Keith Watanabe * NET 2.0

As if Brockheimer producing King Author wasn't bad enough, another Hollywood hack director has taken on another commercial venture on something living by cult fans' markism towards films: aliens and predator. After Predator and Aliens, the follow up movies to these two productions were, imo, dismal yet typical Hollywood failures to ride the coattails of prior successes' names without putting any effort or soul, as Linda Hamilton would say for Terminator 3, into these movies. Without having seen the movie, the first visible aspect is the PG-13 rating. How can either of these movies warrant a PG-13 rating? I've never been a fan of excessive violence, gore, or profanity but at least part of the sell of the previous movies was at least one of those aspects. Essentially, this movie comes under the classification of Lord of the Rings, which excelled on production values and artistic value above all else. However, this venture seems doomed worse with each passing of these series. Predator 2 had little to bear except the repetitive reliving of what occurred in the first movie. They only extended what was done into the city and provided more of the creatures with a hint of the alien in the space ship. Alien 3 was a visual work, but destroyed all prior setup through the crude Hollywood politics. And Alien 4 had Wynowa Rider. Enough said about that. So how can they build upon the ashes that was left? It's like the cockroaches remaining after a nuclear war. Expectations should be set low after the previous three failures. However, this movie is just like Freddy vs Jason, except that movie series was simply a teenage whack off (literally) where story and character never mattered. Alien and to a small degree Predator had character. In the case of the Alien series, they had a very well defined character that probably redefined women's roles in society. With the current Hollywood environment banking on special effects, name throwing, and just the assumption of bored movie goers, they lack any sense of creativity for character development and story building. You're lucky at best to get some social commentary that doesn't deviate from some local, obscure setting. Lord of the Rings might've been the last great epic to be seen but then again it was built by fans and already had ages of analysis to work off of. Not to mention the story and characters were already built. So it looks like I might end up boycotting another Aliens movie.