Recently, I've re-acquired HBO and thus every bad movie is again available at any time to me. I have the TV running while I'm on the computer looking for jobs and whatnot, and I happened to have on Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

The ads promised so much more than the movies delivered.

I've always liked Alien,Aliens,Predator, and to a lesser extent, Alien 3 and Predator 2. But then Hollywood has to go and throw Alien: Resurrection in our faces. Why? And then they had to take the successful crossover franchise and make cheap horror/thriller flicks out of them! WHY?

Money is why. Money money money. The simple logic was: people liked those movies, so people must like anything to do with those IP's. But people didn't like those movies just because they had weird-looking scary Gieger-aliens and weird-looking violent "predator" aliens in them; they both had a good story. So here, for yours and Hollywood's benefit, I am going to detail exactly why the good movies are good, and why the bad are bad.

The Good:

Alien

Here's what's great about it:

--The visual style of the director, Ridley Scott -

This is the guy who made Blade Runner 3 years later, and you'd expect he'd do more of these visually stunning movies, right? Oh well. Anyway, Ridley Scott was meticulous and obsessive with the visual style and set design of Alien, and it helped, vastly. The spaceship set was actually built as a single, continuous, enclosed set that added to the feeling of claustrophobia. Ridley Scott made his case for doing the movie by drawing one of the most beautiful, detailed storyboards ever.

In the seventies, they always tried to make scintillation seem "realistic."

---Realistic Horror The crew of the spaceship in this were all average-joe, working-class types. They talked about real issues, like their bonuses, and they weren't stupid about running into dark rooms alone. They argued with each other, and considered options, like real people do. When characters are realistic, there's a greater suspension of disbelief, and the audience can get into a movie more. When there's a bunch of stupid, overattractive 20-somethings with fake problems and fake drama taken straight from an episode of The Real World, nobody can take a horror movie seriously.

Real horror is when you're living your normal, everyday life, struggling to make ends meet, and then a bunch of fucked-up coincidences send you into a spiraling, nightmarish scenario of doom -- the alien doesn't care if you're ugly or pretty, or how many of your friends you saved from death. Real horror is arbitrary, unjustified, and cruel.

---Real characters By this, of course, I mean Ripley. Remember that she didn't want to let the alien-paracitized crewmember on the ship? She was all about business and survival, but Dallas wanted to be a big hero. And thus he was eaten. Cain was curious, wanted to go exploring, and he gets a facehugger. You see? Real consequences for real flaws.

All of these things together make for something that is more like an art film than a Hollywood blockbuster. A plot that breaks the mold, characters taken from life, a surreal, post-modern set, and a carefully planned cinematic style makes the film much more than simply being about an alien monster killing people.

Aliens

---A director that understands action, James Cameron. These were classic days of 80's action movies, without the half-second, rapid-fire cuts that seem so prevalent nowadays. Back then, you could see what was going on, as in, who shot what alien. Cameron wrote the screenplay himself; which makes me think that directors who are also the writer can more effectively execute their vision cohesively.

"When she heard 'aliens,' she thought they meant 'illegal aliens...'"

---Realistic characters Yes, once again. More than just fill archetypes, the characters in Aliens change and react to things. In the beginning, the colonial marines seem like marines, the corporation execs act like execs, and Ripley acts like the survivor of a horrific encounter with an alien. Hudson, the cocky marine, freaks out and delivers some of the most memorable lines of the movie. Ripley gets over her fear and takes charge. And so forth.
---A simple, but believable plot You don't have to try too hard to make people watch a movie about aliens and marines with guns trying to survive. The story is the same: how best to survive? The characters think real hard about this and make a plan, and it mostly comes to fruition. Mostly. I think one of the hallmarks of survival movies is that there needs to be a debate about the survival plan.

---Cool shit, but not in excess. Okay, this is a guy movie, and guys like cool stuff in their movies. The dropship, the exosuit, Bishop remote-piloting, the alien mother, the assault car, the 10 millimeter explosive-tip caseless light armor-piercing rounds, Ripley taping a rifle to a flamethrower; all of that cool shit (but not too much) was in the movie for a reason, though.

Motion tracker, pulse rifle, and a big machine gun on some sort of articulated harnass attachment. I want them all!

Remember in the Fifth Element when almost ten minutes was wasted on showing off a cool gun, and then it pretty much didn't matter to the plot? I hate it when there's something thrown in a "sci-fi" movie just for the sake of proving that it's science fiction (which it doesn't). Aliens just threw what it needed in there, and nothing more. The harder filmmakers try to show off their fantasized pseudo-technology, the more contrived and pointless it seems.

Those moments in movies always seem like the movie itself just stopped and went off the rails. I mean, did Luke have to explain his landspeeder to the audience? It's a fucking floating convertible. You see it in action, you get it. That's what being on the screen is all about, rather than in a book: seeing is believing. If it has to be explained, then it probably is too unbelievable to work for the audience.

Predator

---Arnold Schwartzenegger made this movie cool, because it was the 80's, and everything he did in the 80's (except for Conan the Destroyer) was cool, no matter how insipid. Don't worry that the movie featured two future US Governors. The message of the 80's was: don't freak out, use your big muscles and boy-scout-trap-making-training, and you can defeat an alien hostile with superior firepower and strength with mud and sharpened sticks. Was it a Cold War allegory? More like a counter-narco-insurgency-in-Latin-America allegory.

You are one ugly mother fucker.

---Visual narrative. Sometimes you just don't need clever quips and one-liners. This movie had plenty, but it knew when to shut up. There's plenty of scenes of the soldiers walking through the jungle, stalking around, acting with just their eyes, body language, and wordless screams. The predator-alien doesn't have any lines (other than parroting the humans), and there aren't subtitles to explain what it's doing or why.

Geoff told me about the GI Joe comic "Silent Interlude" (#21) which has absolutely no written dialog, probably because the whole issue is about a professional ninja. You know, I'm really tired of seeing movies with chatty ninjas. The point is, you don't always need dialog to tell a story.

The So-So

For these, I'm going to talk about the good and bad aspects of them.

Alien³

---Unclear Mission Too much to detail here, but check out the wikipedia article. In short, there was so much controversy about what to do with this sequel that they had a whole host of different directors, recuts and edits. Something like 30 different draft screenplays were written. It's like the studio couldn't make up its mind about what to do with the franchise.

If only this was the start of a hot alien-human shower sex scene...

---You just can't go backwards in scale or scope with sequels. After all the awesome special effects and cool sci-fi props in the previous two movies, why go to something so pedestrian and mundane? It's just one alien chasing religious XXY-chromasome prisoners around a dingy prison, and Sigorney Weaver with a shaved head. The first film was beautiful, the second was exciting, and the third...well...depressing. Boo.

The Matrix sequels suffer the same problem of diminishing scope/scale, but on the level of story. Instead of a mind-blowing, through-the-looking-glass scenario, we just have two special-effects driven crapshoots. The Wachowski brothers should have chosen mind-blowing plot/story over eyeball-exploding visual effects.

Come to think of it, the original wasn't all that mind-blowing in terms of the science-fiction genre itself, but it was much more amusing to watch. But I digress...

Predator 2

---Danny Glover cannot fill in for Arnold Schwarzenegger, yet he's essentially playing the same character: a strong, gun-toting, ass-kicking dude who's just a little more intelligent than the cannon-fodder that gets cut down in the course of the movie. And for some reason, this movie is also some strange allegory for the counter-narco-insurgency, in the "jungle" of L.A. It makes me feel like this is the second half of Crocodile Dundee, with the predator-alien playing the city-culture-shocked Mick (and it also happens to look something like a mutated crocodile, too).

You are one sweaty mother fucker...

I would have like a different human-predator battle in this movie, maybe with a female protagonist, in the same setting. In the end, Danny's character (I don't remember the name) simply out-fights the predator alien, and gets a small antique gun as a prize. And just like with Alien 3, this movie...

---Lacked some sort of escalation of stakes. I mean, we already understood the whole "these aliens are here to hunt the most dangerous prey... MAN!" thing after the first movie, so what does this movie do but simply repeat the same idea? The hint at the end that the aliens have been hunting dudes on Earth for a long time amounted to a whopping "so what?" to me.

What could have made the movie better? Well, how about a conversation with the predator-alien or something? They have superior technology, so translation shouldn't be that much of a problem. Why couldn't Danny Glover team up with the predator so they can both put down the drug cartels or something? It could be his invisible friend.

Alien: Resurrection

More like, Alien: The Final Nail in the Coffin. What went wrong? Well, for starters...
---Joss Whedon wrote it! Don't get me wrong, Buffy The Vampire Slayer (the series) was a guilty pleasure of mine, but I liked that show for being basically a comedy and a spoof of the supernatural genre. Firefly was a decent show, too -- gritty action mixed with black comedy, however Joss Whedon doesn't seem to be able to write anything I might be able to take seriously.

Shut up, bitch -- You're ruining my franchise!

Specifically, the characters in Alien Resurrection were too much like role-playing-game characters. It felt like each and every one of them was designed by a nerd (which they were). All of them had their "cool" traits, a very specific set of skills, and had a "cool" profession (some kind of mercenary/smuggler-types) that got them into "awesome" adventures. Of course, the Alien-franchise formula of killing off your characters who are decidedly not cool, just average-joes, simply can't apply here. They're all badass mercenary types, so how do they get killed so easily?

I can't get so down on Joss, though, because in 2005 (8 years later) he said of it:

"It wasn't a question of doing everything differently, although they changed the ending; it was mostly a matter of doing everything wrong. They said the lines...mostly...but they said them all wrong. And they cast it wrong. And they designed it wrong. And they scored it wrong. They did everything wrong that they could possibly do. There's actually a fascinating lesson in filmmaking, because everything that they did reflects back to the script or looks like something from the script, and people assume that, if I hated it, then they’d changed the script...but it wasn’t so much that they’d changed the script; it’s that they just executed it in such a ghastly fashion as to render it almost unwatchable." - "Joss Whedon on Alien Resurrection". Bullz-eye.com.

Nice try, but there had to be parts of it you wrote that were simply just amateur, Joss. But you obviously moved on, and so shall we.

---Science fiction needs to be integral the plot, not just thrown in. There was a bunch of sci-fi ideas thrown in that were simply eclipsed by the bad-action-movie aspect, and they're so cliche'd that they're not even worth mentioning, and merely ancillary to the plot (plot: aliens kill people, a few survive). Some of them were downright fetishistic: the second-generation android (or, "gynoid") played by Winona Ryder. You can see the kind of fanboy-thinking that went into that contrivance, and probably evolved into Joss Whedon's Dollhouse series. I especially hated the part where one character gets excited and has a long expository dialog about the android-girl; it has to be one of the most contrived, "as-you-know" dialogs ever written. That scene made my writer's nerves ache.

"Monkey, monkeymonkeymonkey..."

---Jean-Pierre Jeunet should NOT have directed this movie. That's right, the director of Delicatessen and The City of Lost Children and later, Amélie , was asked to do Alien 4 after his success with City of Lost Children -- but why, I wonder? Did they expect his quirky, cartoonish style to be appropriate for the gritty, dark Alien property? Or were they thinking, "oh here's a commercially successful director that's cheap, let's just give it to him!" In any case, you just have to see the scene where the captain of the military vessel rolls a grenade across the floor, and the camera dollies backwards tracking the obviously-CG grenade to understand that no, it was NOT a good choice to have Jeunet direct this.

Maybe if the movie was about how the aliens change the lives of some space orphans by dreaming, and they have to make friends with an awkward giant played by Ron Perlman... then it would have been perfect for Jeunet.

The Shitpile

Alien vs. Predator and Requiem

Okay, I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this, because it's obvious why this movie sucks. An interesting thing I read was that the producers (at least one of the 6 who touched the property) wanted to make sure it didn't break continuity with either of the two existing franchises. Good job on that, buddy. What it did break, however, was the viability of both franchises. What had been (for a while) some rather noteworthy and fun films have just degenerated into schlocky slasher films.

Yep, this generic douchebag (Steven Pasquale) plays the main protagonist, "Dallas," in AVP: Requiem. Isn't he the most bland white dude ever?

There's a scene in Requiem where a guy out hunting with his son gets his arm melted off by alien acid-blood, while his kid watches. And then the man gets a facehugger. Then the kid gets one. Later on they both wake up and suddenly a chestbursting scene ensues. Come on, that's such a slasher-horror film trope; totally blatant audience manipulation. Real stories give you actual, sympathetic characters that you care about when they suffer.

Intercut with all the scenes of aliens in the pacific northwest forest is a totally standard "unlikely-hero" setup that is so contrived and pointless that it's downright annoying. At least the first AVP tried to be a little interesting with its Tomb-Raider-like, ancient-predator-alien-ruins-with-deathtraps, and its surviving-black-woman-as-a-peer-to-predators.

So there you have, my breakdown of how Hollywood took two once-great properties and turned them into shit. Hey, maybe they only care that the first AVP cost $60 million and grossed $173 million, so who could blame them so long as it was in the black? But consider the ratio of profitability. The first Alien cost $11 and grossed $103, which is something like 900% profit. The second did $18/131. So how come the third cost $50 mil and made only $159 mil? This is a lesson that Hollywood needs to learn: profitability comes directly from quality. Sometimes a hundred million is spent on a movie that ends up making billions, probably because it's a good movie. But you know what, if I could turn $10 million into $100 million like Ridley Scott did, it means I'm not a filmmaker, but an artist. Think about it: painters take $100 worth of paint and canvas and sell it for a few thousand dollars. It's not the materials that make the art worth it, it's the artist's vision and talent that adds all the value to a piece of art.

My conclusion does paint (no pun intended) artists as the biggest capitalists of all, ironically. But art embodies the very essence of commodity-fetishism: the notion that perceived, purely abstract value can have tangible, real-world value. A movie doesn't feed the consumer or give them healthcare -- there is no material value whatsoever. And yet the movie industry commands the highest profit margins you might ever find. This should in fact prove that there is no such thing as free market rationality, as if economists didn't know that already.

Was that enough of a digression for you? Well I'm not done. Here's the big one: The Alien and Predator franchises were about consumerism. They both have the predator-prey, hunter-hunted dichotomy going on, issues about money and corporate/government interests, and survival. It's all about how when the consumer-consumed relationship is inverted, humans have to actualize their survival, rather than take it for granted.

Okay, so maybe that's just my own interpretation of the movies, but that's what makes them art -- they use real themes from life that can be taken to abstraction by the audience and applied. The visual clues, acting, characters, story -- all of those things give us mental toys to play with, to work into our understanding of culture and life itself; that's the value that the audience gets from those movies, whether they realize it or not.

What makes a good movie? Whether or not it's art. What makes a movie art? I can't say for sure, but I think I'm beginning to understand.

art by H.R. Gieger