Monsters Without a Cause

FOR A DEFINITION of the phrase "diminishing returns," see the Alien movies. The fifth installment, Alien Vs. Predator, which opened Friday sans press screenings, is the first Alien film that's not worth seeing. It's badly written, badly paced, badly acted, and afflicted throughout by a galling lack of artistry. Based on a comic book that became a hit videogame, the film is actually a joint installment in two franchises, simultaneously a third Predator sequel and an Alien prequel. But because the Predator movies never felt original (they were lead-footed, kill-crazy fusions of the Alien pictures and the oft-filmed short story The Most Dangerous Game), the sense of shame falls on the Alien series, which spent the past 25 years demonstrating that adult science fiction was not an oxymoron.

I always loved that releasing company 20th Century Fox let ambitious directors imprint their personalities on each Alien picture, a contrast to the dull, bottom-line conservatism MGM-United Artists forced on the James Bond series. Ridley Scott's 1979 original was at once a sci-fi haunted-house picture and a psychoanalyst's catalog of sexual and reproductive fears, referencing everything from Dario Argento and Mario Bava to Howard Hawks' original The Thing and Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast. James Cameron's 1986 follow-up Aliens was bigger and louder, but it had its own muscular integrity. Part war movie, part western, part mommy fantasy, it gave star Sigourney Weaver the rare opportunity to play a tough, smart, capable hero who just happened to be a woman. David Fincher's Alien 3, which killed off Ripley and the other survivors of Aliens, was dramatically thin but intriguingly gloomy and decayed, mixing original Alien illustrator H.R. Giger's biomechanical freakishness with a Freudian gothic sensibility that borrowed from sources as diverse as Francis Bacon and Clive Barker. French filmmaker Jean-Pierre Jeunet's fourth chapter, Alien Resurrection, spent too much time with its crew of overacting, fake-hearty space pirates and not enough with hardboiled heroine Ripley, who had been reanimated with help from alien DNA and felt a sisterly affinity for the space bugs. The film was alternately soulful and glib, a self-canceling combination. Yet it built to an unexpectedly wrenching climax: a face-off between Ripley and a needy but vicious half-human alien with pasty white flesh and a toddler's eyes. Jeunet and screenwriter Joss Whedon subtly altered the usual airlock death to suggest sci-fi's most graphic abortion-a fitting end to a series that often equated pregnancy with rape and conquest.

Nothing in Alien Vs. Predator is remotely as striking. An early sight gag makes the film's low ambitions clear: in a remote monitoring station, a tv shows footage from 1943's Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man. We get it: This film is about monsters facing off. So why not go all the way? It's not hard to imagine a sci-fi picture with the same title that omitted humans and instead followed a small group of predators into a hive of aliens and watched as each species struggled to understand and defeat the other. An action film featuring an all-extraterrestrial cast in which not a word was spoken might have placed unexpected intellectual demands on the bloodthirsty young men who flock to action pictures on opening night. But the result could have been astounding-or at least unique.

Writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson (Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon) won't (or can't) go that far. He spends much of the film's brief running time with a team of charisma-free humans exploring an Aztec-looking pyramid located deep beneath Antarctic ice. (Plot spoilers ahead.) In due time, we learn that the South Pole was once inhabitable, and the predators used the humans as sacrificial hosts, breeding aliens in their bellies and then hunting the beasts once they escaped. Production designer Richard Bridgland deploys elegant heiroglyphs to suggest that the predators dominated their human slaves by creating a new religion built around alien incubation, then colonized and exploited a whole civilization. (This, too, might have been an amazing film.)

Alien Vs. Predator has no characters to speak of, just hunks of meat with names. The reliably serious Sanaa Lathan plays Alexa Woods, a mountain climber recruited to lead the expedition into the subterranean pyramid. Lance Henriksen, a veteran of the second and third Alien pictures, plays Charles Bishop Weyland, the cancer-stricken corporate CEO bankrolling the adventure. His name alludes to Aliens android Bishop and the series' longtime corporate nemesis, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation-a trivia twofer that's not interesting enough to disguise the fact that Henriksen's character shouldn't be there. Everyone else is critter food, including Trainspotting costar Ewen Bremner, who introduces himself to the audience by showing Alexa pictures of his family.

While the humans spout clichés and die predictable deaths, the aliens and predators stalk around the ancient temple, drooling and leaping and slicing at each other (but not nearly as often as previews suggest). In place of thrills, character development and bloody poetry, Alien Vs. Predator gives us buddy-movie bonding between Alexa and one of the predators. This leads to several accidentally hilarious sight gags, including slo-mo shot of the heroine and her predator buddy outrunning a fireball and a shot of the duo standing on a hilltop at the story's end like trimphant storybook lovers. (When the predator took off his helmet to reveal his mandible-pronged face and gazed meaningfully at Alexa, a wiseguy down in front yelled, "Kiss her!")

The casting of Lathan, an African-American woman, infuses this moronic plot twist with a weird hint of right-wing propaganda. The predators may be more technologically evolved than the aliens, but they seem equally willing to enslave or kill humans, so it's tough to see why the surviving humans would find the predators more worthy of empathy. One has to assume it's because the gray-skinned, bipedal predators are more "human" than the black-shelled, buggy aliens-more like us, less like the "Other," and therefore more likeable, even though their colonizing/exploiting instincts suggest an obscene misuse of intelligence. When Alexa credulously warns a fellow explorer, "We're in a war ? We have to choose a side," Alien Vs. Predator suddenly ceases to be a stupid sci-fi movie and becomes (inadvertently, perhaps) a coded political statement. Like Man on Fire, A Man Apart and the remake of Walking Tall, it's another violent Hollywood blockbuster that seems to wish nonwhite Americans would set aside their ambivalence toward American power and get with the program. My species, right or wrong. o