I’m concerned and tired. Concerned about sci-fi and tired of things clanking and exploding.
CRUSHING DISAPPOINTMENT OF YOUTH
I’ve been filled with this foul tasting disappointment and righteous fury ever since that idiot Joss Whedon got his irritatingly gilded claws all over the Alien franchise and proceeded to piss over it as if it commanded no more respect than a Fast & Furious movie. In my idealistic and hope-filled teen years, I remember lining up excitedly to see Alien Resurrection with all the enthusiasm that only youth can bring, only to be curiously crushed after seeing the CGI-infused pap they had lazily churned out. Not adding anything but ludicrously misjudged awfulness, and displaying a total misunderstanding of what I wanted from the franchise, it was like having your own mother spit your sister’s faeces in your face and then crushing each of your eyeballs underfoot like grapes. Well done, idiots. I was more disappointed than I would have been had they ruined Jesus’ resurrection by splicing his DNA with Jennifer Aniston’s and attempting to give him some sort of quirky teen backstory. That was the end of my youth.
CYBORG WEEKEND AT BERNIE’S
Stupidly, and going against every fibre of my being, I lined up to see Terminator 3, and later Terminator: Salvation, with a similar feeling of excitement. All right, it wasn’t Alien (the love of my young life), but it had a fair chance of being good. In my mind, it shouldn’t be difficult to make a terrifyingly tense and dreadfully scary movie about a cyborg killing machine intent on wiping out the human race. But somehow, with Terminator 3, they seemed to have decided to try and make post-OC version of Weekend At Bernie’s, complete with vacuous sunglasses jokes and for some reason almost no violence. The only reason to watch it was for the leather-clad blonde lady. And Terminator: Salvation- well that somehow managed to be even worse!
Walking into Salvation, I had convinced myself that it would be impossible for them to fuck this up. Making an exciting film about a climactic war between people and machines should be as simple as the brain-dead zombies who write articles about Jordan and Peter for the terminally idiotic, shouldn’t it? It should be as easy as outwitting a Nickelback fan! But somehow, as I watched the sheer pointless vapidity unspooling before my poor eyes, I realised that McG had managed to churn out something that was so boring I was looking at my watch every ten minutes before the halfway mark and wishing that the whole human race had never existed, so ashamed was I to be a human.
CLANKING AND EXPLODING
And that’s the problem- a slew of CGI explosions and non-entity characters does not make for an exciting or even vaguely interesting film. Terminator: Salvation was just an endless slog of things clanking and exploding, with a pointless cameo from Helena Bonham-Carter in it, and it was SO BORING I WANTED TO DIE. Transformers 2 was almost entirely the same. Once you’ve seen one thing clank and explode, you’ve seen them all! Of course, McG said when making that awful Terminator experience that he was fully aware of the legacy of the previous films, and what the fans were hoping for, and the faults with the previous film and blah blah blah. Promises were made, but on watching the film it’s painfully obvious that neither he nor anyone else involved in the making of the film gave a shit about anything, or anyone, ever.
FILMIC ‘FINAL SOLUTION’
And that’s what worries me with this new Predators film. Robert Rodriguez can go on all he likes about being a fan of the original 2 films, and wanting to build respectfully on those. Both him and director Nimrod Antal talk about being aware of and avoiding the pitfalls of the mindless, vacuous tosh that were the Alien Vs Predator films- which somehow managed the feat of BEING EVEN WORSE THAN YOU WOULD EXPECT, despite me expecting a sort of filmic Final Solution. But at the end of the day I doubt either Rodriguez or Antal really give a flying shit, and from the trailer that’s now doing the rounds online it’s clear that all this talk of respectfully trying to make a decent film rather than a jumped up toy advert of a cash-in are well and truly LIES.
The plot (a number of tough idiots find themselves whisked to an alien jungle for some sort of already tedious alien hunting party) is ludicrous beyond all comprehension, and already bores the living hell out of me just thinking about it. The fact that they’re talking excitedly about introducing new creatures frankly makes me sick! They’re also talking about trying to make it funny, and of revealing the creature pretty much straight away. In a recent interview that Airlock sent me, both Rodriguez and Antal suggested that modern audiences would be too impatient and dim-witted to wait 40 minutes of tension out to see a monster. Way to respect your audience, eh? Who is this audience made up of- attention deficit disorder fuelled three year olds?
ECSTASY OF IDIOT PIXELS
I’d like to see a movie where they don’t reveal the creature until the final five minutes, and just continually rachet up the tension and characterisation until then. I’m more interested in that than watching some sort of foxy female predator clank and explode her way onto the screen in an ecstasy of idiot pixels.
Haven’t they just fundamentally disregarded (or misunderstood, more likely) what made the original two films so great? You don’t need more creatures. In fact, you don’t need more anything. We don’t need to be baby stepped through all our films. We’re not ALL idiots (despite the fact that so many of us went to see the Da Vinci Code). Why the hell someone whose best movies are the Spy Kids series has been allowed anywhere near making a Predator film is totally beyond me. Still, I’ll probably buy the lunchbox and go see the movie. They could have had Why Bird making it and I’d have gone.
DULL
I also hear a dull rumbling that Ridley Scott is looking to make another Alien movie. In 3D- of course! This will obviously be a movie for all you pricklets and numbskulls out there that watched Alien and thought that it could have been a good movie if only they’d made it in 3D. With more lasers and monsters and CGI. And lots of clanking and exploding. With Jennifer Aniston playing Ripley and Vin Diesel playing the alien.
I expect they’ll even slap a Linkin Park soundtrack on it. Bliss.
Clanked-out Regards
Biolab
Pablum from the (bio)Lablum 