received I really wanted to just sit down and watch an undemanding piece on entertaining nonsense. I usually really like that sort of thing - from the heady heights of the original Predator and Alien movies to the Die-Hards and the early works of the hilarious Jean-Claude Van Damme.
Unfortunately Paul WS Anderson has contrived to make a film that I couldn't possibly enjoy without the aid of non-prescription drugs or a prefrontal lobotomy. Now I'm just angry.
(spoilers warning) The first few scenes, gathering a team to travel to the Antarctic, and the dialogue in the helicopter between Alexa Woods and Ewan Bremner seemed to be setting things up quite well until a big bag of stupid was dropped from a great height, hit the screenplay and burst all over the celluloid.
The team leave their icebreaker and trek to the site of a pyramid buried two kilometers under the ice directly below an abandoned whaling station. A whaling station that is situated, as you'd expect, next to the sea. Why not just take the ship there? Well, obviously because this whaling station has been built upon a huge inaccessible cliff of ice overlooking the sea. I think I can see why this whaling station was abandoned.
Mr Anderson builds the tension by having Bremner surprised by a lone penguin. Penguins are, of course, well known for their solitary hermit-like lifestyle. Maybe this can be forgiven - perhaps there is a silent penguin colony just off-camera.
Next a ray from the predators' starship burns a 30' tunnel down into the ice, leading straight to the pyramid (being a pyramid, it's fortunate that the team leaders have had the foresight to bring along a talented Italian archaeologist, though I find it strange that his usually fluent grasp of the English language doesn't extend to the pronunciation of the word "archeological"), which would make site of the pyramid, oh, 3.5 kilometers away from the station. Not what you'd call under it. (end of pedantry)
Some of the team get impregnated with aliens, and all I can say is there must have been a lot of quintuplets because soon the place is overrun by aliens. By soon I mean in the space of a few minutes. (sigh)
Later, the talented archaeologist translates an ancient text about spaceships. Not "fiery chariots" or some similar bit of mangled simile that wouldn't cause you to bat an eyelid in a film like this, but straight in there with the spaceships and aliens. That really curdled it.
God, I'm sorry, I really can't go on. This film has more plot holes than my ass has hairs - I'm all for suspension of disbelief but this really is taking the mick. It's almost as if things were being introduced into the plot just to be contradicted soon after - a sort of "Where's Wally" of errors for fans of the originals, or indeed fans of any kind of coherent plot development.
The only bit that really got my attention was the first one-on-one between a predator and an alien. I was willing to forget about all the crap that had led up to this point, thinking that *now* the film would really get going, until the predator, after a bit of brawling, beat the alien like a ginger-haired stepchild then stood around waiting for it to kill him/her, restoring the monotony.
I enjoyed Event Horizon, and I quite liked Resident Evil, but by all that is sacred, I hope no-one lets this man near a director's chair again.
I have waited for this film since Predator 2, and Paul Anderson has raped my childhood dreams. From "In space no one can hear you scream" to "on earth no one can hear your howls of derision". Zero out of ten.