Rid­ley Scott’s orig­i­nal Alien is one of the most effec­tive and influ­en­tial hor­ror films ever made, and a per­sonal favorite of this Dork Reporter, who makes no apolo­gies. Its art direc­tion and visual aes­thetic were so far ahead of their time that pretty much only the hair­cuts have dated, but the real keys to its longevity are its brains and depth of sub­stance. No doubt there have since been dozens of dis­ser­ta­tions on its gen­der themes and often overtly sex­u­al­ized imagery designed by bio­me­chan­i­cal artist H.R. Giger. Once you real­ize the por­tal to the crashed space­craft is a giant vagina and the Alien’s head is an erect penis, you will never be able to un-see it.

But Alien’s most unfor­tu­nate legacy is that it has for­ever melded the sci­ence fic­tion and hor­ror gen­res in movie­go­ers expec­ta­tions. Aside from the odd excep­tions to the rule rang­ing from the parable-for-all-ages E.T. to the gut-wrenching social cri­tique Chil­dren of Men, we now can’t have a hor­ror film with­out a rub­bery alien or a sci-fi film with­out evis­cer­a­tions and gore.

Worst of all, the Alien fran­chise has been cursed with dimin­ish­ing returns. Prob­a­bly but not nec­es­sar­ily by design, James Cameron’s vapid sequel Aliens com­pletely drained the core themes and sub­texts from the orig­i­nal in favor of the mere spec­ta­cle of space­ships and bul­lets. Sub­se­quent sequels achieved the rare feats of being by far the worst films of two extra­or­di­nar­ily tal­ented direc­tors: David Fincher’s com­pro­mised Alien3 (the only install­ment with the tra­di­tional numeral in the title) and Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s bizarre-but-not-in-a-good-way Alien: Res­ur­rec­tion.

Part of the prob­lem is that there can be only a lim­ited set of vari­a­tions on the core premise. The orig­i­nal Alien found the right recipe on its first try: lone but nearly invin­ci­ble crea­ture vs. unarmed bunch of humans in claus­tro­pho­bic envi­ron­ment = teh awe­some. Most sequels mul­ti­plied the num­ber of aliens only to find that their col­lec­tive dra­matic impact was less­ened when all it took was a futur­is­tic Colo­nial Space Marine’s rifle to dis­patch one.

Nope, I just see two dudes in rub­ber suits

Mean­while, the less ambi­tious Preda­tor fran­chise man­aged to only rack up a mea­ger two install­ments. Per­haps their lesser appeal is attrib­ut­able to what the Alien films got right; the “aliens” are not intel­li­gent mem­bers of a soci­ety like the Preda­tors, whose entire cul­ture is based upton the con­cept of hunt­ing for sport. Aliens are instinc­tual beasts that live to eat and (espe­cially) to breed, so sav­age and ani­mal­is­tic that their species doesn’t even have a name.

The two spent prop­er­ties found a new life together in the unholy crossover mar­riage “Alien vs. Preda­tor” that began as comics and video games. Inevitably, they found their way back to cin­e­mas as Hol­ly­wood attempted to reboot the cash flow with the first Alien vs. Preda­tor film in 2004. But this “new” series has already run out of vari­a­tions on the core premise in only its sec­ond installment.

Believe it or not, AVP:R is the first Alien film set not only in the present day, but also actu­ally on Earth. This time around we have a sin­gle Preda­tor vs mul­ti­ple aliens, with a vari­ety of help­less human bystanders caught in the cross­fire. Basi­cally, the Preda­tors screw up and acci­den­tally seed Earth with a batch of aliens they had intended to breed as hunt­ing stock. A lone Preda­tor, per­haps fan­cy­ing him­self a sort of space age Mr. Fixit, attempts to white­wash his col­leagues’ mess. He’s no sym­pa­thetic hero, how­ever, for he doesn’t hes­i­tate to take the pelt of a human as a tro­phy when the oppor­tu­nity arises.

To go back to the afore­men­tioned vari­ety of help­less human bystanders: any decent screen­writer or pro­ducer (or, hell, any­one who’s seen a cou­ple of movies) should have real­ized that there are three prob­lems with this sce­nario: “vari­ety,” “help­less,” and “bystanders.” The huge cast of human char­ac­ters all remain under­de­vel­oped. The lamest thread involves a bunch of so-called teenagers, obvi­ously writ­ten by a screen­writer that was never actu­ally a teenager. The only rec­og­niz­able face (to this Dork Reporter, at least) is Reiko Aylesworth from 24, mis­cast as an Army sol­dier on leave. Her only pur­poses in the story seem to be to instruct the audi­ence that guns work bet­ter if you shout while shoot­ing, and to have some­one on hand who might plau­si­bly know how to fly a helicopter.

Mandible with care

AVP:R is so divorced from the six prior Alien films that there are only two ten­u­ous con­ti­nu­ity threads to link them. A Mrs. Yutani appears, pre­sum­ably of the Weyland-Yutani cor­po­ra­tion that, in the future, has the secret agenda of locat­ing more aliens as it strip mines the galaxy for fos­sil fuels. But per­haps the one true link to the orig­i­nal Alien film from 1979 is a sequence involv­ing a chick strip­ping down to her skivvies. In the orig­i­nal, the truly badass Rip­ley (Sigour­ney Weaver) deservedly kicks back her heels and gets ready for a suspended-animation nap in her undies, but here all we get is a bland “hot­tie” strip­ping for her unlikely dweeb crush (an inci­dence of nerd wish-fulfillment that speaks vol­umes as to the matu­rity and life expe­ri­ences of the filmmakers).

What should have been another major screen­writ­ing red flag is the hugely unsat­is­fy­ing end­ing. When the Preda­tor, the clos­est thing the film has to a hero or pro­tag­o­nist, finally closes in on his prey, they go at it look­ing for all the world like two pro wrestlers in rub­ber suits. And then imme­di­ately… they’re both oblit­er­ated by a nuke. A small hand­ful of the humans are only barely proac­tive and man­age to sur­vive untrau­ma­tized despite hav­ing watched all their fam­i­lies and loved ones killed.

So why do I keep pun­ish­ing myself by watch­ing each Alien sequel? I don’t ever again expect some­thing as mul­ti­lay­ered as the orig­i­nal Alien, but I do keep think­ing that these kinds of movies are sup­posed to be at best enter­tain­ing and at worst a lit­tle fun, and yet they always turn out tor­tur­ously awful. AVP:R’s best qual­ity is its brisk 86 minute run­ning time, even in its unrated extended DVD cut.

Offi­cial movie site: www.avp-r.com

Buy the DVD from Ama­zon and kick back a few pen­nies to The Dork Report.

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