AvP

Take two superior monster-movie concepts, Alien and Predator, and roll them into one. Usually, that would be a leg up on the way to a passable, profitable film. Alien vs. Predator, released last week, is probably not that film.

If AvP had managed to generate any advance buzz, it didn't reach me. And by the time I got to the theater, it was starting to generate a "who died?" type of odor. So why still go? Why did I go to The Day After Tomorrow, or Troy? Probably the same lure that compels one to drive past the neighborhood that the tornado went through. Plus I was given a free movie pass, so at least this time I wasn't paying to waste my time.

To put it bluntly, the movie was crap even before the first line of dialog was uttered. A corporate satellite is snapping infrared photos of the earth, which at the downlink station triggers one of those full-screen blinking, beeping warnings like "Anomalous Thermal Signature." Uh huh. The corporation's computers are familiar with every "non-anomalous" infrared pattern on the entire planet, so that's how it can flag this one so the plot can stagger, robotically, on to the next contrived scene in Nepal. There, the movie's heroine is ice-climbing a full week's journey distant from civilization. Despite this alleged Nepalese remoteness, the heroine gets a cell-phone call. Now, aside from the absurd notion that the Himalayas are dotted with cellphone towers, she takes the call without much difficulty since she already has a receiver bud in her left ear. So apparently she has been getting these cellphone calls out in Nepal with some regularity.

I'll hand-wave some of the blah-blah here. The heroine is hired by the big corporation to "guide" an expedition to the "anomalous thermal signature," emanating from a pyramid (!!) buried under 2000 feet of ice on an island, apparently in the antarctic. What is the purpose of the expedition? No one says. The guide lady argues that people will need two weeks' training in order to work safely in the antarctic environment, but we are told there's insufficient time for such training, and anyway it's "worth the risk." What, exactly, is worth the risk to their health and safety? Again, given that no purpose nor tangible benefit has yet been explained, no-one knows. After losing the training-time standoff, the guide insists that the expedition adhere to three rules. I will not recount them here since all three rules are broken within five minutes and never mentioned again anyway.

A few cursory scenes later, the expedition nears their drilling site, which on the surface bears an "abandoned whaling station." The whaling station was neither mentioned nor alluded to until it appeared out of the October antarctic darkness (again, remarkable), but nobody seems surprised. We are told that the whaling station is "directly over" the pyramid. This is flatly contradicted a few minutes later, when we are shown that the station is actually offset from the pyramid by about 3500 feet, which the digging team will drill toward at an angle. Allegedly, the spookily mysterious thing about the whaling station was that everyone there suddenly disappeared in 1904. "It was a big mystery at the time," says the heroine. You might think that since the disappearance has never been explained that it might still be a big mystery, but you would be overestimating the curiosity of these explorers and scientists by at least a factor of ten. To me, the most mysterious thing about the whaling station is why it was constructed two thousand feet above sea level. You'd think dragging whales a mile up the side of a glacier for processing would be inconvenient, to say the least.

Anyway, this level of stupidity persists for the duration of the movie. The entire drilling team has laser-sighted machine guns. People run around in the antarctic without jackets or hats. An archaologist informs us that Aztech timekeeping was "metric." A couple minutes later, he saunters past a statue of an oversized extraterrestrial being without even arching an eyebrow. The entire screenplay is written such that the cast seems to have little curiosity about their environment and even less regard for their safety. Inevitably, this apathy filters down to the audience.