so they've actually started shooting alien vs. predator.
yes, that's right. people are moving in front of cameras, and the cameras are recording them doing stuff. like acting. we can hope.
it's like a fanboy's dream come true.
the only bad part is that a fanboy's dream tends to turn into a pretty crappy product, especially in the realm of crossovers. they rely heavily on contorting and contriving a large amount of backstory to make two universes collide in a pseudoplausible way, and that requires either a) frontloading a bunch of bad exposition or b) coming up with something really, really stupid.
usually, it's a combination of both.
sure, there's been some joke references in the movies to each of the franchies (eg. an alien head in the predator ship in predator 2), but it's not like the two species are interlinked in anyway. sure, there was the dark horse comic series, but i never read that, and i never cared to, either.
because this boils down into one two many 'what if x happened' statements that were made somewhere down the line. we're already dealing with a genre of speculative fiction that begins asks that question once, and i really don't see the need to take two what ifs and ram them together. especially when it looks like the plot involves finding frozen alien eggs in antarctica and then predators show up for some reason.
no, i'm not kidding.
there's a reason most of these story crossovers are relegated to fanfiction: because they aren't very good. while it's a nice time-wasting mental masturbation exercise to imagine whether hal-9000 or WoPR could destroy the human race faster, you don't need to make a movie about it.
it's just going to be another freddy vs. jason, which was contrived as hell and, while fun in a stupid way, did not need to be made at all. these types of movies are like that snl skit that goes on for six minutes too long.
not to belittle the wonderful enjoyment that can be obtained by pointless movies. but this, methinks, is taking it a bit too far.
i'm sure i'll be in the theater next august watching it, though.
Posted by kilgore at November 5, 2003 10:23 PM | TrackBack