Predators

Rating: ***

Way back, a long, long time ago (the 80s), someone (James Cameron) had a bright idea for a sequel to ALIEN. While Ridley Scott’s original was big on atmosphere in the cramped quarters of a spaceship with only the creature and a small group of long-haul space-truckers to stop him, ALIENS went bigger. Cameron’s sequel had more guns, more thugs and, most importantly, more aliens.

It took about 25 years for the trickle down effect to, well, trickle down for another mega-space-monster franchise: PREDATOR. The Schwarzenegger epic already had one sequel starring Danny Glover (?), and then segued into the lacklustre ALIEN VS PREDATOR films. But somewhere in between, then indie auteur Robert Rodriguez had a bright idea: let’s have more PREDATORS. Now, the brain trust at Fox has never exactly been protective of their franchises (*cough*X-MEN LAST STAND*cough*FANTASTIC FOUR*), so when they decided to revisit Rodriguez’s script from 1994 it was like Christmas morning.

The results however are somewhat mixed. Directed by Nimród Antal, PREDATORS is undoubtedly bad ass, even though the Academy Award laureate in this film is unusually high. Still, there are clichés and plot traps by the dozen, and something about the Predators themselves just doesn’t feel quite as menacing, but in the long run this film is an improvement by light years over what’s been done with the franchise before.

The film puts us right in the centre of the action as Royce (Adrian Brody), a former US soldier now mercenary wakes up mid air and lands in a foreign jungle having been parachuted in from a great height. He encounters others: Mexican drug cartel enforcer Cuchillo (Danny Trejo), Chechen war vet Nikolai (Oleg Taktarov), Israel Defense Forces sniper Isabelle (Alice Braga), death squad soldier Mombasa (Mahershalalhashbaz Ali), death row inmate Stans (Walton Goggins), Yakuza bad ass Hanzo (Louis Ozawa Changchien), and doctor Edwin (Topher Grace). It doesn’t take them long to put two and two together. They’re on an alien planet and they’re being used as prey for a group of alien hunters.

The script seems to take a lot of time to establish the characters and get them oriented in their setting, but they seem to get oriented pretty quick and there’s not much character to these guys to begin with. For the most part, these guys are names and loose affiliations Trejo is playing that menacing Mexican guy he always plays and Grace is the ironic detached guy who doesn’t seem to fit in. Brody was a surprise though. He conveyed just enough burly gravitas to make me believe he belonged with the rest of these rough necks. A later encounter with Laurence Fishbourne as a US army soldier long-since stranded on the alien world was interesting, but his appearance was brief and really not very fulfilling.

Of course, coming in to a movie like PREDATORS you’re not expecting a lot in the way of complex character work or engaging dialogue, after all the first film starred such thespians as Jesse “The Body” Ventura and Carl “You’ve Got A Stew Goin’” Weathers. The film creates viable tension as it leads up to the first battle between the humans and Predators, but something seems to happen once our gang comes across Fishbourne’s crackpot, the film loses a lot of its momentum. I’m also not sure where exactly Royce gets his great plan to force a captive Predator to take the human prisoners home, or even where he gets half his ideas. Or why everybody else seems to follow him despite the fact that he’s not giving anyone orders or evens seems to want to help anyone but himself. But I guess if they didn’t, there wouldn’t be much of a movie…

But the action is solid and the cast does exactly what it needs to in order to make sitting through the film an easy experience. Certainly, in watching PREDATORS one appreciates that this is the sequel that was always there, somewhere, in the franchise’s capabilities. And certainly fans, those long suffering fans, will be grateful to have a film worthy of their beloved mandible-accessorized monster. PREDATORS is pure entertainment, and proof positive that when you put the right creators in charge, the results can astound. That lesson comes a little too late for some other franchises, but better late than never as they say.

Hot Docs - Talhotblond

Rating: ****

With MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin and all the assorted social networking facets that exist the days, it’s easy to forget that once upon a time, so deeply personalizing one’s self online was strange and one could never be sure if the person on the other end was being earnest. Sure, there are still plenty of people on the internet, predators mostly, that are pretending to be something they’re not, but often we take people at their word that they are who they say they are. Think about it: how many times has someone you’re not sure you know, friended you on Facebook or the like?

But filmmaker Barbara Schroeder quickly sets internet paranoia back by about 10 years in her first feature documentary Talhotblond. Utilizing journalistic precision and impeccable research, Schroeder recounts the unfortunate set of circumstances that led to the murder of Brian Barrett, a promising young man that got caught up in the worst case of fatal attraction since, well, Fatal Attraction.

The story begins in online chat rooms and a cyberspace tale of boy meets girl. On one end is marinesniper, an 18-year-old enlistee about to head off to the frontlines of Afghanistan and Iraq; on the other is talhotblond, a bright precocious and virginal teen queen with blond hair and long legs. A torrid cyber-romance takes place between the two as marinesniper and talhotblond participate in X-rated chats, or sexting as the kids call it. By all appearances talhotblond was every inch the 18-year-old vixen she said she was, and marinesniper the ripped and dedicate young man doing his patriotic duty.

There was just one problem though: marinesniper was a 46-year-old factory worker pretending to be a battle-hardened soldier looking for comfort in his small town girl back home. Of course, talhotblond wasn’t all she advertised to be either, but that’s a twist best left revealed in context of watching the story unfold in the movie. Indeed, Talhotblond may be the best story Law & Order: Special Victims Unit never told. A startling tale of deception, obsession and naiveté taken to perilous extremes that resulted in the death of a young man whose only crime was being a bit too trusting.

Using exclusive access to the players and insightful analysis from psychologist Rex Julian Beaber, Schroeder paints a complete anecdotal and psychological dissection of the tragedy. What drove Tomas Montgomery, a man with a steady job, family and, by all accounts, a happy, productive life, to become so thoroughly obsessed with a woman he never met that he would kill someone for her exclusive affections? As incomprehensible as that question is, the filmmakers do a pretty reasonable job not writing Montgomery off as a gross pervert, and tries hardily to understand him. His counterpart, the woman calling herself “talhotblond” remains a sphinx though. Not including her in the doc, either through her own refusal to participate or the filmmakers purposefully excluding her, makes the film’s title character its real villain.

In thinking about the film, that part is problematic. Such great pains were taken to cover the field and understand the players, as each text message shown seemed mined with subtext. But the woman at the centre of it all was conspicuous by her absence. Combined with the posthumous narration by an actor playing Brian Barrett, the film seemed uncomfortably partisan. What is admirable about the film are the facts of the case, and they way they’re presented, and what is surprising about it is that those facts are so lurid, so scandalous, that given our current media culture, this story is not more well known.

Schroeder’s compelling narrative style though makes Talhotblond one of those has to be seen to be believed documentaries. The implicit tragedy of the film is that the most honest person in the central triangle is the one that paid the most terrible price, and the feeling that Brian Barrett was left alone out in the vast internet forest without adequate protection. But what is adequate protection? Is it a crime to play act or pretend to be something you’re not? Is that not what things like World of Warcraft and similar online games, are all about? Talhotblond is a guaranteed discussion provoker with no easy answers.

Aliens Vs Predator - Requiem

Rating: **

First, a note to the family of four that was sitting behind me in the theatre, specifically the parents of the two obviously under-10 children: just what the hell were you thinking? I’m by no means a child psychologist, and for that matter neither are the people who rate movies, but seriously, what part of your brain said that Aliens Vs Predator was the appropriate holiday choice?

Seriously, it’s people like you that are ruining it for people like me to enjoy entertainment that’s aimed at a mature audience, like the idiots who don’t check the video game rating before giving their kids “Blood & Guts 3” for X-Box. And it’s also people like you who fan the flames of idiots like Bill O’Reilly, whose recent campaign against Naked News proves that he has finger on the pulse of the biggest internet trends of 2001. But I digress; let’s talk about Aliens Vs Predator: Requiem.

It sucked. No seriously, what were you expecting?

Not that this is a truly disappointing development, but frankly after Paul W.S. Anderson’s craptacular inaugural film released in 2004 the franchise had nowhere to go but up. The trailer released after Comic Con did display some amount of cleverness, naturally though this was a trick of the light and a trick of the grand olde marketing machine. Those expecting the very best that these two marvellous movie monsters have to offer will be disappointed or, if you’re like me, it will barely meet your expectations.

Unfortunately picking up from the conclusion of the first Alien/Predator, we begin on the departing Predator spacecraft and the birth of what is presumably the first ever Predalien, bursting forth from the chest of the sole surviving Predator from part one. The ship crashes in the woods outside a small town in Colorado town killing everyone onboard except the Predalien and about half-a-dozen of the Facehuggers, which are all set loose on an unsuspecting population. A Predator “cleaner” soon arrives, but not before an Alien infestation grips the small town leaving a handful of survivors.

What amazes me the most is how the storylines for these movies haven’t changed since James Cameron’s Aliens over 20 years ago. (And just to remind us of the fact, the unmistakable sound of the motion-detectors operated by the Colonial Marines in that movie is heard overtop of the opening credits.) As you may have already guessed, only the most necessary and most iconoclast of the townspeople rally together as the alien war cuts them off from civilization. In a situation like this you not only need the town sheriff, an army officer back from combat and an ex-con but a pizza delivery boy, a dumb jock, a couple of kids and some eye candy.

And typically not a single one of these characters is developed well enough to be anyone worth caring about, and it seems that the screenwriter and directors didn’t care about them either. Why was the one character an ex-con, it’s not like it figures into the story at all. Oh, and the poor pizza boy? He never even gets to coitus with the pretty girl, let alone to the interuptus. It’s emblematic of everything that’s wrong with the movie: it looks like things are going one way, but things never turn out the way you expect them, not how you want them.

In the original 1992 Alien Vs Predator comic, a newly colonized world is overrun by Aliens and Predators arrive to begin the hunt. A human woman named Machiko Noguchi assists the Predators in defeating the Aliens and is accepted as part of the Predator tribe and leaves with them on another hunt. I had thoughts of this as I watched Requiem because things seemed so set-up to take us there.

One of the characters is a returning army officer named Kelly (Reiko Aylesworth, 24), who’s unexplored storyline involves a detachment from her husband and daughter after what is presumably years overseas. So here, you’re thinking: well this is a cool way to set up Kelly as the new Ripley, their names are even kind of similar. It would have awesome if the filmmakers had taken the time to set up Kelly as a real hero who could be followed through possible, subsequent films as she, perhaps, joins the Predators on future hunts. But instead the movie squanders time on the pizza boy.

Also, why does it seem that there are only three alien races in the universe? When we see the Predator trophy case in Predator 2, it’s filled with a variety of skulls, where are some of these races? In Requiem, we see another trophy case, this time: purely made up of Alien skulls. Is there some kind of imagination limitation requirement for the people that are assigned the stewardship of these movies? It’s a big wide galaxy out there, but what are we doing? Retreading the same narrative ground over and over again in a place as bland and ordinary as small town America. (Though I’m pretty sure it’s really British Columbia.)

And for a movie directed by a couple of guys who come from the fertile creative background of visual effects, the movie looks oddly stale. While this movie isn’t shy about gore, as opposed to its PG-13, Anderson-directed predecessor, it doesn’t really go for the juggular either, which would make up for the fact that it doesn’t do anything all that creative either. It’s a terrible thing when you’re bored seeing two monsters fighting and I was bored solid and left twiddling my thumbs waiting for the body count to rise. The problem there, of course, was that I wasn’t all that invested in whether the heroes lived or died.

I wish I could say, “A for effort”, but this is an all-round D-movie. I know that there’s a lot of love out there for both franchises and a lot of potential in the ether for the collection of huge sums of cash, but until the executives in charge of the properties can do right by then and the fans, maybe they should leave well enough alone.