AVP: Alien Vs. Predator [PG-13 Version,,Special Edition]

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My Southern California colleague, Eddie Feng, and I had the dubious pleasure of attending the first showing of 2004's "AVP: Alien Vs. Predator" on the day it premiered. The pleasure was in seeing one another again and going to watch the movie at San Francisco's Metreon theater complex. The "dubious" part was having to watch the movie.

In fairness, I remember thinking when the picture was over that it wasn't half as bad as it could have been. Unfortunately, that's not saying much. "AVP" is like one of those video shoot-'em-ups that looks great on your computer screen but has no story to it. Once the fascination of blasting space aliens diminishes, there isn't much left. This should come as no surprise to viewers familiar with "AVP's" director, Paul W.S. Anderson, who also did "Resident Evil" and "Mortal Kombat." Of course, he also did "Event Horizon," which proves he can do more than show us monsters being blown away in darkened hallways. But not here.

Hey, it's not as though "AVP" is terrible. All it needed was a script and characters, and it might have been OK. As it is, it reminds me of a "Friday the 13th" movie where you get a group of people together for the sole purpose of watching them die. The only fun is guessing the order of their demise. The characters are generic, interchangeable, and when they go, we have no feelings for them. Besides, we know from the outset who's going to be the last man standing. It's a tradition in the "Alien" series; it's a woman.

One familiar face is that of Lance Henriksen, who plays his own creator. Let me explain. The time setting for "AVP" is the present, and Henriksen plays Charles Bishop Weyland, a "pioneer of modern robotics." He's the guy for whom, many years later, the "Bishop" robots in "Aliens" and "Alien 3" would be named. And you always wondered where those robots got their name and why they looked the way they did. Now you know. It's the only clever touch in "AVP," and it's but one of a hundred other references to previous "Alien" and "Predator" movies.

Anyway, Weyland is the president of Weyland Industries, which has just located a gigantic, ancient pyramid under the ice in Antarctica. He gathers up a team of experts to go explore it, and there they find just what they were looking for: Aliens (never called "aliens" but mostly just "serpents") and Predators (simply called "hunters"). Well, it's not quite what they were looking for. It seems the Predators come back and activate the pyramid every hundred years, take the Queen Mother Alien out of the deep freeze to lay eggs, and rather quickly create some new Alien creatures to hunt and kill. I guess it passes their time.

Weyland's team consists of a dozen or more people, most important of whom are Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan), a mountain climber and guide; Sebastian de Rosa (Raoul Bova), an archaeologist; Graeme Miller (Ewen Bremner), a Scottish chemical engineer; Maxwell Stafford (Colin Salmon), Weyland's right-hand man; Adele Russeau (Agathe De La Boulaye); and Thomas Parks (Sam Troughton). The others, frankly, I didn't notice and can't remember. The movie is too short to be so cluttered with characters, none of them developed enough to care about.

"AVP" is a good looking film, even if there isn't a lot of thought to go with it. Indeed, the one response the film evoked from me in the movie theater was toward the end when Sebastian says to Alexa, "It's starting to make sense." Well, maybe for him it was, but not for me. It's one of the silliest, most senseless plots imaginable, and I couldn't help chuckling out loud at Sebastian's remark. Still, as unintentional as my response was, at least it was something.

Here's an example of the intelligence level of the film. While exploring an old, abandoned whaling station above the pyramid, Alexa and Sebastian pass by what is clearly the skeleton of a whale. (I think it's supposed to remind us of the interior of the deserted space ship at the beginning of "Alien.") As they pass the skeleton, Sebastian asks in all sincerity, "What are these?" Alexa answers, "Whale bones." Now, think about that for half a second. They're in an old whaling station. They pass a huge rib cage lying on the ice. "What are these?" He's an archaeologist?

The film's graphics are dark and foreboding, and the music is mostly soft and eerie, reminiscent of the earlier "Alien" films. The pyramid is impressively constructed, like a giant puzzle box with endless corridors for the crew to get lost in. Remember, the movie is really nothing more than a glorified computer game with mazes and monsters. The Alien and Predator creatures are pretty much as we remember them, although now they are done with a combination of live actors in costume, animatronics, and CGI. Actually, I thought they looked less frightening now than ever before, the Predators especially seeming less detailed, but that may be a biased reaction.

As in all B-movie horror flicks, upon entering any building, the characters immediately spread out and go in all directions alone. Then they creep around in the dark until something scares them. Too bad nothing scares the audience. A penguin replaces the ever-present cat from "Alien," but the hanging chains we became so acquainted with are still around to remind us of former glories.

As I mentioned above, I was more than a little surprised to find the Aliens reproducing so quickly. The Queen lays her eggs, the eggs hatch the facehuggers, the facehuggers attach themselves to a host and incubate, the little Alien creatures spring out of the stomach or chest, and then they grow to maturity; all of this happening in about the time it took me to type this sentence. Nobody in the film comments on the impossibility of the feat, an amazing generative process even for fictional space monsters.

I kept waiting for something, anything, scary to occur. Instead, we get a series of scenes and creatures we've all seen before. There's nothing unexpected happening, there's little tension or suspense, and most of the action is unrealistic and unbelievable even by bad sci-fi/fantasy standards. Think of a woman being thrown the length of a room against a stone wall and sustaining zero damage, or people falling from ten-foot ledges and bouncing right back up again. If this were done tongue-in-cheek, a la "Indiana Jones," it might have been fun. Here, it's just dumb.

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