Shadow Puppets
posted on Wednesday, January 23, 2008 in Movie Reviews
The sum appeal of this movie can be boiled down to a single fact: there are both Aliens and a Predator in this film. For some people, the mere presence of the Xenomorphs and the Yautja is enough reason to see this film (not to mention the unholy union that was teased at the end of the last film). For the rest of the populace, however, Aliens vs. Predator 2 ought to be a hard sell, because if you get past all the glorious creature effects, you’re left with a pretty poorly acted, almost incomprehensible film. The film kicks off from the end of the previous movie. The Predator ship is leaving Earth, alien specimens in tow, and transporting their fallen comrade. A chestburster suddenly emerges from the fallen Predator, and the Alien-Predator hybrid causes the ship to crash in the small town of Gunnison, Colorado. On the Predator homeworld, the crash is detected, and a lone Predator heads to Earth to investigate. The citizens of the small town get caught up in the hunt, and they must try to survive as their town falls apart.
The film doesn’t need a lot of story to work in a narrative sense. The entire point of the film is just to get these creatures to butt heads, and the film provides enough reason to bring everything together. There are weird pacing problems and strange plot movement, but overall, a person can completely ignore that. The problem is that when they finally do meet, it’s all done pretty shoddily. This film will serve as a prime example of bad filmmaking, a shopping list of technical errors and creative mishaps.
The creatures themselves look great, as they should. They’ve always looked great, even when the technology was light years behind what we have now. It’s hard to see how great they look however, since the film is so poorly shot. The film is lit entirely too dark and all the shots are too tight, making it really hard to appreciate the creatures in all their glory. The action sequences in this film are almost completely incomprehensible. People probably want to see this film to see the two creatures fight, but all they’re going to get are little glimpses of what might actually be a fantastic fight. An arm here, a tail there. Never anything truly satisfying. The shaky, jumpy editing only adds to the confusion.
I understand that the filmmakers were probably trying to achieve the same claustrophobic aesthetic of the Alien films, but it’s a complete misstep for this film. For one, they didn’t seem to have enough talent to pull it off, and second, this just isn’t the same film. This film isn’t about the silent threat of a single dangerous entity. This should’ve been a film with exciting, fun fights between the Predator and the Aliens. Fights that we can actually see and geek out over. Instead, what the audience gets is a muddy, technically-laughable, barely-seen facsimile of action.
All this might still have been salvaged if the character parts were strong enough to justify the weakness of the action, but they aren’t. To make it worse, the performances are uniformly horrible. Granted, perhaps no one could have delivered the script’s silly lines of dialogue well, but it still comes off as pretty bad. Stephen Pasquale, in the lead role, is hilariously bad in this film, delivering almost every line as if he wasn’t talking to anyone.
It’s a strange thing to expect to expect so little from a film and still be disappointed. It shouldn’t have been difficult to at least make the film fun, but the filmmakers just kept making all the wrong choices. Maybe they’ll get it right next time.
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