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Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 5, No. 40 |
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ALIEN VS. PREDATOR  An armored hunter from outer space (left) faces up to an acid-dripping alien beast in the bowels of an underground breeding center beneath the ice in contemporary Antarctica in 'Alien vs. Predator' |
No Arnold or Sigourney,
but lots of sci-fi nastiness
of TheColumnists.com
Ever since "Freddy vs. Jason" cleaned up bigtime at the box office last summer, movie studios have been searching their archives for monsters to team up for another summer battle royal.
You can be sure the hunt will continue for next summer now that 20th Century Fox has struck gold by matching up the monsters from two sagging series franchises--"Alien" and "Predator"--in another "battle of the century."
At first, this seemed an unlikely pair to draw in millions of fans. For one thing, the four previous "Alien" films all starred Sigourney Weaver as the heroic monster-masher Ripley, which guaranteed the sequels would remain "A" pictures. But Weaver wasn't available for another sequel.
Likewise, the original "Predator" was an Arnold Schwarzenegger picture. The only sequel, "Predator 2," was without Arnie--and slipped well below "A" status in terms of quality and box office take. You may have heard that Arnold has gone into politics and isn't taking any acting jobs these days.
Consequently, that meant "Alien vs. Predator" would have neither of the stars from the original films. Since the "monsters" involved were non-human, didn't speak lines and had no visible personalities, this meant the two principal antagonists would be hard to root for in the balcony. In "Freddy vs. Jason," at least one of the battlers had a discernible personality--Freddy Krueger, played with his usual high humor, by Robert Englund, the original "Freddy."
So, the producers of "Alien vs. Predator" would either have to create some compelling new human characters to inhabit the story--or simply go with non-stop action, building up to the "championship" bout in the final reel. They chose the latter path. Among the actors, only veteran horror movie actor Lance Henriksen, the former star of TV's "Millennium" series, had much of a following. (He was in the second and third "Alien" films, but not as the same character.)
All that said, "Alien vs. Predator" turned out to be much more entertaining than anyone had a right to expect, given the routine human characters the writers dreamed up. The basic situation is a clever one and the very special "environment" created for the monster showdown is executed in spectacular fashion.
The first problem faced was how to bring the monsters from "Alien" and "Predator" together in one place. In the original "Alien," the action takes place in Earth's future when space travel is routine. A cargo ship returning from the far frontiers is attracted to a murky planet by what they think is a distress signal. They wind up taking an alien life form aboard that ultimately kills all of them except surviving officer Ripley (Weaver). By the fourth film in the series--"Alien Resurrection" (1997)--the time has shifted even further into the future as Ripley is cloned from stored cells and put back on the job of monster-smashing.
In contrast, the original "Predator" (1987) pitted Schwarzenegger and his crack SWAT team against an invisible extra-terrestrial who had dropped into the Central American jungles on a sport-hunting expedition to engage the local wildlife, including humans, as trophy bait. The 1990 sequel found more outer space hunters at work in contemporary Los Angeles, facing Danny Glover and local cops.
The problem was solved by dreaming up a situation in which a team of galactic hunters lands in Antarctica at the same time a human search team is trying to track down a mysterious heat source that has suddenly developed there, miles beneath the ice. What the humans find is a giant underground pyramid, loaded with preserved "aliens" ready to start breeding, using stray humans as the "hosts" for their reptilian embryos. Did the "predator" gang set this up so they might have a really first class hunting trip with the quarry being those nastiest of all creatures--the acid-dripping, snake-headed "aliens"? Well, you'll have to check it out yourself. I'm not telling.
In short, the movie has us presume that the "aliens" have been hanging around the universe for thousands of years and were, in fact, planted here on Earth long before Ripley & Co. ever found them on the far reaches of space. The "predators" also seem to have been around forever, so it makes sense for them to continue making hunting expeditions to Earth even after the problems they encountered with Schwarzenegger and Glover.
For the record, "Alien vs. Predator" would be a "prequel" to the original "Alien," but a sequel to the original "Predator."
The "pyramid" where the action takes place is an active one, very much like the ancient tombs in the new generation of Universal "Mummy" movies. The walls shift every couple of minutes, forcing the fleeing humans into more and more dark corridors. Meanwhile, the giant predators come after the reconstituted alien reptiles, engaging them with a variety of weapons.
The "predator" creatures are very tall and bear-like in bulk. They wear armor and helmets to protect their faces from the sharp-toothed, acid-spraying aliens. They probably should keep those helmets on anyway--for esthetic reasons. Their faces look like the bellies of crabs. They have an array of bladed instruments that pop out of their armor, but their principal hunting tools are metal spears, which have lots of their own special doodads. And, of course, they have the ability to cloak themselves with invisibility--a special talent they don't use very often in this film. (Perhaps it didn't seem sportsmanlike?)
The film makes an effort to introduce Broadway actress Sanaa Lathan as the new Ripley, playing the team leader. Like Weaver in the original "Alien," Lathan gets to develop what amounts to a very tenuous "relationship" with a monster--this time it's with one of the giant predator hunters. But instead of trying to kill the monster, Lathan becomes its ally. Works for me.
"Alien vs. Predator" certainly won't rank as one of the great horror/sci-fi movies of all time, but it's by no means a disgrace to either franchise. It doesn't necessarily end both franchises, the way "Abbott & Costello Meet Frankenstein" ended most of Universal's 1940s monster franchises, at least for a decade or so, back in 1948.
On the other hand, it seems kind of hard to imagine either franchise going much farther than this--unless Fox comes up with yet another monster franchise that will need some help at the box office from the "aliens" and "predators" someday.
©2004 by Ron Miller.
The photo is courtesy of 20th Century Fox.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
teaches classes in mystery and related topics at Whatcom Community
College and Western Washington University in Bellingham, Washington.
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