I can’t remember the title. I could probably look it up, but…I can’t be bothered. Just like I can’t be bothered to make a gigantic blinking ‘spoiler warning’ tag. If you don’t like it, get off the internet now.

Since it’s some holiday or other, and I’m supposed to give, I’ll provide my very own out of context, ambiguously near-positive single quote:

It’s everything you’d expect from an Alien vs. Predator sequel. And MORE!

More, in this case, means less. Because any Alien without a queen is less. I would’ve forgiven everything if I’d been allowed a good half hour stretch [not all together, mind you] of pure Alien Queenness. Or hey, even some fairly well-lit scenes of any xenomorph. But no, the best I got was some night vision. And that wasn’t very good….

There were some serious failings in the character development area, and by that I mean they tried to develop the characters. It just didn’t work. You know why? Nobody fucking cares. I sure don’t, why should anyone else going to see AvP care? These aren’t characters. They’re blobs of flesh meant for breeding more aliens so the predator can blow some more shit up. Except, no! No, we must focus on the human element. It’s worse than fuckin’ Final Wars — that movie that kinda had Godzilla in it, but it was more about the people than Godzilla.

Basically, what you have here is a movie in which a bunch of people and Michelle Dessler from 24 living in Gunnison, CO, in a time immediately after the AvP Antarctic Weyland-Funded Clusterfuck. The ship [you remember the ship. It was called ‘Sequel Device’, but…whatever that is in Predator Scribblies] crashes in the woods because the incredibly unnoticed PredAlien happened. And, hey, if you don’t remember any of this happening in the first movie, it’s okay, because you get to see it all again! Isn’t that great?

The Predator tries to blow itself up, but the incredible wrist device of doom fails for some reason. This, of course, leads directly to a father-and-son hunting trip turned facehugger encounter [because The Good Ship Plot Device just happened to have living facehuggers in those big specimen jars].

Disappointment 1: chestbursters from children? Same size. I was so hoping for itty bitty childlike aliens. Why? It’d be cute. I’m a chick. Do the math.

Cut to…strange planet. Predator World! Where High Lord Badass uses amazing technology to see the last minutes of that other Predator’s life. And by see, I mean ‘see what the other Predator saw’, which I guess is why they all wear that face-thing. He takes off, and gets here…well, he gets to Gunnison as if he were driving there from a nearby town. Impossibly fast. Predator World must be the moon.

…and here’s where I start to lose track of the order of the film, partly because it’s Character Development Time, and partly because it cuts back and forth through reality in a way that makes Highlander look reasonably linear.

There’s a guy who’s friends with a cop, and that this cop is a cop is supposed to be unexpected or funny somehow. NonCopGuy has a brother who is implied to be in a lot of trouble, possibly for refusing to wear his Pizza Delivery Hat. Brother Guy is apparently intended to be lower class, since he’s delivering pizzas to the Female Classmate LoveInterest who lives in a nice house and naturally hangs out with the bastardliest guys in school. There’s mild bullying. I’m sure that’s why it’s rated R.

Then there’s Dessler, the JustOffDeployment Army Person of Undetermined Rank and MOS, who has the most ungreatful little brat of a daughter in the world. The kid pulls out a pair of night vision goggles from mom’s bag and mutters ‘are these for me?’ as if they aren’t the coolest gift ever. What, was mommy supposed to smuggle a real live Arabian horse home for you instead?

Disappointment 2: You just know this brat is going to survive.

His Lordship, Mr. Badass arrives — and yes, I’m assuming he must be the most Awesome of Awesome Predators here just because he got the message and flew off all by himself — and shows off how amazing his Wrist Gadget of Doom really is. You inject liquid into it, and it shows you what was floating in that liquid! It’s amazing. Also, it would appear that he’s on Earth for three seconds before breaking his steathy-thing…but, wait, no, the weird electrical sparky thing it was doing must’ve just been there to throw us all off, because it still works later in the film.

Also amazing is how he reactivates the other Predator’s Wrist Gadget of Doom, and then decides to loot the ship for weapons-and-stuff before it blows up. Or, rather, magically implodes into nothingness with a bright flash.

Disappointment 3: The film could’ve ended right there if the stupid explosion had behaved as expected.

A few cuts later, and someone must’ve noticed that Daddy and Junior were missing, because there’s the biggest clusterfuck of a search I’ve seen in a movie this year. Everyone all bunched together, looking in the same place? Yeah, that’s going to work. It’s a good thing the cops are calling it off. Except the Other Family Member is morally outraged at this decision.

Not that it matters. They’re dead. The Predator finds them, and MAGICALLY DISSOLVES THEM. Some other cop sees him doing this, so…he ends up dead, hanging upside down, and possibly flayed. I can’t be sure. What I do know is that he wasn’t skinned alive, since he ran himself right into the stabby bits that come out of the Predator’s arm.

Disappointment 4: The people in this town aren’t going to stop reminding you of how stupid they are.

Actually, right around the time they find Mr. Skinless is one of the ‘hard-to-suspend-disbelief’ moments. The whole coroner’s office thing. I just…had a hard time with it all, I guess. But it kinda set the tone for the rest of the movie.

See, at this point, we’re out of face huggers. I skipped over that important part earlier, but…we are. There’s the PredAlien, and four regular aliens [that I counted, but I’m not very good at counting]. Except…they keep popping up everywhere. Sometimes literally. Like, through the pavement. Because the’re in the sewers, which happen to be strangely well-developed yet blended sewers which funnel human waste through those strange sidewalk-bordered manmade rivers like you see in some videogames. And we know they’re all in the sewers [and right under the town], because That One Guy and his In Trouble PizzaGuy Brother have to criminally break into the storm drain PizzaGuy’s keys were dropped into. And there was a chestburster. And some skin.

…it really only gets worse from here on out. See, the Aliens, trapped by the Amazing Predator Laser Barrier Trap of Doom, just sorta…burst through the city streets. And nobody notices. I mean that. NOBODY NOTICES. There’s a van driving by in one of the scenes, and it just continues driving, which is just…beyond stupid. Who would fail to react to the street going poof and a fucking Alien flying out of the hole?

I guess it doesn’t matter, though. This is where the dying finally gets ’round to seriously commencing. PizzaGuy breaks into the school’s pool with LoveInterestGirl, there’s some hinting at what might be future nudity, but the dumbasses from earlier show up [in what might’ve been a prearranged trap, for all anyone knows]. All four guys end up in the pool for a round of ultra-macho underwater rasslin’ while she scrambles for her clothes, and an alien shows up. One guy dies in the pool, and another dies during an attempted through-the-window escape.

Yay.

At roughly the same time, Mr. Skinless’ wife and her boss at The Diner are being killed. And Ungrateful Brat sees an alien through her nifty new toy and starts screaming for daddy. The ‘see, no monsters’ scene commences, and he dies.

Meanwhile, over here in Commerce City Lookalike Land….

There are aliens all over the place. The Predator ends up wounded, and somehow sets the whole place [which turns out to be the power plant] on fire. The fire, of course, is what leads to the call for the National Guard to help evacuate the town. While that call is being made, what’s left of the group from the school meets up with the cop and the older brother, and…everyone heads back to the school.

The Predator gets there first, though, and ‘cleans up’ with his Amazing Unlimited Blue Goo, which not only dissolves humans and aliens alike, but makes water boil away damn near instantly — he pours some into the pool, the water boils, and it’s all gone by the time everyone re-arrives.

At some point, everyone meets up with everyone else. Someone found Ms. Skinless’ body at The Diner, and relays the important line: “Her stomach was gone.”

…they decide what they need is guns. Lots of guns. So they break into a store.

Meanwhile, the Aliens are hitting the hospital. And we find out that the Aliens have caught The Stupid from the humans.

See, it turns out that…I think it was the PredAlien is able to implant NotReallyChestburstersAnymore directly into people, without having to go through the egg/facehugger stage. Except…it seems to only be implanting women, which is really very dumb, since it’s still implanting things through the mouth. If it had anything to do with female anatomy, we’d be stuffing the babies in there through a more…anatomically correct route, wouldn’t we?

Oh, also, Disappointment 5: No onscreen Alien/Newborn Baby Hospital Nursery DisplayRoom carnage. Also, no chestbursters in newborns. See earlier disappointment regarding little childsized aliens, revise for ‘infant sized’.

Throatbabies aside, litters of little aliens? Very nice. I’m not sure it makes up for the obligatory ‘terrorists’ joke in the gun store, though.

The National Guard arrive. The National Guard die. The people in the gun store leave the gun store, and find the leftovers of the National Guard, and get in touch with Obligatory Evil Suit Guy, who might be one of the many bastard children of the Cigarette Smoking Man. The survivors are told to go to the middle of town for an ‘air lift’.

Dessler smells a trap, because that’s totally not what Jack Bauer would do. She wants to find a helicopter instead…which she can fly, being That Chick From 24 and Of Undetermined Rank and MOS. There’s a small argument, but since she’s the only person who can figure out how to drive the Conveniently Undamaged Stryker, they have to go where she wants to go.

But wait, more survivors! The group splits up. We’re left with The Brothers, Dessler and child, and The Love Interest. And some guy who broke off from the other group. The Cop and…someone else went off to the middle of town. The guys who made the terrorist joke [who also happened to be stoned!haha!] got their heads blown off by the Predator in the gun store, way back before everyone decided to run away from the gun store….

The hospital, as everyone watching the movie already knows, is now The Nest, except ‘oh, we’d be surrounded by them in the middle of town’, so…funny, right? Or possibly stupid, since every last bit of this town is suddenly covered in fully-grown Aliens. And, of course, since the hospital is The Nest, it’s covered in those weird nesty structures like we saw in every other Alien film.

The Predator, of course, shows up at the hospital and starts killing things, and dissolving them with his magic blue goo, which he finally ‘runs out of’…except it’s more like he ‘shoves the container down the throat of an Alien’ instead of ‘runs out of’. But that just means we’re getting down to the end of the movie, right?

Of course we are. Because the MidTown people just heard from Mr. Suit [did I mention he’s pretending to be an officer?] that the air strike evac is ten minutes out. He says this while looking at a display showing the flight paths of some F22s.

So, time limit. Great. And, hey, iminent death. Things are looking up. Especially over at the hospital, where LoveInterest gets killed by one of those Predator Flying Blades of Death. PizzaGuy, knowing that he’s probably going to die a virgin, does that grief-stricken charge into danger thing, and, since he can’t do anything right, fails to die when impaled by an alien tail.

The charge into death involved repeatedly shooting at the Predator. All that did was make the Predator lose his gun — which is okay, because he somehow gained a whip made of Alien Tail at some point. And also, when he gets knocked down the elevator shaft, the gun appears to follow him.

I swear I saw the gun follow. Really, I do. I saw one of the guys pick it up. I saw much scuffling, and I was certain I saw the PredatorWeapon fly out of the person’s hand and down the elevator shaft. But…in the next scene, there’s Big Brother figuring out how to fire it, which helps everyone get to the helicopter.

After some absolutely retarded firing-of-the-weapon-through-the-helicopter-from-the-inside, they escape…just in time for The Ultimate Badass Showdown. You know it’s the Ultimate Badass Showdown because it’s the PredAlien vs. His Lordship, the Ultimate Badass. His Lordship takes off his face shield, and tosses his weapons aside, and the PredAlien is somehow forced by partial genetics to just stand around and wait while this stupid fuck disrobes.

Not that it matters, because the F22 Nuclear Bombers have arrived, and, SURPRISE! They drop the amazing, weather-changing, rain-ending nukes right on the evacuation meetup point. The helicopter from the hospital is caught in the blast, but somehow, everyone survives. They’re surrounded by Soldiers of Indeterminate Branch, forced to surrender their weapons, and then given first aid….

…then, in one final attempt to have more endings than the cinematic release of Return of the King, you see Mr. Evil Suit walking to some officebuildingey destination which is bound to be some portion of The Company, and delivering the Predator Weapon to the cleverly-disguised-in-the-imdb-credits Ms. Y.

For everyone who couldn’t figure that one out, it’s Yutani. As in, the other half of Weyland-Yutani. They have a vague discussion about how the technology is not for this world, and the movie ends.

I didn’t stick around long enough to see any AfterCredits bits, if there were any.

Final Disappointment: There’s bound to be another sequel.

The best thing about this movie was probably the burger I got with it. And possibly the Hellboy sequel trailer. I liked that a lot. I could’ve done without the Cloverfield thing, though. I’ve seen enough of that.

I suppose another good thing was that it provided me with long-rambling-disjointed-post-material. And it wasn’t any worse than I was expecting it to be — I’ve had pretty low expectations for movies ever since Transformers, personally….

Don’t waste your money. See it Second Run, or when it comes to OnDemand — especially if you have HD. It’s bound to look better at home.