Comments on The House Next Door: Versus the Audience: AVPR and Fanboy Cinema

--Matt: James Cameron has always said that the fin...

2008-01-13T09:17:00.000-05:00

--Matt: James Cameron has always said that the finale of Aliens is Ripley working out her PTSD--it's a purely emotional and spontaneous reaction, not a logical one. Even he admits it. It's also his kind've pumped up 80s big-action version of the deleted scene in the first one where she torches the cocooned Dallas and Brett.

--Fantasy author Caitlin R. Keirnan had the single best idea for an Aliens Vs. Predator movie I've ever heard--it's still archived somewhere over at her blog, if you want to go look for it. Basically, it was that the Predators would bioengineer the Aliens for use in a war. Their ship transporting the Aliens would crash, and the last surviving Predator would manage to set up a warning beacon to try to warn his race to make no rescue attempt, that the Aliens were too dangerous to control. You'd then dissolve to a slow pan across the planetoid they've crashed on...ending on a shot of an approaching spaceship--and the subtitle "Commercial Towing Vehicle: Nostromo" would appear. Fade to black.

This ties in pretty well with the unnoficial theory of the Alien's origin that people like Ridley Scott and Cameron have always put forth. Of course, I admit, I find the whole concept of Alien Vs. Predator movies kind've useless. I mean, Stan Winston sticking the Alien skull in the trophy case in Predator 2 really said it all. I can still rememember the rising tide of laughter cheers sweeping through the audience back in '92, or whatever it was, as people recognized the Alien head. Anything else after that was really just belaboring the point.

I didn't feel Requiem was quite as awful as Paul W...

2008-01-12T22:18:00.000-05:00

I didn't feel Requiem was quite as awful as Paul W.S. Anderson's disastrous original, but the Strause brothers clearly were not much of an improvement

They have no idea how to direct actors. Yeah, big surprise, but Steven Pasquale sets new standards for actor disinterest. Look, I know Pasquale was probably just picking up a check and I shouldn't be resentful towards him, being somewhat of an actor myself, but MAN, he failed to invest Dallas with ANY sort of personality, depth, or even excitement when things were going on. It's one of the worst performances I've seen this year. At least Reiko Alyesworth gave O'Brien a few touches of humanity and determination, and her angst about reconnecting with her daughter gave the movie a recognizable human feeling. It made me very angry, since so much of the movie seemed to say, "Hey, we're not like the stupid last one!" They could have given us, you know, characters to care about?

Shane Salerno's script seems little more than a bunch of points to hit, then out. The Aliens and Predators look nice but hey, they looked nice in the last one.

A hard thing for most fanboys (myself included) to admit, given that Dark Horse has been recently reprinting their entire Alien Vs. Predator line in thick, 400 page Omnibus editions, is that outside of the first miniseries by Randy Stradley and Phil Norwood, the comics by and large sucked, were simply variations on the same theme: a small band of humans gets caught in the middle of an Aliens/Predator fight and have to survive as well as eventually deal with the nefarious Corporation. The trouble with these setups is the sops to continuity: they've always got to take place in the Alien future.

The insanity finally broke in half with 2000's Alien Vs. Predator Vs. Terminator- doesn't that sound cool? Nope, it was hacked out like everything else. DH, making more money off Buffy and Star Wars comics these days (fun fact: ask someone who admits to enjoying the hell on earth that is Revenge of the Sith if they've read the comics that fill in all the blanks Lucas' script was too incompetent to include. 9 times out of ten, the answer will be yes), have relegated the Aliens and Predator franchises to their prose novel lines.

I have a feeling this will make enough money on DVD to wind up greenlighting episode 3 anyway...

kcm: That's one thing I tried to convey here -- th...

2008-01-12T09:01:29.388-05:00

kcm: That's one thing I tried to convey here -- the (very positive) nature of that zeal versus the lack of discrimination it is so often conjoined with. I hope it's understood that this is little more than a broad generality (one has to speak in such terms whenever referring to large groups of people, or any broad concept), but it's still one that, as both an insider and outsider to its "cause," I think does more harm than good (and perhaps most of all to the "fanboy" themselves). I'm pumped for The Dark Knight as well (though I must say, as awesome as I think the Joker seems, the trailer seems indicative of certain sloppy seconds that I just can't stand, so we'll see), but what of the people who stick with such films and never go further? As much as I enjoy them myself, the idea of calling Star Wars the holy trilogy and calling it a day is too depressing for words. It's this closeted perspective that allows a movie like 300, by filtering its images through a layer of brown shit and slowing everything down to a Matrixy crawl, to be able to constitute "art". Ugh.

As an inveterate fanboy, I must quibble with the n...

2008-01-12T02:51:00.000-05:00

As an inveterate fanboy, I must quibble with the notion that "fanboy" is a bad way to approach the world of film.

For me, all it means is that I tend to anticipate and watch films on two different scales. For example, I know Chris Nolan's The Dark Knight probably won't be the best movie of 2008, but you'd be hard-pressed to find a movie I'm more excited to see (except maybe Indy's Crystal Kingdom, which falls into the realm.)

Fanboys (and fangirls) can get very doctinaire, and that's often irritating, but I'd never denigrate their (our) love of film. (And, when it comes to certain properties - LotR, or Zach Snyder's stab at Watchmen -- I'm as picky as they come.)

When it comes to Aliens, I jumped ship soon after David Fincher's butchered Alien 3. (But I'll swear by the first two.) I read the Dark Horse AvP stuff back in the day, but both movie versions of the AvP match-up looked so bad from the previews that I never partook.

It's just a different way of looking at movies, and I wouldn't be half the film lover I am without the fanboy enthusiasm.

W. Australopithecus: Not a jerk at all, thanks for...

2008-01-12T00:35:04.375-05:00

W. Australopithecus: Not a jerk at all, thanks for the tip. And heck, that got through me AND Matt, so two of us learned something today. :)

Darren:At the risk of steering this thread into a ...

2008-01-11T22:10:52.238-05:00

Darren:

At the risk of steering this thread into a -- yep -- fanboy direction, I can accept Ripley popping off a few shots in anger, or to stave off the onslaught of an army of facehuggers. But she goes all Rambo on the queen, and when she runs out of bullets, she starts firing grenades, and the tone of the sequence suggests that it's more about Ripley's angry catharsis than any practical/survival consideration. Meanwhile the joint is crumbling around her and she knows it. It seems like something Rambo, not Ripley, would do -- a macho male warrior thing.

That one part of that one sequence certainly doesn't kill the movie for me -- it's a classic of its type. And it might be more the execution (the tone) than the idea behind the scene (presuming Ripley's motivation is precisely as you describe it). But for a film whose sense of comic book psychology is otherwise tailored to suit each individual character, it just struck me as not quite fitting. Plus the entire thing is a glorified rehash of the end of the first "Alien," where the ship is about to explode and she goes back for her cat.

I've had a number of discussions with cat owners over the years about whether or not they'd go into the bowels of a disintegrating starship and risk attack by a giant extraterrestrial insect predator to retrieve a cat. I can see myself doing that for a child but not for a cat, even one of my cats, whom I've had for 15 plus years. I guess that means I'm not really a cat person.

Sorry for straying so far from Rob's various excellent points about franchise filmmaking -- but hey, it's that kind of thread.

I completely agree that 20th Century Fox has systematically whored one of the great sci-fi concepts to the point of completely diminished, even negative returns. I am reminded of a profane phrase from "Deadwood" deployed by Al to describe a prostitute in his stable who had been worked so hard that she was no longer of any use to him: "fucked out." That's the Alien series in two words. Might as well set it on the shelf for a decade or so and come back to it when the stench of these last two (or three, or four, depending on your POV) has had time to wear off.

--(Why stand there shooting at the queen's eggs wh...

2008-01-11T21:07:00.000-05:00

--(Why stand there shooting at the queen's eggs when the exploding reactor will incinerate them anyway?)--

I was going to say that it's just a rage reaction - and it is - but it's also to keep them from hatching and inundating her with facehuggers. Remember what sets her off is one of the eggs opening up. She can shoot the Aliens, or set them on fire, but the facehuggers move fast and are small.

-Darren MacLennan

I've never understood the furor and excitement sur...

2008-01-11T20:52:16.830-05:00

I've never understood the furor and excitement surrounding the whole AVP thing. It was a novel comic book concept that somehow took on a life of its own through action figures and video games and a possible film version attained an almost mythic, grail-like status perpetuated by the very same people Rob's writing about.

It's interesting that for as long as the idea's been around, the sheer length of time it took for Fox to make an AVP flick -- a movie that people had been begging for for years. When it finally happened, it sucked. And I've yet to read a positive word about the new one. It blows me away that they've apparently made a movie that's ~worse~ than the last one!

I'd argue that the "classic" "Predator" & "Alien" movies were *wholly* dependent on their human characters, and certainly the "Alien" series ended up being as much about Ellen Ripley as it was the Aliens (if not moreso). All of those movies, for better or worse, are driven by people we care about in a bad situation.

There could be a good series of AVP movies perhaps, but such an idea would be best served by having a Ripley-esque central character[1], who is forced to deal with the situation over the course of several films. It certainly couldn't be worse than what they're doing now.

[1] For whatever it's worth, at the time of writing an "Alien" movie without Weaver isn't even an "Alien" movie (to me). I'd be elated to be proven wrong at some point in the future.

I'm saving a link to this review as my future rebu...

2008-01-11T20:00:00.000-05:00

I'm saving a link to this review as my future rebuttal when one of my friends objects because I didn't enjoy next year's Van Helsing or Underworld. It's gotten to the point where I've become so tired of defending the very concepts of acting, storytelling, and narrative coherence that I've simply accepted my opinion as being labeled "eccentric" and shut up.

This isn't the case with everyone I know, but the exceptions are outnumbered by the adherents to the maxim that special effects equal quality film making.

I can have my popcorn, not the stale, luke-warm, overly-buttered variety, and eat it too. Thanks.

The funny thing is, I can picture an "Alien versus...

2008-01-11T18:34:59.549-05:00

The funny thing is, I can picture an "Alien versus Predator" that dispensed with humans altogether. I wasn't a fan of the comics and I don't remember their details too well, but I seem to recall that the very first one followed a single predator or small group of predators as it went to a planet containing an alien hive, looking to collect trophies. The aliens proved more formidable than the predators anticipated, and they had to adapt their tactics. I can see a movie being made of this very story, directed by someone of extraordinary visual talent, that played like a war film, "trapped behind enemy lines" subgenre, or perhaps something akin to "The Most Dangerous Game," where the hunter becomes the hunted, only this time it's the last surviving predator that's at a disadvantage.

I don't know enough about the behind-the-scenes history of the series to venture a guess, but I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, maybe early in the process, some enterprising, ambitious filmmaker presented an idea more or less like that one -- all aliens and predators, no dialogue whatsoever; essentially a wordless action film -- and was told, "No dice -- the movie would seem too dissimilar from all the other Alien films."

This of course presupposes that the "Alien" sequels were interesting primarily for the extent to which they replicated the "Ten Little Indians" narrative of the very first film. The opposite is true; it's the atmosphere, characterization and themes that make all of the first four movies interesting, to greater or lesser degrees. The only aspects of "Aliens" that exasperate me are the mandated genre touches -- particularly the ticking time bomb finale, which makes Ripley's pyrotechnic rage against the queen mother seem illogical. (Why stand there shooting at the queen's eggs when the exploding reactor will incinerate them anyway?) And for that matter, the wacky byplay between the shuttle crewmembers in "Alien Resurrection" -- it's so obviously pandering to a particular moviegoing demographic that it makes the film's splendid poetic/horrific touches less impressive.

Lots to vent about here. What it comes back to is studios demanding a certain fealty to formula throughout a series' run, for what they would consider reasons of box-office insurance, when it's precisely this adherence to formula that prevents all of the movies in the series, even the best ones, from achieving their full artistic potential.

An "Alien versus Predator" with no people, done with an adventurous spirit and total commitment, could yield one of the great action films of all time. But studio groupthink being what it is, that's a movie of a sort we'll never see -- at least, not with the words "Alien" or "Predator" attached.

Check your dictionary: In your first paragraph, "p...

2008-01-11T18:30:00.000-05:00

Check your dictionary: In your first paragraph, "pittance" doesn't mean at all what you're using it for; I think you're looking for the gerund "pitting."

I don't want to sound like a jerk, but Orwell made me do it....