 Starring: Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova, Lance Henriksen, Ewen Bremner
Director: Paul W.S. Anderson
Year Of Release: 2004
Plot: A massive pyramid is discovered 2,000 metres under the Antarctic ice, so a team of experts is sent in to dig down and discover more about it. When they get down there, they realise the ancient building is actually where young predators go to fight aliens as part of an initiation ritual, and that they are now trapped between the two species, which are locked in deadly combat. |
Do you want to know something horrific? Alien Vs. Predator is the second highest grossing of all the Alien and Predators movies, and would have been the highest overall if it weren’t for the Director’s Cut re-release of Alien in 2003. It just goes to show you can’t account for taste, even while it demonstrates what a cool concept like aliens fighting predators can do, even if the film itself isn’t particularly good.
The movie was just the latest in the ever growing list of Paul W.S. Anderson movies that are mediocre at best, but which are based on ideas that sound like they should make a better movie than what he comes up with. Each one of his films, from Mortal Kombat to Resident Evil, is a bit of a mess, with a shoddy screenplay (normally written by Anderson himself), confusing action scenes and a sense at the end that the whole thing wasn’t as entertaining as it should have been. This is, after all, the man who still holds the record for the most expensive movie ever to go straight-to-DVD /video in the UK, when his $75 million dollar Kurt Russell sci-fi film, Soldier, failed to score a British cinema release.
Although both Event Horizon and Resident Evil have their fans, in my opinion he’s never made a genuinely good movie, although 1995’s Mortal Kombat is close to being alright. However, while he’s never made a truly decent film, all his movies are just about watchable, and the reason that I think that he’s the best bad director around, is that while he’s not very good at telling a story, he does create a lot of absolutely excellent individual shots.
It was something that I couldn’t help but notice while I was watching AvP, to the point where I ended up watching one of the action scenes of a predator in hand-to-hand combat with an alien in slow-motion, because while it was all a bit hectic and confusing at normal speed, slowed down you could see how wonderfully set up and framed each shot is. It was just in putting them all together that things went downhill fast. Of course a lot of this is down to cinematographer David Johnson, but it is something that has been true of all Anderson’s films.
In AvP, moments such as the early shots of Sanaa Lathan climbing a sheer rock face and when the alien queen wakes up from having been frozen, all look absolutely amazing. The camera positions and they way he fills the frame are superb. Even going back to his very first movie, Shopping, which was about ram raiding criminals (and in my opinion is still the best film he’s ever made, even if IMDB lists it as his lowest rated movie), you can see he has a real talent for shot composition. In fact he’s rather like Red Dragon and Rush Hour director Brett Ratner in that respect, who’s another director whose movies look very good, but who falls down when it comes to telling a story on film.
However a director can’t just be judged on how pretty his films look, because if the storytelling isn’t up to scratch, the film won’t be any good, and this has always been Paul W.S. Anderson’s problem. The director has previously blamed studio interference for the problems with some of his films, but some of these accusations have proven to be false. For example he said AvP was originally designed to be more violent and was hacked down to a PG-13 rating, which turned out not to be true. No, the blame has to be laid at his door, as he’s just not a particularly good storyteller and his screenplays are basic to the point of being almost unnecessary.
Even so, with his talent for images and the fact that his films are at least watchable, he’s probably the best bad director currently working in Hollywood. And he has had some success. With Resident Evil he’s overseen the most profitable and longest running videogame-to-movie adaptation ever, and last year’s Death Race was decent fun. It’s just a shame for him that directing movies is about more than about creating great-looking individual shots.
TIM ISAAC
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