Holy. Fucking. Shit. This movie is fucking great. Well, sort of. It’s so great because it’s so fucking bad. Before watching this movie, you should go and rent “Commando” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Watch it, and if you enjoy it, you’ll like AVP:R. Obviously, nothing can touch the cheesy-ness of Commando, but you have to give AVP:R credit for trying. I mean, this movie hit every single movie cliché right on the nose. It’s fucking amazing.
First off, let’s have a run down of the plot which can be summed up in about 2 sentences. The aliens and predators fight on earth (aka a small Colorado town) with a group of dumb characters trying to survive. Sorry, I was wrong; it can be summed up in one sentence.
Now, let’s have a look at the characters, who are about as interesting as a blank piece of paper. I thought in movies, you’re supposed to care about the characters, but in this one, you actually root for them to die and you don’t feel bad for them when they actually do. I mean, even in Transformers, I felt bad for bumblebee when the government was experimenting on him, and that’s a Michael Bay movie. A Michael Fucking Bay movie had more character development that this. Anyway, let’s have a run down of the “main” group of characters:
Dallas(nowhere near as cool as Dallas from the original “Alien”) aka the bad ass who just happens to roll into town on that day, of course he wears a leather jacket and is an ex-con and he reminds the audience of his criminal past every 10 fucking minutes. It’s like the Strause Brothers think the audience is too stupid to remember. Dallas has some sort of a relationship with, of course, the town sheriff, although I’m not sure if it’s a friend or a father-figure type since the sheriff isn’t young enough to grow up with Dallas nor old-enough to be his mentor.
Next, we have Dallas’s brother, Ricky, who is of course, the nerdy, angry and sad kid, now if you follow the Movie Cliché rulebook, has to be in love with….yep, the hottest and most popular girl in school. And that moves us on onto the next character, Jesse.
Jesse is the hottest chick in school, which has a good heart and absolutely no acting skill. Her only saving grace in this movie is a scene where she only wears a bra and panties. Now, for the best character in the movie. What does every movie with a nerdy kid who likes the hot chick need? Think……come on…..it’s obvious….The Blonde Jock Asshole Boyfriend!!! Yeah, they actually have him in the movie, he’s blond, he’s a jock, he’s an asshole and he’s dating the hot chick that really likes the nerdy guy. It’s like a Fucking ‘80s movie flashback.
The final character that I have to mention is Kelly, which is the main female lead in the movie. I think she’s the offspring of Rambo or something since she can drive a tank, pilot a helicopter and make a semi-automatic assault rifle (M4) fully automatic in seconds. During the movie, Kelly wears a wet tank-top, has a huge gun and protects a little girl. What other movie had that?......oh yeah, the original “Alien” where Ripley protected a little girl, wore a wet tank-top and had a huge gun. Now, I don’t if the Strause brothers are trying to pay homage to the original “Alien” or they’re just stealing from it. Besides those four, there are a few other characters that have a few lines of dialogue before an alien runs in and kills them. For instance, this movie actually has a token black guy that dies first! I mean, come on, how can you do that after “Scary Movie” made fun of that so many years ago? I half expected him to yell out “This is wack!” as he was dying. It’s really hard to believe that the Strause brothers treated these characters seriously.
Next, let’s move on to the actual movie. It’s horrible. The editing on this movie is amateur at best. There’s no transitions between scenes, it’s like a friend describing a movie to you going “Then this happened and then this happened and then this happened…” and every “this happened” is another scene. Trust me, even if you don’t usually pay attention to editing in a movie, you’ll notice this. And as for that Alien vs. Predator thing, it doesn’t really happen. I mean, they fight, but you don’t get to see it, usually because it happens somewhere really dark and all you see is shapes. The predalien looks fucking retarded, basically throw a dreadlock wig on an alien and you got the Predalien, but he’s evil. You know he’s evil because the Strause brothers keep showing him doing evil shit, but they go way too far. It’s like a six year old wrote the script and in order to make the predalien look bad; he has it do the worst shit to innocent people. For instance, the predalien ends up injecting a bunch of pregnant women with alien eggs and later we see their stomachs explode with little aliens. You’re supposed to think “WOW, that thing is evil” but all you can think is “I really didn’t need to see that”. They make the aliens in this movie seem serial killer like, they’re not just killing to survive and multiply. It doesn’t work.
The Predator is just as fucking retarded. Remember the original “Predator”? Remember how awesome he was? Remember that scene where he walks out of the water all slow and his invisibility gives out and you see him for the first time and the only thing going through you head is “That’s a bad-ass looking ****”. Well, that scene happens in this movie too. Except we already know what the Predator looks like. We already saw him. 22 years ago. And in the first 2 minutes of this movies. This Predator is pretty bad-ass though, because he kills like 30 aliens through out the whole movie. I think he has some special weapons too, because at one point in the movie, he takes off both of his shoulder cannons (yeah, he’s got two in this movie) and put then together into a shot-gun type weapon that takes 30 seconds to charge up between shots (as opposed to when they are on his shoulder and they could shoot every 2 seconds).I think it’s kind of dumb, but hey, what’s cooler than a shotgun, right? Anyway, that’s the movie. There were only two moments in the whole thing that I actually stopped laughing and paid attention to it. They were those “Oh Shit!!” moment and they lasted for 3 seconds. This movie is bad, and I can’t believe that the Strause brothers actually took it seriously. I don’t know how it’s possible to watch this and think this is the most embarrassing thing that’s come out in years. I mean “Snakes on a Plane” was cheesy, but they knew it and these guys think they made a serious movie. It’s sad that the monster from two Sci-Fi classics have been reduced to this.