Sequels

Having just sat through Alien vs Predator Requiem, it occurs to me that I've seen a couple of sequels lately.

The Dark Knight, seen at London's IMAX cinema, turned out to be a film which, while undoubtedly excellent, pretty much fell into the same trap as the Tim Burton and Joel Schumaker entries. Too many villains, too much going on, not enough Batman.

It does better than any of the earlier films but, upon reflection, it's nowhere near as good as Batman Begins. Heath Ledger played this version of The Joker very well... but I'm not sure I liked what they did with the character. It's good that they didn't kill him off (shame about what happened to the actor, of course) but, towards the end, it becomes clear that The Joker was just a means to an end - that end being the introduction (and possibly elimination - his fate is ambiguous at best) of another villain.

I read a complaint somewhere that, of the three female roles with speaking parts, all exist merely to get into peril. This is not true.

Two are eyecandy (admittedly, one presents an interesting philosophical argument in favour of the masked vigilante), one exists largely to get into peril.

The theme of the film, in a nutshell, was 'the difference between the heroes we need, and the heroes we deserve'. New crusading District Attorney Harvey Dent is 'The Hero Gotham Needs/White Knight', Batman is 'The Hero Gotham Deserves/Dark Knight', and the film wastes no opportunity to remind the audience of that. Honestly, it was all very laboured and had me grinding my teeth by the end.

So it's sad that I'm less disappointed by AvPR.

True, it could be described as Alien vs Predator vs Dawson's Creek (not that I ever watched that, but I understand it's some kind of 'teen' drama), and it is populated entirely by TV actors (the woman who plays Dale Arden in the Flash Gordon - Stargate rip-off - TV series has a brief and messy role, several staff from 24's CTU crop up, as does the new mortician from CSI:NY), but it's actually reasonably well done.

The problem is what it does to the franchises involved. While the Aliens are certainly amoral enough to use children and pregnant women as hosts (which they do - very gorily), the Predator has been shown to have a strange kind of code of honor - don't attack the unarmed, don't kill children, that kind of thing. The Predator in this one - obviously a veteran of many encounters with the Alien - manages to shrug off 'accidentally' slicing a girl in half with one of its razor-star things, and basically goes round slaughtering everything it can. Perhaps this is the Predator race's idea of 'containment procedure'.

There's basically too much of everything. Too many Aliens, too many gory deaths, too many gadgets in the Predator's arsenal (though he still strips them away to go hand-to-hand with the hybrid), it's just an overload of special effects and gore, with a very dull towny backdrop and too many two-dimensional characters introduced purely to get killed in a variety of colourful ways.

And when I say 'colourful', I mean red.

Blood red.

The everyday, small-town America thing only serves to make the situation even less believeable.

What really bugged me was the end, though. It seems to be clumsily setting up an even more far-fetched third AvP movie... where, having reverse-engineered the Predator's weaponry, the newly-amalgamated 'Weyland-Yutani Corporation' goes after either the Alien or the Predator... or both... in space.

Oh well... In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream That They've Ruined The Continuity Of The Franchise.

I thought for a moment that AvPR was trying to present the Predator as the Pilot from the very first Alien movie... the 'navigation chair' thing looks very similar... but that may have been either coincidence or intentional misdirection (or perhaps just an ill-advised reference).

But how, pray tell, does an Alien/Predator hybrid suddenly develop the ability to use its telescopic inner jaw to impregnate its victims with multiple baby Aliens?

Seriously, the writers needed to think about this stuff more seriously before they stick it in a movie.

Gotham Knight is quite a strange collection. The differences in art style between each 'chapter' are quite jarring. More so than the similarly-presented Animatrix collection, where one would expect things to look a little odd. It's even more jarring because Batman's voice remains the same all the way through (mixed blessing - Kevin Conroy is pretty good, but to have that same voice coming out of six very different Batmen is very distracting). Still, David McCallum does a decent turn as Alfred (more traditional that Michael Cane's approach), and Gary Dourdan is excellent with what little he does (basically going from "I don't trust the Batman" to "Yo, Bats, my man... You're the only one who can protect Gordon").

Time to go now... and put an end to this terrible day.