QuoteI won't deny the Brothers are admitted Predator fans, but I will defend what they wanted to do with their film. I also blame the Pred-heavy focus on Davis rather than them because he's an even bigger Predator fan (hell, the man is practically a worshiper). Don't believe me? Listen to the commentary in the sewer fight scene.
Care to summarise it? I don't have a commentary-enabled DVD.
QuoteAnderson himself is an-admitted Alien fan. I blame, what I perceive to be some slight Alien favouritism in AvP on him. I don't agree with the way the fight in AvP ended because it doesn't make sense to me, how Celtic couldn't realize his net wasn't going to hold the Alien forever since (I'm assuming anyway) he knows how the damn works in the first place, and that the Alien's blood is going to eventually break it.
That might be an instant of Alien favouritism, but there's a lot of service towards the Predators as well. Scar killing half a dozen with the plasma caster in less than a minute, for instance. Or the three Predator holding their own (for a while) against thousands upon thousands of Aliens. Scar not getting covered in acid after slicing an Alien's face off. The very fact that the plot assumes that Predators can effectively contain Aliens for hundreds, if not thousands of years.
QuoteAvP:R's fights were predictable, yes, but at least they were entertaining because there was more of them as opposed to AvP's one true fight, and one race at the end, with one or two minor squabbles in between them.
Having more of nothing just means you have more nothing. I can see how, even if the fight scenes were bad, a constant supply of them could string along a movie. But AvPR's fights were so astronomically free of actual content that they're even more boring than the boring human interaction.
QuoteDon't even get me started on this hero bullshit. You want to talk about the Brothers making Wolf a hero? Anderson actually did make that mistake in his movie, and he did it to a much greater degree. Not only did he actually label Scar as a "handsome leading man" (WTF), he even went so far as to change the look of the creature by giving it puppy dog eyes and floppy mandibles to make it seem more lovable. He wanted to turn the Predator into a of heroic, chivalrous saviour which saves the damsel in distress. Which is pretty ironic, considering considering it's Lex who ends up saving Scar's ass on multiple occasions.
The visual issues weren't fixed by Wolf, though. And Pussyface already had silly eyes.
Scar was actually threatening for a long time, though. He was not on the human side. He even killed Weyland, who was the one interesting character. If he killed an old, partially-crippled businessman, what's to stop him from killing a young, able woman who's stolen his most powerful weapon? Absolutely nothing. At all. And that's why we're sorta wondering, when Scar tracks down Lex, what's going to happen. And she's on the verge of tears, pleading for life, trying to give him back his plasma caster.
And he's just staring her the f**k down. Like a badass.
A lot of the team-up stuff that happened soon afterwards was dumb, sure. An Alien dying of localised impalement? Dumb, and another thing to chalk up in favour of the Predators, in fact. Running like motherf**king Baywatch? Puh-lease. Staring into one-another's eyes romantically after a narrow escape? Cringe-worthy.
But all the same, Scar had established himself at this point. He didn't just shoot down Aliens; he beat them at their own game. He killed a character that was genuinely cool. He antagonised the other characters. He was like Riddick in
Pitch Black -- the vastly more combat-effective superwarrior who could end their alliance with you at any second and wouldn't think twice about it.
Wolf never had a reason to kill humans and when he did, it was entirely arbitrary. Not to mention that the context of the film sets him up as the Arnator (Predanegger?).
