Movie Review: AvP

So last night, after getting back from dinner with Elsa. The two of us and her roomates watched perhaps the finest cinematic gem of the last half century. I am of course referring to the classic romantic comedy...Alien vs. Predator. I know some of you may be saying, " But Patrick...AvP is not a romantic comedy." To you I say, of course its a romantic comedy. Furthermore, I would argue that it is the archetypical romantic comedy. A fine merging of two classic genres into two seamless hours of movie gold. Of course, I take romance in the sense of classical european definition being characterized by Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur and of course the seminal Beowulf. As I'm sure you've probably guessed...I take comedy in the more modern sense as exemplified in the classic Farrelly brothers farce "There's Something About Mary." In other words, it was HILARIOUS. Now for a plot summary. The movie begins realistically enough with the discovery of a massive pyramid under the arctic. While this may seem a bit uninspired to some of you, I can assure you without giving much plot away that this is no ordinarry underground arctic pyramid we are dealing with here. A team of heroic arctic archaeologists (which must be a lonely gig when you aren't discovering alien temples) begins to explore buried pyramid through a mysterious hole in the ground near an abandoned whaling station. A call them heros here because only a movie hero would venture 300 feet down a hole that appeared over night without the thought of calling the rest of civilization for input on the matter. Once down within the pyramid structure they find a mixture of egyptian, aztec, and mayan symbols which is really the first major revelation of the film. I know I was always taught that these people were located on two distant continents while in fact they were united in antarctica the whole time. Once you think about it, it makes perfect sense that people from the hottest part of the planet would undertake massive construction projects deep below an ice shelf in the arctic. Why nobody thought of this before AvP, I will never know. Come to find out the mayans and egyptions were taught how to build pyramids by the predators who were subsequently treated like gods. Again this makes perfect sense. Picture yourself in the mesoamerica of classical antiquity and appearing from the sky comes a ship of some sort carrying a masked creature with dreadlocks. Said creature teaches you to pile stones up into big shapes for years on end for his own personal enjoyment...would you not be totally enthralled by his very presence and treat him as a king. I know I would...because if I didn't I would probably end up with a giant predator scythe coming through my abdomen. More on that later. After our intrepid explorers decode years of mayan history from the temple walls, it turns out that the predators desire the ultimate hunt and thus breed aliens that need humans as a host. Again this makes perfect sense, aliens from a different planet need humans to reproduce. I don't want to get into the chicken and egg thing here but i think that the movie was written by some intelligent design folks because this system just works despite reasoning and logic. So after having my faith in evolution destroyed and my sense of history shattered, the movie stuns us again when one by one main characters are slaughtered by either aliens or predators but then makes a total turn when we discover that actually the predators are our friends and are really pretty damn cool. I mean out of all the aliens you could have a pan-galactic garglebaster with...predators are clearly the bloodthirsty extraterestrial of choice. Skipping forward a bit, last surviving human and last surviving predator team up to kill mother alien. After all that the predator dies and some others come to take his body away and leave the lone human in the arctic alone. This was really the disappointing part...after 2 hours of epic movie the clearly relies on scientific fact and sound reason...how on earth are we supposed to believe that this woman survives on her own in the arctic. That is just absurd and to be honest it ruined the last 5 minutes of the movie for me.
In short, go see AvP! Patrick OUT!