Alien Versus Predator

That there are a lot of problems with this film will doubtless surprise no one. Nevertheless, viewers should know that the tagline -- "no matter who wins, we lose" -- is a straight-up lie. SPOILER.

The whole point of the damn movie is that if Predator wins, we win, and if Alien loses, we lose. There's nothing wrong with that being the story of the film, but given that that's the story of the film, why misrepresent it in the adds. What is problematic about the story of the film is that for a movie called "Alien Versus Predator" very little time is consumed by scenes of the Predator fighting aliens. Those scenes are cool, the erstwhile character development involving humans is, predictably, lame. The question was what would the ratio of cool shit to lame shit be, and the answer was "shockingly low."

The whole movie also drove me to constantly want to quibble abour characters not wearing hats at various points. If you walk outside in Cambridge, Massachusetts during the winter without a hat on, your ears get pretty fucking cold, even if you're just walking a few blocks. The idea that you could be outside riding on a boat cruising through the Antarctic Ocean without a hat on is absurd. Similarly, running around a structure buried deep beneath Antarctica (it's colder underground) without a hat for an extended period of time is ridiculous. And fighting an alien on the surface of Antarctica without a hat or a coat is beyond insane. But these are quibbles. All the quibbles, however, lead to a gripe -- why set the movie in Antarctica? It seems that a jungle setting would have eliminated a lot of these problems, been more in the spirit of the inane Egypto-Cambodian-Aztec premise, and more in the spirit of the Predator's preferance (as expressed in previous works) for warm climes.

Final quibble. The Predators come, or so we are told, every 100 years. Hence the whaling station "abandonned" in 1904. But who was there in 1704 or 1404?