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Alien Vs. Predator (Paul W.S. Anderson, 2004)

Again and again throughout this film director Paul Anderson exposes his miniscule talent and ambition like a demented flasher. If it's not vapid reconstructions of scenes from previous films or desperate attempts at creating 'iconic' images, it's pathetic non-characters and men in suits engaging in poorly-shot gunplay and fisticuffs. With no characters and too tenuous a plot to even notice, when the film's tagline asks the audience to ponder on who will win this battle of sci-fi horror titans, an hour and fifty minutes later the answer turns out to have been 'nobody cares.'

Too scared to play it 100% straight, AvP adopts a mock-ironic, knowing tone, which neuters its effectiveness just as much as the 12A rating, and one comes away from it with a sense of an incredible wasted opportunity. Clearly budget, talent and time were unscalable barriers that none of the cast, crew or studio could ever possibly hope to overcome.
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  1. Maj24 November 2010 at 21:00

    Yeah, i hate it when they smirk at the camera. Only original movies should be allowed that cliche. It's always painful in sequels and spinoffs.

    At this point they should give up on having any plot whatsoever, and just recreate the Capcom arcade game as a movie. If someone gave you fifty million dollars to make Predators and Aliens do cool ninja shit for two hours, would you have any trouble coming up with ideas?

    You can easily fill up 20 minutes just by XCOPYing Blanka combos!
    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dYRbJxJG7UI

    (Although how does someone make a video like that and not choose the jungle stage?)

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