It is particularly difficult to do proper forensic justice to a film that is very poor.  Oh, certainly, it is easy enough to suggest changes.  The problem is knowing when to stop.  The worse the film, the easier it is to simply come up with your own plot, containing only the barest relation to the actual film.  I have scrapped several forensic investigations (drafts of Underworld and Van Helsing) simply because my suggestions amounted to a complete reworking of the film.  The purpose of Film Forensics is primarily to provide an alternate version of a film, one that is easy to imagine.  In the ideal Film Forensics investigation, a reader might, years later, remember a film with a great deal more fondness that it warrents, and be surprised, watching it again, that the story is somewhat different to their memories.

Obviously, we aren’t there yet.  But it’s something to aim for.  And it is something much easier to do when the changes are small and subtle.

In that sense, it’s almost worthwhile skipping Alien Vs. Predator altogether.  The idea of Aliens fighting Predators has been around since the first Predator film (and was made explicit in the series of comics, and Predator 2, which had an Alien head in the Predator spaceship).  There have been many other works devoted to the premise, including computer games, card and roleplaying games, and of course numerous bits of fan-fiction.  I don’t doubt there have been dozens and dozens of scripts floating around Hollywood, over the years.  And many fans of the franchises have their own ideas about what the movie should entail.  I doubt whether the eventual script for Alien Vs. Predator was what anyone had in mind.

Paul Anderson has a long history of doing highly derivative films.  Event Horizon walked closely in the shadow of Aliens for much of the setup, then turned into Hellraiser by way of The Shining and Solaris.  Resident Evil has so many influences (including, obviously, computer games) they blur into a giant seething mass of cliche.

And so it goes with Alien Vs. Predator.  It starts with an assembly-of-team sequence that could have been cut and paste from any number of films – Aliens, of course, but even Vertical Limit or Atlantis or… well, any film involving the assembly of a team.  It comes complete with the “I suppose you’re all wandering why I brought you here” and witty riposte by the team jokester (actually, I’m not sure about the riposte.  I think this happened, but watching this film was like driving to work: thinking back, you know you’ve done it, but because it offered nothing new for the senses, your brain has only the slightest grasp of it.  And no, I’m not going to watch it again.)  A climbing expert – I expected them to call her the “best of the best of the best” – offers dire premonitions of failure, refuses to go, but is dragged into it by means so tedious I’m afraid to relate them.  You remember. 

There’s a lot of work to be done, right from the beginning.  It would be tempting to set the adventure in New York, say, instead of the Antartic, as it would give us more tension about whether the Aliens got loose into the population, but we already know the tale won’t amount to much, as it is set in the present day, and we know from the Alien series of films that in the future the Aliens are still largely unknown.  And I suppose setting the film in the future would push the budget well outside the “dark corridors” sets of AVP.  We’ll work with what we have.  We’re on a hiding to nothing if we seriously try to threaten the whole world, so the best we can do here is threaten the characters.  In order to do this, we have to first establish that they’re worth saving, and the film really doesn’t do this. 

It is worthwhile, then, spending a bit of time in getting the characters good and sympathetic before we start bumping them off.  One of the pleasures of Alien was not knowing who would survive.  It’s easy to forget now, but I remember at the time thinking Ripley was definitely one of the disposables, and that Dallas was the likely survivor.  It was by no means clear.  In the current version of AVP, of course, it doesn’t really matter because none of the characters make an impression.  There is no character development. 

We need to set up a character as being the likely survivor, and then pull the rug out from under them by killing them part-way through the film.  Imagine the surprise if the Scottish guy had managed to escape, and the more obvious heroic super-climber (and did I miss the bit where her climbing proficiency became important to the film?) slated-to-survive woman had died instead, possibly saving him.  When has the nerdy character ever been the sole survivor?  We can gain a great deal of tension by having the surviving character one who is not in charge until the competent characters are killed off.  It’s a primitive varient on the “coming of age” story, in which a character is forced to take up the reins of power when their mentor dies.  But it does, at least, generate some tension and give us a bit of character development.

There is quite a large cast of characters.  In this kind of story it would make sense to have a smaller cast – say, five people – on whom we can concentrate all our character building.  The deaths would be less frequent but more important.  Ten years since last seeing it, I can remember every one of the death scenes in Alien (which had seven characters, but also had Ridley Scott).  The only death scene in AVP I can remember is that of the Scottish guy.  The others blur together.  Part of the problem is the meaninglessness of the deaths.  Each death should mean or reveal something in the story: even the classic “You’re not as safe as you think” death, in which a character dies simply to show the other characters that their sense of safety is a delusion, can’t be used here.  The characters are never given a delusion or fig-leaf of safety; a hint that, with sufficient cleverness or skill, they might escape.  They go in, are surprised by what they see, and die, generally while running away.  If we made the characters clever and resourceful, actually evading the threats and staying together as a group and having minor victories, we might care more.  We need group dynamics!  We don’t even have a clever-but-devious character who tries to ally with the Aliens or the Predators!

Which, of course, brings us to the Aliens and the Predators.  It says a lot about the film that, on the whole, they are completely unnecessary to the “Haunted House” plot.  The Aliens and Predators are merely moving traps for the characters to encounter.  As far as the humans are concerned, we could replace them with giant rats, until the end of the film.  They we’d have to bring in a were-rat of some sort.

Before we delve into the Aliens and Predators themselves, let’s get some of the more obvious surface criticisms of the film out of the way.  The idea that the pyramid reconfigures every ten minutes is daft: as many people have pointed out, a digital system of time would not have minutes or hours that were remotely compatible.  And the temple being in the Antarctic just doesn’t work, for reasons that are explained in detail in the goofs section of the IMDB entry on Alien Vs. Predator.  The speed at which the Aliens gestate inside the humans seems a bit off: they’re chest-bursting after mere hours in the pyramid, and full-sized aliens about ten minutes after that (Admittedly, the latter was pretty fast in the first Alien film, too).  The Alien queen being held by chains that dissolve in Alien blood?  A bit silly.  The end-credits bit in which the predator alien bursts out of the predator’s chest is even worse: it relies on the predators not checking the body, which has just been in the traditional Alien Vs. Predator proving ground.  Evidently this chest-bursting thing is novel to them.

While the idea of Aliens fighting Predators seems cool, I doubt the old stand-up WWF-style brawling was what people had in mind.  We picture Predators wading into Alien nests, blasting away with swathes of high-tech weaponry, after the head of an Alien queen.  We picture a Peruvian jungle; a wounded Predator, armed only with a tree branch, facing off a pair of Aliens, barely visible in the stalactites as startled bats fly out of the cave mouth. 

We would like to learn something new about the Aliens and the Predators.  We already know Aliens are like ants or wasps, and Predators are like, oh, I don’t know, samurai cats.  Let’s see something more.

We can’t change too much, but that’s OK.  The idea of the action taking place in a Predator proving ground is not inherently bad, even a proving ground that is just a bunch of stone passages.  The idea that the Predators need proving means that they might fail.  So far we have seen Predators that have passed the various Predatorhood tests, but now we’re seeing, pontentially, the ones that fail.  The Predators that might not make it. 

What if one of them was a coward?  We would see this only when the Predators face an onslaught of Aliens.  They don’t have their proper shoulder weapons yet.  They’re not particularly accurate with the weapons they do have, and they’re not quite comfortable with all the other high-tech gear they have.  One of them runs.  The other two fight off the Aliens but one is killed, so the other goes gunning, not only for the Aliens, but his cowardly ex-friend. 

And now we have some real story possibilities.  Perhaps the cowardly one finds his courage in fighting off the other Predator, or, on the other hand, tries to kill the other one to conceal his moment of cowardice.  The humans have the good weapons, but can’t operate the weapons themselves, so they have to ally themselves with one of the Predators, but which one?  Or, perhaps the humans find the body of one of the Predators, and manage to get the armour off, and equip the shoulder weapon on one of themselves.

The Aliens are much more of a known quantity.  They have been explored over four films and much more additional fiction.  For this story, because we want to reduce the number of human characters (and eliminate the chest-bursting-after-gestating-an-hour bit) we can’t have quite so many of our cast being converted into Aliens.  The Predators want to set up a good proving ground involving Aliens, fine.  However, it takes much too long to grow the Aliens up from an egg, unless the sacrifice of the humans came at least a few days before the Predators arrive.  So, we have two or three days pass in the pyramid before the Predators arrive.  Better, have the Predators arrive immediately, but stay on the surface until the gestation period is over.  Perhaps the Predators have arranged for precisely seven people to go down into the hole, invisibly watching at the entrance and making sure none of the people going down have weapons.  Killing off the eighth human who was going to go down.  Killing off the surface team, and sealing off the exit.  The humans enter the sacrificial chamber with its seven pods, and the seven chest-bursters emerge. 

The intent here, of course, is that the three Predators will go down in a couple of days and face seven Aliens.  What happens instead is that the humans are resourceful.  Two get facehuggers attach to the two least developed characters, but the others are able to evade them – perhaps one person is skillful with a throwing knife.  Another (perhaps the Lance Hendrickson character) throws a kerosene lamp into an opening egg.  A particularly strong member of the group wrestles with the face-hugger and breaks all its legs (horrifically acid-burning his hands as a result).  The other two – one of whom should be the eventual survivor – run away from theirs until the competent people can take care of their face-huggers.

After that, the humans have a couple of days to tend for their poor companions with the face-huggers on them and try and find a way out.  They explore.  The face-huggers fall off, and our two doomed extras are relieved that everything is better.  Then the first chest-burster bursts, all the more horrific because we know what is coming – especially for the second person, who has some medical training and can explain a little of what is happening.  But just as he’s steeling himself for a bit of self-surgery with a sharp knife, the second chest-burster comes through, and also escapes.

Perhaps the humans have all decided to go off and hunt down these little pesky parasitic people poppers together when the Predators come down, so that the humans don’t immediately get killed by the Predators (as they would if they were just standing around the exit waiting for it to open).  Then we can enter the story proper.  Three Predators, five humans, two Aliens – and perhaps, when the Aliens take down one of the Predators (who would possibly split up, being lone hunters etc.) they take it to an egg and get some face-hugger action happening immediately, so that at the end of the film, we really are facing a Predator Alien, a beastie that might just be clever enough to work out a way to free the Alien queen.  Of the five humans, one gets killed by a trap, one gets captured by an Alien and facehugged, one gets killed by a Predator, and the remaining disposable character is killed by the Predator Alien or the queen.

Well.  I could go into more detail, but we’re getting further and further away from the existing film, the more we flesh out these ideas – and we could conceivably go on for quite some time.  I’ll leave it at that.  It’s enough for a second draft of the script.  As it stands, the script has either had one draft from someone with no imagination and a habit of watching direct-to-video budget SF films, or twenty-five from twenty-five different writers, all of whom determined to erase all ideas that they themselves didn’t come up with. 

Almost anything is an improvement.

This entry was posted on Sunday, February 13th, 2005 at 12:03 pm and is filed under A, Action, Forensic Analysis, Horror, Science Fiction, shellshear. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.