Normally I would class myself as a moviegoer with at least a little bit of sophistication. I'm no 'buff', to be sure. But I at least like movies that make me think and I like to think about movies. Story, structure, plot and relationships, these things matter to me. I say these things so you won't think me a complete idiot when I tell you I enjoyed the first Aliens versus Predator movie but was disappointed by Prometheus.
The reasons I liked one and not the other movie are perhaps less important than the realisation I came to last night that the two movies are eerily similar - one might even say 'the same' - despite one being put together by a world-renowned and revered, multi-award winning legend of the silver screen, the other by the guy who made Crash and since then probably only keeps getting work because he married a supermodel. Who also probably keeps getting work because she married a director.
Lets quickly go through the similarities, shall we?
Both movies start in a strange and desolate landscape, sometime in the past, where we see a frightening alien do something we cannot explain but know will somehow affect mankind's future and, of course, be important to the rest of the cast in the 'present'.
Then we skip straight to that present, where we see scientists doing, well, science, that although earthbound, will prepare them to deal well with the mystical aspects of the aliens they are about to meet.
Both films then pop those brave explorers onboard a transport vessel where the plot of the movie is explained to everyone's satisfaction with cool lightshows featuring the expeditions funder, Mr Weyland. There is a small discrepancy between the two films at this point - in AvP, Mr Weyland is alive and well and presents the mission in person. In Prometheus we are told Mr Weyland is dead, so his hologram substitutes.
Eventually we arrive at the site of unexplained phenomena - heat blooms in AvP, star maps in Prometheus (At this point AvP is in fact clearly the superior movie - heat bloom is a simple premise to follow, but how on LV-whatever did the Prometheus manage to break into the planet's atmosphere at precisely the right point to find the skull-pyramids?) and those crazy scientists rush out into the harsh weather to explore, despite warnings form cooler heads.
Once inside, more lightshows and exposition ensue - pictograms and holograms in both films explain the nature of the structures being explored. Eventually both parties get split up, small monsters appear and invade the bodies of explorers, these bodies then go on to attack the rest of the teams. In AvP they do this by spawning xenomorphs, in Prometheus they just seem to reanimate the dead.
Prometheus, sadly, didn't feature Predators. Instead it has Engineers. The two fill identical roles though. Both are responsible for the structures being explored, both use them as weapons storage, both are confronted by Weyland as he demands answers and compliance, both murder Weyland.
The two films then each show the luckless explorers being variously dismembered and destroyed, until only one female survives because she's tougher or more special or something. But she survives the film largely because of the sacrifice of a Predator/Engineer as he fights off a massive xenomorph. She is not unscarred from the fight though and is now aware there is more to the heavens than meets the eye.
In AvP the heroine is ritually scarred and will now travel with the Yautja, presumably to adventures so exciting we could never hope to capture them on film, while in Prometheus she's off on a Engineer ship to see the universe and answer the question 'where are the answers this movie failed to provide?'.
Avp then, and Prometheus. They are the same film, made a decade apart.
I know, I know, it had its faults. One of which was the casting of the voice of Cleveland's nagging wife from the Cleveland Show as the lead. But, apart from that utter failure to capture even a fragment of the magic the Aliens franchise has derived from its revolutionary casting of a strong female as lead, the film really isn't that bad.
Prometheus on the other hand really was a disappointment.
Even though it had Scott at the helm, calling the shots, driving the design, pushing the story to somewhere it would fit alongside and before the original Alien, the movie was a hodgepodge
Here is something that crept into my brain late last night as I started watching 'Prometheus'
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