Yes, yes I know.
This is a list of the ten worst films I saw in the cinema in 2008 and yes I knew it would be rubbish. That’s OK, there is rubbish I like. Speed Racer might turn up in my top ten and it was a narratively complex as a Ladybird book. And its not as if the original AVP had set the bar particualrly high. Because it hadn’t. But I still fondly remember the first AVP as one of the best social times I have had in the cinema, beered up with an audience who all new it would be tat, and thus throwing the odd heckle and bon mot its way. The tagline was explicit after all, whoever wins, we lose. And NO-ONE WON.
So isn’t it disingenuous to put this film in here, when I knew it would be rubbish and went to see it anyway? Well perhaps, but in the scheme of rubbish films that i know will be rubbish, AVP2 was rubbish squared. It had that magic ingredient no bad movie should have: it was dull. You read me right. Dull. There was nary a laugh out loud moment, the cheese was non-existent and the violence sedate. As I said here, the film finally confirmed what would happen if the Aliens made it to Earth. And the answer was end up in a very rudimentary slasher monster movie. And any slasher monster movie needs to build up its lead human characters enough for us to care about the needless slaughter. However AVP2 does the precise opposite of this. It present us with a selection of dull stereotypes who we do not care about AND THEN LETS LOADS OF THEM LIVE. Its like a Christian Science Monitor version of a horror movie, there is very little horror and everyone survives*.
Oh and the Predator? Or the Predalien. Dull, dull, dull. The monsters here become the punchlines to poorly told jokes. Any film that makes Paul W.Anderson (diretor of AVP1) look like a genius must therefore be terrible.
Requiem for a dream? Only one of those really dull dreams where you know you are asleep and you can’t wake up and nothing happens apart from the growing dread that you might have wet yourself**.
*OK, not everyone survives, actually most people die but there is still more survivors than in ALL THE PREVIOUS ALIEN FILMS PUT TOGETHER!
**I don’t know about this, I am only speaking from annecdote as I, as you will know by now, do not dream.