Alien VS Predator

Whoever wins, we lose more than a hundred bucks.

SPOILERS AHEAD

I met up with Vin and Jason after work to watch the monster franchise-crossover movie, Alien VS Predator. As usual with our movie ops, after Vin closed up the store we had a rush dinner and then hurried off to The Podium.
These past few weeks, I've missed I, Robot, Catwoman, Collateral and The Village. For some reason, we decided to watch AvP. Oh well. Here we go.

Set in present day (October 2004), the movie introduces us to... well, a bunch of humans. I really don't care about any of them, and I hardly remember any of them as well. There's the lead female, a kind of mountaineering or survival specialist, a couple of archaeologists, a tough chick that kinda reminded me of Marie Fredrickssen from Roxette, a black guy with a great voice, a bunch of guys with 'cannon fodder' and 'alien bait' written all over them, and of course Lance Henricksen as multibillionaire Wayland, whom film enthusiasts will probably see as the origin of the Wayland-Yutani Corporation that's the background villain in the Alien movies.
To make a long, dragging first quarter of the film mercifully short, a heat source is detected by Wayland's satellites at the North Pole. They find a pyramid hidden under the ice, and immediately send forth an expedition. Wayland himself joins the hastily-gathered experts and manpower, despite having a life-threatening illness. Of course, the ruins are deadlier than just any ordinary fossil ground- and soon the humans are waist-deep with H.R. Giger's babies, and a team of the extraterrestrial hunters known as The Predators.

This film just screams 'rushed', in more ways than one. The characters are pretty shallow and the story is little more than an FX-fest. There are some stuff about the origins of earth's civilizations and how they are tied with the Predators, and that's pretty much it. The alien-predator fights are kinda short, and people hoping to see the predators kick major butt will be disappointed. The climax, where the last predator and human join together to fight and survive, is pretty hokey... especially the part where the predator improvises some equipment for his new ally... The only thing missing is the crab-faced alien giving the homo-sapien a 'thumbs up' and a pat on the back at the end. Heh.

In the end this is really just a harmless, no-brainer action movie that tries to use two popular franchises... an idea that has been in comics for years, but in the end the movie version just falls short... as I expected. It could have been scripted a LOT better, with the wealth of stuff and material the producers had to work with... but a lot just went to waste, under-utilized and glossed over. Dumb, heavy-handed action.

Well, I wasn't expecting much from this, so I actually had a laugh and a bit of fun. Heh. What a way to end the week.