Reviews

I don't care what anybody says. I don't care how I'm supposed to feel about this movie. I don't hate it. To be honest, I kind of love it a little. Maybe if I'd been born in the 50's or 60's, and grown up loving the original, then gotten all excited about a remake, only to have my hopes dashed by a mediocre product, I'd loathe this like everyone else does. But I was born in '76. By the time I got around to being able to actually comprehend movies, this was already on T.V. every Saturday afternoon. For me, there have always been two King Kongs. Yes, the black and white ape is more believable, and scarier looking, and more lovable, and inarguably the star of a better movie. But when you're 5 years old, a man in a monkey suit is just as realistic as a stop motion model, because suspension of disbelief is not just easy for you, it's a way of life. So go ahead, hate this movie if you want. To me, it's an old friend, and I won't abandon it.

Kind of disappointing. I'm not sorry I saw it, but it wasn't the movie that 14 years of waiting should have built up to. The commercials made it look like it was going to be pretty large scale, but those scenes are part of a flashback. The actual confrontation was more of a whimper than a bang. This really should have taken place in the future, like the Aliens vs Predator novels written in the mid-90's. Those weren't masterpieces, but at least they understood why we wanted this meeting to happen in the first place: to see lots of fights between the two species (and could someone PLEASE make a movie in which they are given unique, definitive NAMES?! It would be so much easier to talk about them without saying "the aliens from Alien", or using the generic term "Xenomorph", which is only known to hardcore fans (so one is usually forced to define it as "the aliens from Alien")).

Lots of minor nitpicks too. Why would the sled that lowers equipment into an ice tunnel have an emergency return that goes 300 miles an hour? Since when is the Alien life cycle 20 minutes from facehugger to adult? Don't Predators like hot weather? So why would they still visit Antarctica now that it's a frozen wasteland? Were there enough people left alive to spawn as many Aliens as we saw? We watched at least five of the things get killed, and see at least five more of them in a group later. If the Aztec calendar was metric, why does something happen every 10 minutes? MINUTES ARE NOT A METRIC TIMEKEEPING MEASURE! That's like saying something is metric if it uses 10 feet or 10 pounds as a benchmark.

Freddy vs Jason may not have been an earth-shaking confrontation, but as far as long awaited meetings between vaguely similar movie franchises go, it was a lot more satisfying than this.

About halfway through this movie, something occurred to me. I was watching what Tremors would have been without a charismatic star, likable supporting cast and a neat monster. A bunch of people, stuck in a desert, hunted by a bunch of blind creatures, who have to choose between waiting in a safe place until they starve to death, or making a dangerous run to safety through the jaws of the beast. Only these chicken-bats (their primary attack seems to be pecking you to death) aren't nearly as cool as graboids. Heck, they're not even as good as the shriekers from Tremors 2.

And can I just say that the liberal use of the f word in this movie seemed like nothing more than a desperate attempt to make the characters sound "tough" and "real"? I've never seen a movie where every single f-bomb dropped felt so forced. I can just imagine the writer sitting down with his finished script and saying "I'll put one here, and one here, and one in this sentence..."