2008-01-24

REVIEWNESS

Here's a silly pic and a review of last nights cinema excursion!
Went to see AVPR… LOVED IT…but…

Imagine all yer favourite action moments of all 4 alien movies rammed together with the best parts of the original predator movie and your some were in the ball park, it’s got rain, darkness, slime coated monsters, cocooning, scuttling face huggers buckets of blood and strobe lighting. Which is all great and fab and a good romp, now, on with the panning.
As I say it has all the stuff you loved from the original movies, which is great, they captured the atmosphere, but you just have the feeling that you’ve seen it before, a plucky dark haired girl in a vest driving an APC recklessly, a hopeless gun battle between the aliens and a group of unprepared soldiers, all ace for the nostalgia factor, but then again, I can plug ALIENS on when I get home and achieve the same end, my point is, it didn’t really bring anything new, and you know that they purposefully ARE cashing in on the previous movies, there’s a guy called Dallas for fuck sake and the hero woman (who looks so much like Sigourney Weaver its scary) spends 90% of the time carrying a small child about.
The effects were amazing and there was very little cg, the atmosphere, as I say, beautifully rendered with a lot of the same sound cues that make a huge fanboy like me feel at home, but the things that really make an Alien movie were missing, the vast amounts of characterization and untenable depths of the plot were missing. The characters felt like they were plucked strait from a rejected script for scream and were so one dimensional, if they turned sideways they’d disappear, they kill um off left right and centre and you laugh, ‘cos you don’t give a bowl cracking log whether they get out alive or NOT. And the plot feels as ropy as, well, old rope in places. The hero predator gets there within a few hours of being summoned from the home world, despite the fact that in the previous film, the Pred’s went to earth in cryogenic freeze, all the main characters just happen to turn up at the precise moment this kicks off, the main woman, she comes back from the army the same time Dallas comes out of jail, WHY?, it would have been better if we just saw a photo of her in Iraq on her mantel piece or something. The human characters just feel flat and unexplored, which is just soo out of character for the Aliens universe.

Over all, an enjoyable experience if you just cash yer brain in at the door and want a fun ride of blood guts and awesome effects, it is a Requiem, a Requiem for Hollywood and the days when films were multy layered, deep and slow paced, the days when you could watch an hour of a film before something blew up or someone got melted, when all there was to hold your attention was people, hell, people can hold my attention, they do all day every day, so why should a film be any different, any way, I still say see it, just don’t be expecting James Cameron or Ridley Scott, there ghosts can be felt, but not in the eyes of the plastic humans, you might glimpse them in the glistening jaws of the monsters just before they strike, if you look hard.

Over all 7 out of 10 it made me :)

1 comment:

Wesley Riot said...

lol great review man, it sounds exactly as i want it to be: monsters and guts n bombs n guns without that incessant plot nonsense getting in the way ^_^

sweet drawring too