The thing about AvPR, though, is that its fight scenes failed to deliver. AvP was certainly light on the Aliens-fighting-Predators front. And that's a pretty heavy kick to the nuts. But when the two did meet, that one fight was interesting and unpredictable. It used the environment and made both combatants seems capable and powerful. While the Predaboys were no doubt ridiculously f**king angsty over Grid get a last-second sneak kill over their deific pussybeast, the fight gave us a nicely balanced view of a hand-to-hand engagement while remaining entertaining.
And by that I mean that it was really good. If there were more fights in the first AvP film that had that level of unpredictability and suspense, we'd probably look back on it as a bit of a cult classic with acting and dialogue flaws.
AvPR, while providing even less on the characterisation, acting and plot fronts failed to be the superior action film.
Action scenes that boring and predictable must take effort to create. And I know they did. Because the Strausses were Predator fans. Let me explain that:
Predator has Arnie in it. It has a ridiculous action scene where everyone's hip-firing, one-liners are tossed around like infants in Nanking and Arnold actually tells someone to stick around after he impales them with a combat knife. This is not an issue. This, in fact, it a lot of fun, very entertaining and ends up supporting the plot.
But the Brothers wanted to make a Predator movie. They wanted to call on all those 80s action movie tropes and make something that was true to that style of film-making rather than actually think about the elements that made the Predator monster itself effective and relevant in those circumstances. This is a particularly major issue because that drags the Alien down. Borrowing more narrative and atmospheric elements from the Alien films is a much wiser choice because those films take the audience so seriously, and so invite the audience to take the film seriously.
The basic idea is that when the Brothers reference the kind of bronze-age heroism that 80s action was about, they do it through the Predator. They make Wolf a hero, like some sort of interspecies Arnold equivalent. And it doesn't work. Ironically enough, while Predator fans criticise AvP1 for making Scar a good guy, AvPR does this from the beginning, because that's the attitude that the Brothers went in with. They wanted the Predator to be the one the audience was rooting for.
And that sucks for everyone involved.
/rant end
That went on for way longer than intended.
