Roaring Ripping Rending Rebirth!

At last – the sequel to PREDATOR we’ve been waiting for!

With the internet ablaze with derogation over the casting of Adrien Brody in the lead role (purely because action fans cannot comprehend life after Arnold), and the B-movie schlock of the ALIEN VS. PREDATOR movies sullying DVD rental racks around the planet, it would seem PREDATORS had little chance of being taken seriously by moviegoers or the men who make the moving pictures.

But Robert Rodriguez (producer) and Nimród Antal (director) have bowed their heads in fealty to the legendary 1987 PREDATOR film, shinked out their arm-talons and ripped forth a roaring rebirth for the franchise.

PREDATORS starts in free fall – literally – as eight nameless characters drop from the sky into a mysterious jungle. They’re all the best “predators” in their killing fields. They discover they’re on another planet – a grand vista of three gigantic moons in the sky and a sun that “hasn’t moved since we got here” tipping them off.

And they’re being hunted by something.

The planet is a game preserve and they’ve been dropped here for sport. The over-arching theme, which is sometimes used as the embarrassing tagline: “When the predators become the prey.” Oh, I feel dirty.

Adrien Brody, an American Special Ops merc, is the tacit leader and therefore has to put on the raspiest voice. There is the Russian Special Forces soldier (Oleg Taktarov, last seen with De Niro in RIGHTEOUS KILL and 15 MINUTES), a Mexican drug enforcer (Danny Trejo, last seen in any Robert Rodriguez film), a Yakuza (Louis Ozawa Changchien), a Sierra Leone soldier (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali, last seen buying another vowel), an Israeli sniper (Alice Braga), a death row inmate (Walton Goggins, last seen as Sam Rockwell in THE GREEN MILE) and a disgraced bean stem of a doctor (Topher Grace, last seen apologizing for being an actor).

(Of course, physics is once again given short shrift, as three giant moons that close to a planet would not make it humanly habitable: the planet would either be torn apart by gravitational forces, have no atmosphere or suffer continual tectonic upheaval and volcanism. Also, it’s very unlikely the sun would appear the same size in the sky as our sun, and if it doesn’t move, how come night falls?)

Onward to plot that makes sense if you discount everything else.

Luckily, Brody has read the script and rasps the exposition above. But you don’t need the script if you’ve got someone who saw PREDATOR; Alice Braga recounts the story of the Special Forces guy (that would be Arnold, fanboys) who killed one of the hunters and described its proclivities.

Can’t help feeling the cast is a leetle too international for the sake of worldwide box office – or maybe they’re just auditioning for a crowd of passengers in another SPEED movie.

First act is tight, effective screenwriting; characters introduced smartly, situation assimilated; inexplicable jungle mystery, thriller, action, even some horror. All the classic story elements that made PREDATOR so good. PREDATORS reminds us of ALIEN 3: back to basics to bring the solemnity under control again.

Suddenly – Laurence Fishburne. A surprise cameo, an eccentric old hermit, well-built, brain-fried, and whispering in that Morpheus velvet about surviving for ten seasons. He reveals the Predator hunting party travels in threes.

And then, in maximum cool – we meet The Predators…

They’re played by Carey Jones, Brian Steele and Derek Mears, and they’ve been given names by the filmmakers that we discover only by reading the credits: the captive, strung-up Predator is Classic Predator; the leader of the three hunters is Berserker, larger and scarier than Tracker and Falconer. The armor and headgear of these new Predators is akin to the development of Batman’s suits; more jagged and streamlined than previous versions. Makeup by Greg Nicotera and Howard Berger goes above and beyond the call of B-Movie duty. Like the rest of the production, they’re taking it very seriously indeed.

There are numerous homages to PREDATOR, creatively intertwined into this tale, and Little Richard’s Long Tall Sally (which is blaring in the chopper on the way to the drop zone in PREDATOR) plays us out over the closing credits. There are the unavoidable cliché moments: Walton exalts, “We killed it! We killed it!” and is suddenly shot in the back by “it.” There are the interesting twists of character, and even a grand moral dilemma: when Topher is injured, rather than carrying him as dead weight, Brody decides, “We leave him as a booby trap.” When Alice protests, he elucidates on how the Predators maimed Topher to slow down the fleeing humans, knowing they would carry him, “They’re banking on us being human.” I love the smell of sociopath in the morning.

And when Yakuza finds a samurai sword, we know there must be a reckoning – between an arm-bladed Predator and Yakuza gettin’ his Toshiro Mifune on. Like Billy on the log, Yakuza stops in a field as the rest of the humans continue to flee. He turns to face the oncoming Pred, who, true to form, decides to grant his prey the courtesy of a “fair” battle… as he shinks out his arm-talons…

It seems Predators are taken down not by their superior technology or weaponry, which, if utilized judiciously, can take down any prey in the galaxy – they are done in by their own hubris! They are arrogant beyond caution. Brody (covered in mud like Arnold) goes mano a mano against the last Berserker; when the Pred could easily shoot Brody as he lies squirming on the ground, he opts to grab Brody by the neck and throw him. Even picking Brody up by the neck could warrant an efficient killing stroke if the Pred just shinks his arm-talons up through Brody’s throat. Nope. They take toying with their prey to new levels of carelessness.

Maybe it is this inherent ego, conceit and pride that makes them hunters in the first place (those characteristics sure work for Man); maybe this same presumption of their superiority impels them to waste resources bringing animals from throughout the solar system to dump on this planet as prey; all we know is: “Pride goeth before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall.” (Proverbs 16:18). Another reason for Predators to read the bible – they’d kill us more efficiently. They should also stop watching 1960s Batman episodes.

It’s almost as if the words of the Little Richard song reflect the taunting hubris of the Predators, “We’re gonna have some fun tonight – whooo!/ We’re gonna have some fun tonight – whooo!/ Have some fun, havin’ me some fun tonight!”– Oops! Blown up by humans again!

Whooo!

END

Requiem for a Dweeb.

Hundreds of Aliens. One Predator. No actors.

The splash-slogans on the DVD packaging of ALIENS VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM scream at us louder than the Predator’s roar: “More Blood… More Guts… More Gore!” Pretty much guarantees a maximum rating of five cucumbers out of ten – if everything else is top-notch. Everything else is not.

Sucking never hurt so good.

Story picks up exactly where we thought it had thankfully ended in the last movie, AVP: ALIEN VERSUS PREDATOR (2004), with a cute Alien busting through the chest of a Predator onboard a Predator rescue ship. Sporting Predator-like quad-jowls (therefore affectionately called Pred-Alien by the film-makers), the little tyke quickly dispatches all the supposedly-tough Predator warriors onboard and crash-lands the ship back on Earth in a small town called Sequel Land. Whereupon Pred-Alien starts laying eggs, whereupon face-huggers face-fuck every human in sight, whereupon chest-bursters emerge, and Aliens over-run Sequel Land.

A decidedly hyper-masculine Predator from Predator Planet receives the auto distress signal from the downed Preda-ship and takes the express Sequel Rescue Ship to Earth to take on this Pred-Alien who unceremoniously capped his Predapeeps (even though there was a Predator mother ship that was just leaving Earth orbit, all those Predators apparently too insubordinate to be stop-lossed and turned around to return the few hundred miles to Earth).

But think about it: if the Pred-Alien can kill Predators so efficiently while still a tiny chest-burster, imagine her lethality when she grows into one of H.R. Giger’s rubber suits. And only ONE Predator goes back for the clambake?

Shake out that stupid thing called Logic. Cue pointless human interest stories…

Like the last film, it’s another B-Actor hoedown, everyone conveying just enough emotion to get past the audition for a detergent commercial: the ex-prisoner (who looks like a model), the small-town sheriff, the dork pizza delivery guy, the college jocks, the salubrious chick who digs the dork, but jacks the jocks… But that’s why there’s “more blood, more guts, more gore!” – more distraction.

Credit where it’s due: the Alien character was created by Dan O’Bannon and Ron Shusett (ALIEN, 1979) and the Predator character was created by Jim Thomas and John Thomas (PREDATOR, 1987). Though this movie launches another salvo that only aids marketing synergy and recognition, I can’t help feeling a little sorry for the crafters of these once-ominous alien beings, their legacies being smeared more heinously than the Republicans smear men of honor and vision.

Directed by The Brothers Strause (Colin and Greg, two effects supervisors whose best work as directors could definitely be said to be in front of them), REQUIEM boasts many staff who worked on both PREDATOR and ALIEN franchises; movie also retains the ominous elements of the PREDATOR soundtrack – those tribal drums, coupled with that eerie music.

Then Ripley turns up.

Well, not exactly. One of the human stories shows a female Marine returning home to find her daughter has bonded closely with her husband. Struggling to regain her daughter’s trust, an Alien comes to her rescue – as her husband is mangled by an Alien, she doesn’t hesitate: grabs the kid and hi-tails it like Jackie Onassis off the back of that limo in Dealey Plaza – so much for “leaving no one behind.” She and the prison model rally the puny humans into fighting back. And fail. Need more testosterone than that to be Ripley, honey…

Then there’s a government guy who obviously works for even less than Lance Henriksen. But kinda looks like him if you squint real hard. He’s the baddie (cos he’s from The Government, see?).

As the Aliens rip into the townsfolk, who all use magical guns (Happiness is never having to reload), the Predator, who is all alone against hundreds of Aliens, shows he’s a pretty resourceful son-of-a-predatoress by using his gadgets and superior intellect (so who died and made the Predators the good guys?) in attrition against the Aliens until there remains only him and the Pred-Alien.

And what happens to all the B-actors? Who cares?

Hundreds of clichés. One script. No kidding.

END

Ground Control to Major Tom
Take your protein pills and put your mascara on…

Mission To Farce.

MISSION TO MARS stands every bit as tall as CAPRICORN ONE in the Ignorant Space Movie category, exhibiting so many misdemeanors, misrepresentations, misapplied physics laws, mistaken facts, missteps, mysterious logic, and misapprehension of spacefaring dialect that one wonders which second-grader took three months off school to helm it.

Brian de Palma – the dark force behind 1983’s SCARFACE – appends his name as director. But I think he’s lying.

Starring Don Cheadle as the Crazy Black Guy, Gary Sinise (wearing more makeup than David Bowie on the Ziggy Stardust tour), Tim Robbins as The Tragic Apple-Pie Hero, Connie Nielsen as The Chick and Jerry O’Connell as The Fat Kid from STAND BY ME.

Poffy roving redundantly.

From its first space scenes, the film trumpets its ignorance, showing a remote rover aiding a manned mission on Mars. Audiences are so conditioned to robot helpers in space cinema (since Will Robinson and Dr. Smith leaned so heavily on theirs for comedic side-kickery in LOST IN SPACE of the 60s) that they do not realize this particular rover’s superfluity. Rovers are reconnoiter craft for unmanned missions – consequently, this 26-million-dollar redundancy would not exist in a space agency whose motto became “faster, cheaper, better” to appease the ignorant, impatient public and the even more ignorant, penny-pinching government. (That only two of these three aspects can exist simultaneously is another issue altogether. That is, you can have faster and cheaper, but it won’t be better; cheaper and better, but it won’t be delivered faster, etc.)

And from there, it’s downhill fast.

MISSION TO MARS is so machine-gun riddled with one discrepancy and fallacy after the next, that absolutely zero enjoyment can be gleaned from the storyline, performances or the space or planet backdrop effects.

Crazy Black Guy gets stranded on Mars. Blatantly throwing logic, budget, orbital mechanics and NASA protocol to the pigs, Apple-Pie, The Chick, Fat Kid and Ziggy are sent to rescue him. Another “launch window” to Mars is years hence, yet these American Pie Heroes – working on the fact that everyone in the film and the audience regard the launch window as a McGuffin – go anyway. Launching outside a “launch window” is not a “dramatic element that illustrates dedication and Team Spirit” – it is an impossibility. Without gravity assists (by flybys of Venus and Earth), a spacecraft already constructed for such a journey would have to be retrofitted to house inordinate amounts of additional propellant, construction exigencies alone putting the mission outside budget and payload constraints… No one can just declare their heroic intentions and have everything ready to go by Sunday – which is basically how Ziggy achieves his launch; to save someone openly considered dispensable by the space agency (who train scores of astronauts for the same missions, for just such eventualities), who may be a corpse anyway, considering all radio contact with him was lost.

You lost me at Houston, We Have a Problem.

NASA would more likely launch a mission to retrieve its ROVER, which has more intelligence in its antenna than all the astronauts combined.

Our rescuers discover a giant Face on Mars – that old 70’s superstition from the Viking 1 probe photo. In a space age where we have already disproved its existence, the film-makers opt to pander to conspiracy theorists, pseudo-scientists, astrologers and imbeciles who shun scientific evidence like the mystical “evil” they have been inculcated to believe is tangible. In a technological era that possesses extraterrestrial soft-landing spacecraft (Mars Pathfinder, launched 1996) and high-altitude surveillance (Mars Global Surveyor, launched 1996), given the fictional year of this movie (supposedly 2020), even if we need to regard The Face as “real” for the movie’s dramatic purposes, it should have been discovered decades before these astro-nots landed.

Instead, the movie ramps further into idiocy.

Near Mars orbit, the rescuers abandon their exploding ship (more obscene fallacies accompany the ship explosion than can be catalogued here); though, leaving in a dead fall, they still achieve enough orbital velocity to capture a supply module already in orbit. (Again, absolutely no respect is afforded physics laws, as Apple Pie fires up his jets and points directly at the module to catch it – but with the module in a lower orbit, he needs to fire his jets against the direction of his higher orbit to attain that lower orbit.)

Upon impossibly reaching the module, Pie goes flying past it as if he was in an atmosphere, setting up the most heinous crime this movie could commit on the unquestioning minds of its ape-like audience:

With Pie’s MMU (Manned Maneuvering Unit) out of fuel, Chick, supposedly a trained astronaut, uses the same incorrect directional jet burns and massive overacting to try to save him. Pie tells her, “You can’t catch me with your MMU, honey. Their jets are designed for attitude control, not travel.” Information which probably should have been learned at the Astronaut Academy, dontcha think? After the mathematical impossibility of saving Pie is explained to her like an idiot-child, she stops and – shoots a tether cable at him! Remember that silly thing we learned in grade school called Newton’s Third Law of Motion: “For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction”? Taking for granted that Chick has miraculously attained orbital velocity of 28,000 kph, after shooting the tether, she retains her relative position, steady as a rock, in the vacuum of space – breaking one of the most fundamental physics laws, while everything else around her continues to adhere to those same laws! No one told Newton that enough overacting piled on the Third Law would negate its physics.

Speciously landing on Mars, Crazy Black Guy is found (spearing fish and talking to a volleyball named Wilson), whereupon ensue conversations about DNA that only a screenwriter with absolutely no biology knowledge could appreciate. Their super-redundant rover leads them into the Face on Mars, where they encounter a tall alien being wearing a flowing number that would look fabulous on Barbra Streisand.

Of course, helmets – as in all space movies – are completely arbitrary. Who knows why NASA spends so much useless time engineering environment suits when every planet in the universe – as LOST IN SPACE taught us – already has a breathable atmosphere? Before we can even ingest the next twenty stupidities that the movie flings at us like ape-poo, helmets on Mars are eschewed for the purpose of contractually appeasing the pretty movie stars and their agents who insist on verifiable screen time. (How else to prove it if there’s that unfashionable helmet obscuring the star’s $500 hairstyle?)

Barbra shows them a solar system hologram – with all the planets orbiting in the wrong direction (proving that there are idiot screenwriters even on Mars) – and a nifty morphing computer program which she bought from Michael Jackson, showing that Life on Earth was seeded from Life on Mars. Well, that accounts for all those Jerry Springer guests.

Every aspect of the DNA scenes, zero-gee scenes and orbital mechanics scenes is completely blundered from the dialogue to the action to the fallacious physics laws which go in and out of play as the plot requires; spacecraft do not emit vapor trails; sound does not propagate in a vacuum; galaxies don’t look that way in visible light; the atmosphere analyzer on Ziggy’s forearm shows “Nitrogen 56% Oxygen 20% Trace Gasses 1%” – the film-makers are so lazy that they do not even bother to make the numbers add up to 100 percent!

Movie writers always hide behind the pretext that movies are “only entertainment” and should be taken less seriously. Yet what kind of entertainment can be gleaned from a movie with this much blatant disregard for the most basic tenets of reality (such as: Humans Can’t Breath On Mars)? Why should society extol education and learning when this demeaning and insidious disrespect for learning is lauded with heathen funding and absolutely criminal promulgation? If they say they are appealing to “the masses,” how much of an insult is it to regard The Masses as this imbecilic? Unfortunately, there will be many who, being too young or underprivileged to have afforded an opportunity for education in basic physics, will enjoy this film – and thus the dumbing down of a generation acquires its target long before that generation even knows what hit it.

Every scientific fact that mankind has strove so hard to identify is treated like so much dross by the ignoramuses who forged this worthless and useless, deformed, retarded thing they call a movie, that their greatest punishment will be having to see their names attached to it for millennia to come.

END

AVP: Audience Versus Padding.

The question is not whether an “Alien” can overcome a “Predator” (ignorant semantics, as the two non-human species in this film are both “aliens” and “predators”); the real battle is pitting the movie’s Audience against its interminable Padding scenes. Can – we – survive? With my leg bloodied from the onslaught and a gaping wound in my side, I struggled out the theater exit, leaving two friends gurgling in the seventh row – hey, I’m no jarhead – I make no empty promises to “leave no one behind”… If the subterranean walking scenes didn’t finish them off, the inane talking scenes did.

Padding: 2. Audience: 1.

AVP: ALIEN VS PREDATOR is a nippled Batsuit – a franchise gone too far. It fulfills its purpose of keeping 14-year-old boys off the street and thereby less likely to shoot up a school or get your daughter pregnant, which is small respite; all we can hope for – until the next over-breasted Lara Croft video game release or somnolent Harry Potter movie. But as adult entertainment – and let’s face it: present-day adults, not kids, are the demographic weaned on the ALIEN and PREDATOR movies – it is diversionary, but not involving; good but not great, glittering but no prize.

Predapoff

An ancient pyramid is discovered beneath the snows of some snowy country, where Aliens are kept imprisoned in labyrinths, for Predators to send their teen warriors in and achieve predatorhood via slaughter. Sounds great on paper.

Both ALIEN (1979) and PREDATOR (1987) were sui generis movies, the former, through canny screenwriting and an uncompromising lead heroine, spawned three above-average sequels while the latter spawned an adequate-bordering-on-lame sequel (Danny in lieu of Arnold?!). Now, like the HIGHLANDER franchise, the mythos of both creations is sullied to the level of soap opera and with the Marketeers wielding their pimp-witted power, no longer will any successive ALIEN or PREDATOR movies exude the mystery or excitement of their progenitors, but rather, bombastic, overblown CGI and gratuitously-tweaked explosions for the action-figure teenboy market.

As a stand-alone movie – forget it! AVP’s existence is predicated on our cognizance of the last 25 years of these iconic monsters. Without that foreknowledge the very existence of these creatures and their interaction will appear contrived. The plot seems cobbled together from drafts made by 14-year-olds playing with their action figures (much like George Lucas writes his plots). The concept of the battling races at first seems mildly plausible, but then we realize the whole backstory is shoving square storyline into round plot holes and demystifying not one, but two rapacious extra-terrestrial cultures. Casting one’s senses back to those heady days of the original movies, our enjoyment was piqued precisely because their antagonists were inexplicable; they were truly… “alien.” Now they’re just Philo Beddoe in a barroom.

Except for Lance Henriksen (renowned B-movie “That Guy”), all human characters are instantly forgettable, except for a guy whose cultured locution could easily get him mistaken for a black James Bond (Colin Salmon, who actually had a small recurring role in the three Brosnan Bond films) and the young female expedition leader (Sanaa Lathan), i.e. Black Ripley; in essence, humans are this movie’s McGuffin, for any agent could have unearthed the battle-pyramid and a text crawl could have explained the backstory of the Alien-Predator symbiosis. Only reason we meet humans at all in this film is to mayhap invest a modicum of interest in this tale which, literally, has nothing to do with our species.

It’s a B-Actor hoedown: Sanaa Lathan and a cast of glorified extras.

Henriksen’s role is anomalous: his character is familiar with Aliens (from ALIEN 3), yet when confronted by one, instead of becoming Mr. Corporation (as would be his character’s wont), he burbles incoherently with the rest of the B-Actors. Then when confronted by a Predator, instead of dollar signs cha-chinging in his eyes at the discovery of yet another alien species, he goes Rambo on it and gets, subsequently, dead. But I will leave that trite conundrum to the fanboys to clarify.

Terming one species Alien and one Predator is a point of irritating contention for me; these terms only exist in our viewer-reality, for in the movie, the creatures are only superficially identified as “serpents” (Aliens) and “hunters” (Predators). The substitute terms are a dead giveaway: hunters are “noble”; serpents, well… do we need to extemporize on a well-trodden metaphor? From the outset, we are led a merry road by the film-makers to perceive the Predators as “good guys.” No surprise, for in being prejudicially human, we are prone to siding with the more anthropoid of the two aliens and ironically, the Predators assume the Arnold role in this movie – the musclebound “heroes,” as it were. The movie rationalizes, sensibly, that the Predators only try to kill our human B-actors to re-acquire what the B-actors stole – their weapons. Which puts paid to the movie’s tag-line, “Whoever wins – we lose.” Well, not exactly, for the Predators are portrayed as sentinels keeping the roistering Aliens at bay… So only if the Predators lose, we lose.

Battle scenes ensue – with the predictably close-cut action and blurred whiz-banging – but the fights are only adequately directed and rather short, and it is just too incongruous viewing these two iconic monsters on screen together. Something just don’t click. Either this would be a good Alien movie (for the Aliens are animated excellently, combining live puppetry with CGI) or a good Predator movie (the rugged masculinity of those 7-foot behemoths was enough super-cruel to power a small township), but – as Offspring advised – “you gotta keep ’em separated.”

And for the record, the “AVP” acronym is so IGNINTLY “skoolyard-bitchin” that it reeks of Marketeers grappling with the long-dead spirits of their nerd youth in pathetically trying to ramp up the street-cool of this geek-square movie.

Now gimme that spear – after witnessing those man-tastic pecs on the Predators, I’m going in – I’ve got two friends to save in the seventh row…

END