Dead Space
In space, no one can hear you snore. (Film Review)
by Michael Sean McGowan
The Upside: All of the Alien movies are available for rental at Blockbuster. Go now!
The Downside: This is the stuff that scared you as a kid milked out for the Spongebob Squarepants set.
One of my fondest movie memories as a kid was around 1987, sneaking into our living room late at night to watch James Cameron's Aliens, which was just premiering on HBO. I remember my dad and my brother gathering around the TV earlier to see it- and I was yelled at every time I tried to step into the room. For reasons I didn't understand and my dad wouldn't explain, I was forbidden to see this movie so, naturally, I had to discover why. And what I saw, at least to my nine-year-old eyes, was the most violent, goriest movie I had ever seen.
In other words, I thought it was totally cool.
In some ways, to many movie geeks, the first two Alien films were milestones growing up. I hear some who were just breaking into adulthood (or younger) with Ridley Scott's groundbreaking original and they talk about the dinner scene, talk about their reaction, with the same sort of shocked nostalgia that others use to describe what they were doing when they heard Kennedy had been assassinated. Cameron's follow-up wasn't the creepy, claustrophobic affair that Scott's was, but it was brilliant in its own right for dragging the idea into the light of 1980s Rambo/Reagan American military chest thumping and stylized violence that the director had just begun to come into his own with from 1984's The Terminator. But Aliens wouldn't have established the whole franchise in the Hall of Fame of sci-fi/horror if it had just recycled the original with more bullets and a higher body count. There was also the feeling that Cameron was taking the wheel, expanding on the mythology and, likewise, finding even more stuff that could scare the living daylights out of us (remember your reaction when you first saw the queen?). The two sequels that followed are controversial; some argue they're trash, some say they're up to the status of the first two, but there was one fundamental commonality in a series that was born and (presumably) still lives as a director's franchise: these were movies born of blood, shock, and terror.
It says a lot, but nothing good, that a spin-off movie like Alien vs. Predator carries a PG-13 rating. Gone is the notion that these are movies to serve as a rite for introducing new moviegoers to what primal intergalactic fear can feel like. This is a film dumbed down, bleached out, programmed to fill its seats with kids who could have only seen its predecessors by sneaking into theaters under the noses of inattentive ushers. What it's done is taken everything scary and menacing about the Alien series and tossed it out, leaving a chaff that's familiar to what the whole Alien vs. Predator concept started out as- a comic book and a video game. This isn't the first multiplex death match we've been dubiously graced with, and I doubt it'll be the last (what's next: Ishtar vs. Gigli?). In terms of pure quality, Alien vs. Predator is probably just as bad as last August's snoozer, Freddy vs. Jason. But at least that beasty match-up could honestly be described as schlock cobbled together from schlock. The Predator movies that make up one half of this double billing were never really that good, their concept far out-lived their execution, but on the other side of the aisle is a tradition that's been homogenized for an audience who are not only not old enough to drive, but who aren't likely to even be able to reach the pedals.
Like Freddy vs. Jason, what "plot" there is tends to be a cursory affair. A satellite belonging to one Charles Bishop Weyland, the owner of some massive corporation whose general interest is unclear, somehow discovers a pyramid beneath the ice on an island off the coast of Antarctica. Weyland here is played by Lance Henriksen, who was also in Aliens and the connection between the two appearances is sketchy at best. The pyramid, we are told, is a combination of Egyptian, Cambodian, and Aztec building styles- and what the significance can be of this I haven't a clue. The exhibition sent down to "claim" the find is the usual gathering of types, more often described by their occupation and their last name than any handle you'd give a human being (also, explain to me why an archeological team brings state of the art automatic weapons to a dig). In a Darwin minute, the whole gang is weeded down by both sets of nasties until you get the one sensible person in the group and one character who feels compelled to explain everything from convenient hieroglyphics like a Discovery Channel narrator. The only time I showed any life during the movie was when one person mutters a painfully ironic line, "It's all making sense now!"
I could go into deeper detail, but really, why? This is the kind of movie where I get needled for calling the plotting to the mat, being helpfully reminded that the ones who are going to dig this movie don't need a plot. Well, to each their own, but I'm really at a loss for what anyone can get out of Alien vs. Predator at all. In accordance with its PG-13 rating, all of the action takes place in under-lit corridors and the scenes that have become the defining moments of both franchises, somebody getting their chest burst out or being hacked to pieces by a pair of wrist-blades, are done in frantic fast-editing that acts as nothing but a confusing tease (if you think I'm the only one who thinks this way, check this out: http://www.petitiononline.com/nopg13/petition.html). AVP also shows a fair amount of contempt for its origins. Take the scenario it presents. If the Aliens exist on Earth in present day, then how come there isn't any hint of their existence until the regular series picks up some 200 years into the future? Also, how in the world do they survive and grow down underneath all of that ice? What do they have to feed on? Snow cones?
I was definitely amused by one thing- the people during my showing who were taking "score." Maybe it shows my age or maybe it shows what a stick in the mud I can be that I have to laugh at what an absurd ploy this all is, hearing kids who can't be any older than 10 around me, speculating who would "win," as if a producer, screenwriter, or director who had the keys to possible sequels would let anyone off that easy. But I do think this is a sign of the times. We're slowly seeing, maybe not the death of, but the increasing irrelevance of, the R-rating and the expansion of PG-13 as a catch-all for the ultra-bloated blockbuster. AVP is a symptom of this. It doesn't want to survive on the same mature audience that it was built from- it's nothing more than the bad taste left over when you suck everything chilling about our nightmares out one, big, profit-seeking black hole. D+
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