THE DUKE ON
ALIENS VS PREDATOR
ALIENS VS PREDATOR
I gotta tell you, I’m coming over all John Lennon right now. “How
can I give love when love is something I ain’t never had?” and “How
can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m turning?” and “How
in the sweet balls of fuck could anyone screw up such a cast-iron
gift to the filmmaker as Aliens Versus Motherfucking Predator?”
How, man? Just how the fuck does this happen?
This is something so primal, so elemental, so turbulent, that no
one, not even if that no-one is the man responsible for The
Resident Evils and Events On The Horizon and Soldier, no-one should
be able to mess it up.
It’s a Freudian fantasy; motherfuckers with penises for heads go up
against motherfuckers with vaginas for faces. Who the hell could
fail to make this captivating?
Well, allow The Duke to shake his head and mourn the fact that this
fails like a fella tryin to ease the shits on willpower alone.
When I came out of The Resident Evils back in the day, I felt like
someone had brought me almost to climax and then walked off
laughing as I stood slack-jawed and awash with shock, screaming
about “Finish it! For the love of God finish it!”
It had built up right from when I sat down and played that first
video game, back in, I believe, 1986 or something. The Resident
Evil was the coolest shit I had ever seen, and I knew that if
anyone were to make a film from this material, it would be the most
amazing thing ever offered to civilisation. Fuck penicillin, was
the gist of my thinking, if they delivered a film what did this
justice, then the whole damn race may as well jump from the
rooftops, lying, caked in filth and guts on the pavement, happy in
the knowledge that, well, at least we achieved it all.
When the first teaser trailers arrived, I wept with joy.
And what happened? This son of a bitch Paul W.S Anderson went ahead
and crafted a load of Nu-Metal puss around an infallible concept,
completely ignoring the cool mutated spiders and sharks and all
that jazz, and instead slinging a load of crap zombies and some
nonsense about some uppity computer system into the narrative.
You’d make a man puke, Anderson, if that man wasn’t The Duke, who
is much too refined to be spitting out bile like nobodies business.
So, when the news arrived in Mondo Towers that the world had truly
gone deranged in the head, and that Paul W.S Anderson was to be
directing Aliens VS Predator, a little bit of my soul fell out
through my arsehole.
There’s nothing wrong with Anderson, really, beyond the fact that
his shallow, charmless, paint-by-numbers slabs of nonsense don’t
really appeal to me. There’s obviously folks who lap this shit up,
since why the hell else would anyone have suggested him for Aliens
Versus Predator?
This should be exhilarating, and it isn’t. It should be tense as
when you’re laying naked in the sofa cause your folks are on
holiday and then you hear the front door open, and it isn’t. It
should be wall-to-wall perfection, and it isn’t.
So what’s wrong with it? I mean, not only has it got Aliens and
Predators, but it’s even got Spud from Trainspotting. Does he maybe
get fucked on the “brown” and then accidentally fling a duvet-full
of shit into the face of a passing xenomorph?
No, Spud just yacks about “stuff about my kids” and then “here’s
some shite about my kids” and also “I’ve got kids, by the way, in
case I didn’t mention that”, stopping only to get scared by a
penguin for a second.
So, OK, they waste Spud, but what about the big two?
Well, The Duke is man enough to admit that there are moments were,
if one squints, it’s possible to see genius at work somewhere
amidst all the horse-toss. If you ever wondered what a facehugger
might look like if it were flying across the room in bullet-time,
for example, then wonder no more, since Anderson offers the
glorious realisation of such philosophical musing. This is some
inspired decision making. Plus, it’ll free up the folks who get
paid for thinking of cool shit to have in bullet-time. We’ve had
Keanu Reeves, we’ve had Wesley Snipes, we've even had bullet-time
cock-fighting, thanks to Takashi Miike’s City Of Lost Souls. Now we
can add facehuggers to the list, and those creative types can
breathe easy for an hour or two.
I’m guessing it’s only, like, a couple weeks, tops, before we see
some bullet-time masturbation.
So, yeah, the Aliens are rather neat, is what. One of the coolest
shots in the flick has an Alien snarling to camera, its lips
quivering and sneering like some kind of extra-terrestrial Elvis.
Anderson knows this shot is cool, too, and so he throws it in every
fifteen minutes. Just so you never forget how cool it is, the
sneering Alien.
And the Predators are obviously splendid. They stride through the
pyramid set with the cocksure confidence of Richard Ashcroft in
that video by The Verve when he just walks down the street bumping
into folks left and right, but he just keeps on singing.
Those Predators don’t give a shit, is what.
So hang on then, you’re thinking. If the Aliens are cool, and the
Predators are cool, then what gives?
What gives is that Anderson, for reasons best known to himself,
decides that, probably, an audience going to see a flick called
Aliens Versus Predator really only wanna see those motherfuckers
for, like, twenty minutes. They’d rather see some shit about a
bunch of wisecrack’s go to dig a hole in the ice on account of
there’s a pyramid underneath, and oh yeah, it’s really cool cause
it keeps shifting and shit, like in the film about the cube what
had all the folks in a big cube and the cube kept changing. Box Of
Death, I believe it was called.
When the big two do finally knock shit out of each other, it’s
rendered incomprehensible on account of the seriously confusing
camera-work and the fact that it’s pitch black and edited in such a
way as to be almost a series of subliminal images.
The human folks in this are just a bunch a tossers, and that’s all
there is to it. They don’t talk to each other, they just spout
inane “character-developing” shit to anyone who happens to be
standing next to them. If they’re not offering broad strokes of
autobiographical pish, then they’re explaining what’s going on, on
account of we probably don’t know that there’s Aliens and Predators
in this film, and that they might be fighting each other, so you
better take forty minutes to stumble about and explain it to us.
This is so misguided I’m surprised they didn’t end up crafting a
paperback by mistake. The most telling moments in the whole thing
are the two occasions when the script pays “homage” to the original
Predator by having folks almost-quote the famous “You’re one ugly
motherfucker line”. It’s just thrown in there as some kind of
sedative to the “fans”, like that’s all they care about. The film
is a heap of steaming toss, but throw an in-joke or two in there
and those guys will fall over themselves to sing its praises.
As if we’re so fucking shallow. As if a nod to the bit were
Sylvester Stallone said about “ugly motherfucker” is enough to win
us over.
Anyway, everyone knows the best line in Predator was the one about
“What’s with this fucking tie business?”
But you wanna know the really sad thing? The Duke will probably
still buy this when it comes out on DVD. Those moments of genius I
mentioned, although they are seriously hard to find, like some kind
of celluloid Easter Egg, they make it worthwhile almost. The fact
that I could throw on that old Bullet-Time facehugger whenever I
please, that’s enough incentive for me. Or the bit when a Predator
flings an Alien through a wall, swinging it round by the tail.
That is, of course, before the whole thing turns into a human /
Predator buddy-movie. Seriously.
And how does it end? It ends with a final shot which is, again,
utter genius.
The complete bastard.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
can I give love when love is something I ain’t never had?” and “How
can I go forward when I don’t know which way I’m turning?” and “How
in the sweet balls of fuck could anyone screw up such a cast-iron
gift to the filmmaker as Aliens Versus Motherfucking Predator?”
How, man? Just how the fuck does this happen?
This is something so primal, so elemental, so turbulent, that no
one, not even if that no-one is the man responsible for The
Resident Evils and Events On The Horizon and Soldier, no-one should
be able to mess it up.
It’s a Freudian fantasy; motherfuckers with penises for heads go up
against motherfuckers with vaginas for faces. Who the hell could
fail to make this captivating?
Well, allow The Duke to shake his head and mourn the fact that this
fails like a fella tryin to ease the shits on willpower alone.
When I came out of The Resident Evils back in the day, I felt like
someone had brought me almost to climax and then walked off
laughing as I stood slack-jawed and awash with shock, screaming
about “Finish it! For the love of God finish it!”
It had built up right from when I sat down and played that first
video game, back in, I believe, 1986 or something. The Resident
Evil was the coolest shit I had ever seen, and I knew that if
anyone were to make a film from this material, it would be the most
amazing thing ever offered to civilisation. Fuck penicillin, was
the gist of my thinking, if they delivered a film what did this
justice, then the whole damn race may as well jump from the
rooftops, lying, caked in filth and guts on the pavement, happy in
the knowledge that, well, at least we achieved it all.
When the first teaser trailers arrived, I wept with joy.
And what happened? This son of a bitch Paul W.S Anderson went ahead
and crafted a load of Nu-Metal puss around an infallible concept,
completely ignoring the cool mutated spiders and sharks and all
that jazz, and instead slinging a load of crap zombies and some
nonsense about some uppity computer system into the narrative.
You’d make a man puke, Anderson, if that man wasn’t The Duke, who
is much too refined to be spitting out bile like nobodies business.
So, when the news arrived in Mondo Towers that the world had truly
gone deranged in the head, and that Paul W.S Anderson was to be
directing Aliens VS Predator, a little bit of my soul fell out
through my arsehole.
There’s nothing wrong with Anderson, really, beyond the fact that
his shallow, charmless, paint-by-numbers slabs of nonsense don’t
really appeal to me. There’s obviously folks who lap this shit up,
since why the hell else would anyone have suggested him for Aliens
Versus Predator?
This should be exhilarating, and it isn’t. It should be tense as
when you’re laying naked in the sofa cause your folks are on
holiday and then you hear the front door open, and it isn’t. It
should be wall-to-wall perfection, and it isn’t.
So what’s wrong with it? I mean, not only has it got Aliens and
Predators, but it’s even got Spud from Trainspotting. Does he maybe
get fucked on the “brown” and then accidentally fling a duvet-full
of shit into the face of a passing xenomorph?
No, Spud just yacks about “stuff about my kids” and then “here’s
some shite about my kids” and also “I’ve got kids, by the way, in
case I didn’t mention that”, stopping only to get scared by a
penguin for a second.
So, OK, they waste Spud, but what about the big two?
Well, The Duke is man enough to admit that there are moments were,
if one squints, it’s possible to see genius at work somewhere
amidst all the horse-toss. If you ever wondered what a facehugger
might look like if it were flying across the room in bullet-time,
for example, then wonder no more, since Anderson offers the
glorious realisation of such philosophical musing. This is some
inspired decision making. Plus, it’ll free up the folks who get
paid for thinking of cool shit to have in bullet-time. We’ve had
Keanu Reeves, we’ve had Wesley Snipes, we've even had bullet-time
cock-fighting, thanks to Takashi Miike’s City Of Lost Souls. Now we
can add facehuggers to the list, and those creative types can
breathe easy for an hour or two.
I’m guessing it’s only, like, a couple weeks, tops, before we see
some bullet-time masturbation.
So, yeah, the Aliens are rather neat, is what. One of the coolest
shots in the flick has an Alien snarling to camera, its lips
quivering and sneering like some kind of extra-terrestrial Elvis.
Anderson knows this shot is cool, too, and so he throws it in every
fifteen minutes. Just so you never forget how cool it is, the
sneering Alien.
And the Predators are obviously splendid. They stride through the
pyramid set with the cocksure confidence of Richard Ashcroft in
that video by The Verve when he just walks down the street bumping
into folks left and right, but he just keeps on singing.
Those Predators don’t give a shit, is what.
So hang on then, you’re thinking. If the Aliens are cool, and the
Predators are cool, then what gives?
What gives is that Anderson, for reasons best known to himself,
decides that, probably, an audience going to see a flick called
Aliens Versus Predator really only wanna see those motherfuckers
for, like, twenty minutes. They’d rather see some shit about a
bunch of wisecrack’s go to dig a hole in the ice on account of
there’s a pyramid underneath, and oh yeah, it’s really cool cause
it keeps shifting and shit, like in the film about the cube what
had all the folks in a big cube and the cube kept changing. Box Of
Death, I believe it was called.
When the big two do finally knock shit out of each other, it’s
rendered incomprehensible on account of the seriously confusing
camera-work and the fact that it’s pitch black and edited in such a
way as to be almost a series of subliminal images.
The human folks in this are just a bunch a tossers, and that’s all
there is to it. They don’t talk to each other, they just spout
inane “character-developing” shit to anyone who happens to be
standing next to them. If they’re not offering broad strokes of
autobiographical pish, then they’re explaining what’s going on, on
account of we probably don’t know that there’s Aliens and Predators
in this film, and that they might be fighting each other, so you
better take forty minutes to stumble about and explain it to us.
This is so misguided I’m surprised they didn’t end up crafting a
paperback by mistake. The most telling moments in the whole thing
are the two occasions when the script pays “homage” to the original
Predator by having folks almost-quote the famous “You’re one ugly
motherfucker line”. It’s just thrown in there as some kind of
sedative to the “fans”, like that’s all they care about. The film
is a heap of steaming toss, but throw an in-joke or two in there
and those guys will fall over themselves to sing its praises.
As if we’re so fucking shallow. As if a nod to the bit were
Sylvester Stallone said about “ugly motherfucker” is enough to win
us over.
Anyway, everyone knows the best line in Predator was the one about
“What’s with this fucking tie business?”
But you wanna know the really sad thing? The Duke will probably
still buy this when it comes out on DVD. Those moments of genius I
mentioned, although they are seriously hard to find, like some kind
of celluloid Easter Egg, they make it worthwhile almost. The fact
that I could throw on that old Bullet-Time facehugger whenever I
please, that’s enough incentive for me. Or the bit when a Predator
flings an Alien through a wall, swinging it round by the tail.
That is, of course, before the whole thing turns into a human /
Predator buddy-movie. Seriously.
And how does it end? It ends with a final shot which is, again,
utter genius.
The complete bastard.
Thanks folks.
Drop The Duke A Line Via Electronical Email
