[Abyss]

masan, on 15 March 2010 - 04:41 PM, said:

...This could be the biggest Piece of Shit ^TM ever and still never fail....

I'm afraid they said the same thing about A:R, AvP and AvP:R.

PREDATOR was on last weekend and despite having other stuff to do i couldn't resists watching. I think i figured out a few things...

The flic spends about 20min establishing Dutch and co as the baddest badasses to ever be badasses. It establishes the mystery of what happened to Hopper and his team. Then they wipe out the guerilla camp and it's like whoa! Awesome! And then the Pred systematically takes them apart until the big silly finish with Ahnuld, who gets his butt kicked but manages to asspull a save at the last second. It works if you ignore the fact that big super tech predator failed to notice that hey, maybe those sharp spikey things mean there's a trap here somewhere.

Every other pred flic has started at a disadvatage because viewers knew who was behind the killing, and just to give themselves an extra downer, the films fail to set anyone up as a convincing challenge to the pred - P2's cops weren't even close to Dutch's team and the peeps in the two AvP's basically had 'kill and eat me' tattoo'd on their heads with a thin hope that with enoygh gore ans 'splody the viewer might not notice that hey, this movie sucks.

Predators is going to try a game change by using 'the most dangerous game' motif and characters who are supposed to be a valid threat. I don't see predogs as helping the case (see The Hulk and Chronicles of Riddick for why alien dogs don't work as movie threats).

The problem i see is five or so c-list actors trying to chew scenery up until their inevitable gory effects ladden demise. Either they manage to take down a jr pred or two, which reduces the preds as a threat, or they don't, in which case unless the effects are mind-blosingly cool, we're back to predictable.

This film has a hell of a lot stacked against it.

- Abyss, naturally, will see it opening weekend.

[Silencer]

Abyss, on 15 March 2010 - 05:24 PM, said:

masan, on 15 March 2010 - 04:41 PM, said:

...This could be the biggest Piece of Shit ^TM ever and still never fail....

I'm afraid they said the same thing about A:R, AvP and AvP:R.

PREDATOR was on last weekend and despite having other stuff to do i couldn't resists watching. I think i figured out a few things...

The flic spends about 20min establishing Dutch and co as the baddest badasses to ever be badasses. It establishes the mystery of what happened to Hopper and his team. Then they wipe out the guerilla camp and it's like whoa! Awesome! And then the Pred systematically takes them apart until the big silly finish with Ahnuld, who gets his butt kicked but manages to asspull a save at the last second. It works if you ignore the fact that big super tech predator failed to notice that hey, maybe those sharp spikey things mean there's a trap here somewhere.

Every other pred flic has started at a disadvatage because viewers knew who was behind the killing, and just to give themselves an extra downer, the films fail to set anyone up as a convincing challenge to the pred - P2's cops weren't even close to Dutch's team and the peeps in the two AvP's basically had 'kill and eat me' tattoo'd on their heads with a thin hope that with enoygh gore ans 'splody the viewer might not notice that hey, this movie sucks.

Predators is going to try a game change by using 'the most dangerous game' motif and characters who are supposed to be a valid threat. I don't see predogs as helping the case (see The Hulk and Chronicles of Riddick for why alien dogs don't work as movie threats).

The problem i see is five or so c-list actors trying to chew scenery up until their inevitable gory effects ladden demise. Either they manage to take down a jr pred or two, which reduces the preds as a threat, or they don't, in which case unless the effects are mind-blosingly cool, we're back to predictable.

This film has a hell of a lot stacked against it.

- Abyss, naturally, will see it opening weekend.

Quoted for truth.

You can't have multiple Predators against a few humans, unless this 'new breed' is actually a lot less kickass than the ones from the films. Of course, one could say that since the ones from the films have permission to hunt alone on Earth, they WERE pretty badass even by comparison to the standard Preds.

The problem I see with AvP, aside from the obvious, is that 1 Predator (of passing level) should roughly equal about 10 Aliens. At once. And 10 Aliens are roughly equal to like 3 or 4 humans, unless those humans contain Ripley, Hicks and Hudson or some portion thereof. But the Predators were never meant to go toe-to-toe against humans like they do in those movies, they're fucking marines, they're hunters. One by one, pick the prey off. You can't do that with Aliens of course, because they can see through the cloak and smell the pheromones and shit, but that's why a Pred can also take them one-on-one, they're weaker.
I think AvP:R fixed that Alien/Predator imbalance a *little* bit by making the Pred kick Alien butt, but they still had him toned down a bit compared to humans, 'cuz lets face it, the ones he ended up facing were a bunch of normal folk. He didn't even get to kill any of the army people on-screen, iirc.

But the problem is that having 1P = 3H = 10A is that it pretty much means, aside from the issues of combining three different 'playstyles' as it were, you've got to make it balanced between the three factions, which means you need a buttload of Aliens and humans.
Well, that's why the games were set in space, with a whole colony of humans and marine guards, and a nest of Aliens nearby that the humans were (foolishly) studying. Works a lot better than the AvP movies, 'cuz the humans at least have decent tech and training, and there is plenty of canon fodder outside of your chosen few badasses. Let's face it, if you put Dutch's team against a Predator AND some Aliens, they would have got wiped out in about 10 minutes. XD

[Aptorian]

PREDATORS TRAILER RELEASED

Okay, I've changed my mind, this movie looks stupid.

There's no story, nothing original and it looks as though they're going to completely ruin the concept of the Predators in this film by using a whole truck load of them.

I'm not impressed.

[Silencer]

But does that mean you won't go and see it as soon as you can?

It's like the AvP movies. I don't care that they suck, I just have to watch them. This is probably going to be ridiculous, because that many Predators hunting at once, honour should dictate they can only kill the humans with fucking wrist blades. And that many humans would die in two seconds otherwise.

But hey - it may yet prove it's worth. Or at least be entertaining regardless. I, too, however, was disappointed with the trailer. The sneak peak was a better advertisement. Lol.

[Mentalist]

saw the trailer. the preds look savage and really young, when compared to what we're used to.

[Aptorian]

Silencer, on 20 March 2010 - 10:53 AM, said:

But does that mean you won't go and see it as soon as you can?

It's like the AvP movies. I don't care that they suck, I just have to watch them. This is probably going to be ridiculous, because that many Predators hunting at once, honour should dictate they can only kill the humans with fucking wrist blades. And that many humans would die in two seconds otherwise.

But hey - it may yet prove it's worth. Or at least be entertaining regardless. I, too, however, was disappointed with the trailer. The sneak peak was a better advertisement. Lol.

I didn't watch AVP2 in the cinema. I watched the first half hour of a ripped version and just started skipping through the film because I got so angry when it revealed itself to just be a teenage slasher film with Aliens as the bad guy.

Unless this gets at least 4 stars in the newspapers I wont be paying money to see it.

This post has been edited by Aptorian: 20 March 2010 - 05:44 PM

[Yellow]

Aptorian, on 20 March 2010 - 05:43 PM, said:

it revealed itself to just be a teenage slasher film with Aliens as the bad guy.

There are lots of things wrong with the film, but I've never been able to exactly put my finger on what it was that bothered me most about it. You got it absolutely spot on.

This post has been edited by Yellow: 21 March 2010 - 10:48 PM

[Illuyankas]

At least we can agree that AVP2 was less awful than AVP1, right? I mean, both were atrocious, but 2 was merely an abortion of cinema where 1 was a crime against mankind that deserves nothing less than to be sealed into a vault and fired into a different sun to ours, preferably several million lightyears away and possibly creating some kind of newly polluted hellstar, irradiating a prison planet to strand boybands, Simon Cowell and people who talk at the cinema on.

[maro]

It will be a guilty pleasure movie.

C'mon, Laurence Fishburne back to kicking arse!

[Aptorian]

I thought that AVP1 was okay. It was a less that stellar manuscript taken straight out of the 80s handbook, it didn't handle the Predators vs Aliens scenario that well, but it had some awesome parts.

First of all it starred Lance Henriksen. Can't have an Alien film with out Lance Henriksen.

It had a cool opening sci-fi mystery with an abandoned 1900s whaling town, a baffling kilometer deep tunnel bored by unknown means and an ancient alien ruin on the bottom. All very cool.

The scene showing the reawakening of the chained up Queen was also great.

There was also the ridiculous scene where the Pred made a spear and shield for the woman so she could survive 2 seconds longer in a fist fight with an Alien.

And of course the awesome final battle where the Queen emerges on the surface.

[Yellow]

Illuyankas, on 21 March 2010 - 11:40 PM, said:

At least we can agree that AVP2 was less awful than AVP1, right? I mean, both were atrocious, but 2 was merely an abortion of cinema where 1 was a crime against mankind that deserves nothing less than to be sealed into a vault and fired into a different sun to ours, preferably several million lightyears away and possibly creating some kind of newly polluted hellstar, irradiating a prison planet to strand boybands, Simon Cowell and people who talk at the cinema on.

They were both awful in different ways, so it's difficult to compare the two.

[Illuyankas]

AVP2 had the predator kill the hot chick with a massive fuckoff throwing star, AVP had the predator hollow out an alien skull and give it to Strong Female Lead as a shield, as well as turning the tail into a spear. There's the one glimmer of notbad and the nadir of each film, respectively.

[Ain't_It_Just_]

Illuyankas, on 21 March 2010 - 11:40 PM, said:

At least we can agree that AVP2 was less awful than AVP1, right? I mean, both were atrocious, but 2 was merely an abortion of cinema where 1 was a crime against mankind that deserves nothing less than to be sealed into a vault and fired into a different sun to ours, preferably several million lightyears away and possibly creating some kind of newly polluted hellstar, irradiating a prison planet to strand boybands, Simon Cowell and people who talk at the cinema on.

And child molesters?

[Yellow]

AVP2 had the predalien... case closed.

[The Tyrant Lizard]

Abyss, on 15 March 2010 - 05:24 PM, said:

It works if you ignore the fact that big super tech predator failed to notice that hey, maybe those sharp spikey things mean there's a trap here somewhere.

I think the Predator does notice the trap. Dutch's hope is that the Predator will follow him under the spiked branch trap, and when it does he was gonna kick away the stick holding the rope, snaring the Predator and pulling it up into the spikes with the weight of the tree trunk. When the Predator touches the spikes and notices the trap he walks around it...

Dutch thinks he's fucked, but by sheer chance the Predator walks under the counter weight, which was never meant to crush, but to pull up.

[Illuyankas]

Yellow, on 23 March 2010 - 07:16 AM, said:

AVP2 had the predalien... case closed.

So did AVP1. In fact, without AVP1, AVP2 probably wouldn't have had a predalien at all.

CASE RECLOSED LIKE A MOTHERFUCKER

[Aptorian]

Oh snap, he about to get craaazy up in this bitch!

[Yellow]

FALSE CASE RECLOSURE.

In AVP1, the predalien was actually used to semi-coherent effect. AVP2 had the thing impregnating pregnant women via kissing. With dreadlocks.

TOTAL CLOSURE, DOG.

[Raymond Luxury Yacht]

I have this crazy memory from childhood that I can't explain. I specifically remember watching predator 2 with my on AFN in Germany. Problem is, the movie didn't even exist then. The only explanation is that my mind is making shit up, but I can remember scenes and dialog and discussing them with my dad. Freaky.

[Aptorian]

The movie was so good it went back in time and raped your mind.