Parody has no power. At least, movie parody doesn’t. Didn’t Planet Terror just come out, a parodistic celebration of cheap horror films and their narrative tropes? Now comes AVPR: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem, and it goes for the same narrative situations, only with a straight face, and none of the panache of Rodriguez’s film.

If I follow the plot (credited to Shane Salerno and a host of writers who invented the original separate franchises) there is a ship in space that breeds Aliens for the Predators to hunt. On the occasion of the film’s beginning, some kind of half-breed Alien-Predator is born. In any case, the ship crash lands on earth, near the rural town of Gunnison, Colorado, the kind of small, quiet, “nice” town that Rambo could leave in cinders in about two hours.

But the ship has landed not in a Rambo movie but in a disaster film. AVPR: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem is less like a horror film than a ’70s suspense film set on a ship or a town about to get all shook up. The script methodically introduces us to a succession of disparate people who are going to find their “mettle” when confronted with the implacable force of the egg-laying Aliens and the clean-up-crew Predator out to get them.

While the characters are unfurled (ex-con returning to town, his nerd brother in love with the town blonde and victimized by athlete bullies, sheriff, diner waitress, returning female Iraq vet and her husband and her ungrateful brat of a daughter - all essentially nameless and essentially actor-less), the Predator planet has sensed that the breeding ship has crashed. Like Mighty Mouse, one of the Predators goes into action and takes a quick trip to Earth.

I didn’t understand the Predator’s motivation in this film. Why does he have to dash off and clean up the mess of the crash landing? Is there an Alien-Predator supervisory body that frowns on messy events such as this? Is the breeding secret? And who cares, in the universal scheme of things, whether the Aliens crash land on Earth and breed? Isn’t that a good thing, creating a nice hunting ground for the sporting Predators, like Dick Cheney’s bird release farms?

The film quickly falls into a rhythm in which people talk boringly to each other so that we have an idea of their personality so that we will “care” whether or not they die, alternating with mini-suspense set pieces in which a lone character will slowly, boringly stumble upon a stray Alien-Predator and get offed, with a long close-up of a bloody, dead face as a punctuation mark. These narrative delaying sequences are not interesting in and of themselves, especially when they are offering character “color.” For example, the tiresome almost-subplot about the soldier’s daughter being resentful of her mother’s reappearance is very much a TV show “injustice” seen in shows such as CSI Miami where it appeals to the soap opera masochism of female viewers.

Besides borrowing from the kinds of Carpenter-like films that influenced Rodriguez, AVPR: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem (while also availing itself of the rogue-cop alliance, the dispersal of guns sequence, the congregation in the diner, the run-for-it to the chopper, and so forth) also makes glancing references to such films as The Blob, where the cops wouldn’t pay any attention to the kids’ warning, ’cause they were just kids.

Little things don’t make sense, and occur solely for screenwriter convenience. The bullies throw the nerd’s keys into the sewer. When nerd and ex-con brother go later that night to fetch them, why are the keys so very, very far away from where they would have landed in reality? Why do characters keep saying that it will take a long time for the National Guard to arrive, only for them to show up in seconds? In the realm of special effects, things happen that couldn’t or wouldn’t in the real world. For example, a workman in a hard hat simply waits for an Alien steel tongue to enter his head. Wouldn’t a real person react, however minimally? And do heads really remain frozen as spiked tongues enter them? Wouldn’t they bob around or recoil in reaction as, say, physics might dictate? And the antagonists look too much alike in the steel blue coloring of the world created on the film; the Predators have dreadlocks and the Aliens have big steel tongues, but otherwise they are indistinguishable, especially in the dark and the rain.

Fans, such as they are, of the Alien and the Predator series, will no doubt enjoy seeing their “heroes” again, with the signature heat vision, the weird clicking sounds, and the ability to go invisible. The Aliens maintain their villainy, but the Predators have graduated to the status of heroes, like Hannibal Lecter; that is, they are not above viewing human beings as easily-disposed-of impediments. Ultimately, AVPR: Aliens vs Predator: Requiem is the latest example of a hybrid genre, not quite horror, not quite science fiction, not quite suspense, or war film or blockbuster, but a blend of all three with its own rules and regulations and audience expectations. This weird genre still awaits its synthesizing auteur.

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 6th, 2008 at 5:59 pm and is filed under Reel Politique - Film columnist DK Holm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.