Superficiality is what went wrong with it.
The first one needed '
Event Horizon' Anderson. What it got was '
Resident Evil' Anderson. You could at least tell it had some interesting ideas, though - what was being aimed for. In a few points, it kind of works. There just aren't enough of them. On the whole, it comes across as flashy and unremarkable. Some of this, however, is to do with it having a small budget.
Likewise, the next one feels even cheaper - except in terms of quality. They even had a
surplus budget, decided to unnecessarily reshoot the Predator chestbursting scene and made it look worse. It came across like a bunch of fan-boys jamming loads of ideas together for the sake of it, rather than trying to tell a legitimate story.
I seem to remember one of the actors at the time saying the sequel was going to be "pure awesomeness" or something, which became a bit of an AVPG meme.
Basically, neither film really treated its audience like mature adults. Not in the way '
Alien', '
Aliens' and '
Predator' had. That's why both films always seem like they're missing something. You feel like you're a teenager being led into something cool and comic-worthy. But the people behind them forgot that what made the original comics so great was that they were trying
not to be comics. They were trying to be worthy of being made into legitimate film sequels.
