Saturday 14th August 2004
So we went and saw this film last night. Naturally, this will contain some spoilers.
Lemee pull a Harry Knowles here, to explain a few things....
By the time we got to the cinema, I'd been up for about twenty-four hours. During which all sorts of fun things happened to me.
Once the world woke up, I found out about it because Michael from CircuitPity called me to let me know what I already knew: that Hunter's laptop was on its way back here, having been 'fixed'. Which is to say that they looked it over for the fifth time out of three, and decided that replacing the powersource and heatsinks and fans and most of the laptop might do some good, since it didn't do any good the last time they replaced all those things. Having done that, they'd sent it back to me. Great.
Understand that the reason I'd sent the thing in this fifth time was because this Michael guy was having it sent directly to his desk, so he could call me personally the instant he had it in front of him. Which, of course, he didn't do. Instead, he called me two days after they'd 'fixed' it and sent it back to me, to let me know what a robot had already told me two days before: that the laptop was 'fixed' and being sent back and hit One to repeat this synthesised message.
All of which means that CircuitPity are conceding, on this fifth attempt to fix the laptop, that it's been broken all along, and confessing to hell and back that their failure to replace the thing after the second attempt to fix it, as promised in the damned contract, constitutes fraud. Which is meaningless now, since the thing is 'fixed' and on its way back to me. For the fifth time.
I could talk a little about the three months during which I haven't had this laptop while these felons failed to adhere to their contract, but that's largely immaterial, all things considered.
FedEx showed up with my laptop. Like an idiot, I signed for it, instead of just letting it end up missing somewhere in the system and reporting it stolen.
Hunter wasn't awake, so I left it alone for a while. Around six, she woke up, and opened the box.
The first FunFact in the box was the list of things they'd replaced, which was basically a Xerox of the list of things they'd replaced before. Notwithstanding writeoffs, CircuitPity have now spent far more replacing little bits of this machine than they'd ever have spent by simply replacing it, had they not decided instead to become known felons.
Next was the sheet of paper informing us that the battery was broken, but not covered by the warranty, which, we now know, covers nothing in the first place. Which is interesting, since, just before sending them the damned laptop, we proved that the battery worked just fine by using it to show the rest of the laptop's problems to the criminals at CircuitPity here in town. Which equates well enough to evidence that the battery, if broken, became that way while the laptop was in possession of CircuitPity, specifically in the possession of this Michael guy, who reportedly had the laptop the whole time, like in the deal.
Third: since they'd blanked the OS again, the first step was to reinstal it. Which was impossible.
CircuitPity, being known felons with too low an operating budget to have a copy of Windoze to instal on a laptop on their end, require you to send the original installation CDs along with the laptop and battery and powercord all together in the box they keep sending you to FedEx them your laptop until the warranty runs out and they no longer have to pretend to be trying to fix the thing. In addition to the battery, which may or may not actually be broken, they'd also broken one of the damned CDs. So reinstalling the OS to get the computer to turn on to test whether whatever they 'fixed', again, this time did any good, does no good since they broke the CD to prevent me from finding out.
I called half the planet trying to find the right CircuitPity felon to explain all this to, since Michael's number, which he made a point of giving me, connected to an uninspired answering machine which suggested punching in his extension, but eventually turned out to be happy only with my phone number, so it could hang onto it until Monday, and give it to Michael at about the same instant I call him myself to mention, among other things, that the contract claims that it includes twenty-four-hour support.
I get hold of Susan at CircuitPity, who spends twenty minutes learning to understand why broken CDs prevents me from discovering whether replacing all this shit for the fifth time out of three did any good before coming up with the brilliant plan of EMailing Michael with the message that I'm oddly displeased, which he should be getting at about the same instant that he's getting this retarded answerphone's message that I'd called him, which he should be getting at about the same instant that I'm calling him back on Monday. Which I should really record this time, since Michael, while unable to fix or replace the laptop, is at least extremely good at confessing to half the crimes in the US Code every time I talk to him.
At this point, I get the phone as far away from me as I can without actually bothering to stand up. Then it rings. Which I perfect.
I moment later, Rambam finds me on ICQ to mention that I'm not answering my phone. Also: Aliens v Predator v Intelligence is starting tonight; we should go see it.
So. My thoughts on this film might be a little tainted by my thoughts on CircuitPity. If not by much.
I won't bother writing out a linear report on this thing, since it would take less time to sit through the film than to read it all. Instead, I'll just hit the important parts.
First of all, half the film is--at long last--essentially O'Bannon's filmscript which was abandoned in 1979 when it proved to be too intelligent and expensive to waste on the public. Instead, they made Alien, which was, at least, better than its first three sequels.
Which is to say that AvP is essentially Alien set in the pyramid containing the animals, instead of in space.
That said, a few questions were finally answered, in arguably intelligent ways.
The 'third species' [that big thing in the gunnerseat from the first film] appears to have been, at best, a red herring. Which is not so say that the third species was necessarily ichthyoidal. It's just that it never really got mentioned in AvP, suggesting that, if it has any particular importance to the story, it has little to do with the origins.
Also, the assumption that the predators had engineered the aliens was kinda hinted after, but not precisely acknowledged. Instead, the predators had been deities forty million years ago before Antarctica got covered in permafrost, and they got the homosapiens living there halfway through the Cenozoic to act as hosts for the aliens so the predators could hunt them. What homosapiens were doing in Cenozoic Antarctica thirty-five million years before Australopithecus afarensis started thinking about evolving is anyone's guess. Based on the rest of the film, my guess is that this thing was written by morons.
So. It's more or less Present Day. Which, if it were more than less, would be really helpful to the story. But it's not. The film is set in October 2004 in Antarctica, where it's nighttime. Because the people writing this film are morons.
Of course, Antarctica at night is about a hundred and fifty degrees below zero, at which point, the writers suppose, it becomes too cold for vapour to condensate, or for blood to freeze. I used to think that John Carpenter had made some mistakes with The Thing regarding the sun setting in the winter down there; suddenly, The Thing is looking like a joint Nova/BBC special.
So, a team of idiots rush off to Antarctica to investigate the underground pyramid which has just been spotted by satellite for the first time in, um, ever. Curiously, the company controlling the satellite is none other than The Company: the corporate villain which would later send the Nostromo to investigate the distress signal in the first film. The Company, in 2004, is still helmed by Bishop. Or, actually, by the guy upon whom Bishop would later be based. So that element of FanFic actually showed up in the film.
Then, things become confusing.
However coincidentally, the predators show up. Because they do that every hundred years. That they happened to show up on the same day--uh...night...in Octoberan Antarctica--on which the homosapiens finally found the pyramid is a coincidence which is never explained, or even acknowledged. That I noticed, anyway.
It's possible, of course, that it was explained. I could have missed that, since the gaggle of geeks sitting behind me [I usually sit in the very back of the cinema; when I don't, it's because a group of fanboys have got back there first, in which case I end up sitting in the penultimate row, entirely too aware that these squawking creatures exist] were trying to learn ebonics throughout the film, emitting noises like dah'aa'aa'amn and yeh'aa'aa'ah whenever there was nothing particularly noteworthy happening in any kinetic sense onscreen, like GoTards remembering a fireworks display three weeks later. For that, it's possible that I missed the verbal explanation for this amazing coincidence in which every species in the universe happened to reach this pyramid on the same night in the land of eternal sunlight.
It was at about that point that I realised that the film was fine; I was the problem: my IQ is above room temperature; I should never have been there in the first place.
The pyramid is boobytrapped. Which is to say that the writers, being dumber than the geeks sitting behind me, ran out of all their neat ideas in the first twenty minutes and eventually just stole the entire plotline of Cube. Lacking anyone autistic on the team, it was up to the guy with a stopwatch to decide that, since the Aztecs had worked out metrics, the pyramid would pull its Omega Supreme TransFormer Manoeuvre exactly every ten minutes. Which was a pretty good trick, since we don’t know how long an Aztec minute was. Particularly in Antarctica, where an Aztec day is four months long.
Dah'aa'aa'amn....
On which note, the film was, curiously, PG13. Presumably because no one over fourteen would bother watching it. So the bad-feeling-about-this sharkjumper inherent in Predator films was laughably declawed. No less than twice. In what the writers must have thought was a burst of erudition, the homosapiens got all ironical and accused the aliens of being, individually, one ugly son of a bitch. As boring as the motherfucker line was in the first film, and as laughable as it was to have the predator, who'd never met Dutch, step on the line in the second, the second-and-a-half's 'spoof' [I have serious doubts that the writers were clever enough to understand how self-satirising they actually were] was the most insulting thing I've witnessed since the USA Network overdubbed every instance of motherfucker with melonfarmer in their self-important USA Network Premiere of Die Hard 3.
Yeh'aa'aa'ah....
Being a film by morons of morons for morons, the writers employed the ubiquitous suspense tactic of killing off the smartest people first. In the end, Captain Actionfigure and Predator with KungFu Cowardice are the last line of defence between the xenomorphs and a planet which would find this film interesting. So it wasn't tremendously important who won, at that point.
Captain Actionfigure, of course, is the chick who killed one of the aliens, impressing Predator with KungFu Cowardice enough that he took the alien apart and built a spear and shield out of it. Which is to say that he handed a two-handed weapon to a chick whose portside arm no longer bends. You'll be seeing this at ToysRUs soon enough.
Predator with KungFu Cowardice is, of course, the predator who is hosting a new morph of alien, has got to know about it, yet nukes the pyramid by throwing the wristbomb into the eggroom and, in a novel strategy, runs away. If only the predator in Los Angeles in 1997 had thought of doing that, the film would have ended somewhat differently.
Of course, all turns out right in the end. All the aliens--both the standard velociraptors and the tyrannosaurid queen--are killed off, leaving Captain Actionfigure to use Fox Mudler's SnoCat to drive off wearing a cotton shirt in temperatures cold enough to freeze liquids solid in under a second. Where she went is anyone's guess. But she went there with a nice, new, uh...stick. The old predator who gave Danny Glover the flintlock in 1997 gave her the DarthMaul spear. Hence: yeh'aa'aa'ah...dah'aa'aa'amn...that's-what-I'm-talkin-bout...Willis....
Not a film for smart people.
That said, the CG wasn't actually that bad. For what that's worth these days. The only problem now is going to be going back and watching the first film from 1979 without comparing the fast, fluid aliens from this to the rubbersuit with the gumbyfingers available during the Carter Administration. So: AvP might be watchable without sound. Any sound. Especially from ebonic geeks.
That's my take on it anyway. Your opinions may differ. Which is what the messageboard is for.
More later....
--Gremlin