Hacker Cinema
AVP: Alien vs. Predator
2004 · Film · 101 min
Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson
AdventureScience FictionActionHorror
When scientists discover something near Antarctica that appears to be a buried Pyramid, they send a research team out to investigate. Little do they know that they are about to step into a hunting ground where Aliens are grown as sport for the Predator race.
1 positive3 negative6 neutralfrom 10 commenters
Where to watch
No streaming data for this title.
10 comments on Hacker News
I wonder how much of it is the seeds of principles of beauty being planted, then watered over time, and finally sprouting at a ripe age.
For example, I also am old enough to have used DOS before Windows 3.1 came out, which was my first GUI. When Windows 95 came out, it was a clear improvement, but retained the same principles as Windows 3.1 began. Windows 98 iterated on it, and Windows 2k perfected it in my eyes.
So that when Windows XP came out, it abandoned the principles, going for a look that felt cartoonish and childish to me, but for others was perhaps casual and inviting. It was during this time that I discovered Compiz and other Linux eye candy, and although it abandoned the fundamental principles that Win 3.1 planted, it almost admitted this with pride, submitting a new set of principles altogether.
So when Windows Vista came out, clearly trying to compete in the arena of that new set of principles of beauty, I was ambivalent but mostly impressed. That's when I found out about Mac OS X, which Compiz et al. were clumsily imitating, and I fell in love with them, which I realized had perfected those principles before Microsoft and Linux even began to imitate them.
It almost seems like the same concept as the original purpose of MMA (mixed martial arts). There is a perfection particularly to a set of principles. You can be the best at boxing, or the best at Brazilian Jui-Jitsu, and it's almost comparing apples to oranges because they're so fundamentally different that they don't actually mix well (the current UFC being proof that the experiment has failed and created a monster).
It's the same reason movies exist like Home Front: it's that age old question, "who would win if ...", in this case London gangsters vs Southern American gangsters. Or Freddy vs Jason, or Alien vs Predator. I wish I could remember more, because those are some of the most interesting types of movies, with different real human cultures being pit against each other. Like David and Goliath, the top champions of two cultures facing off for the world to see.
I think MacPaint is one of the most beautifully designed GUIs ever created.
Lol, I guess this is what happens when two assholes surround themselves with sycophantic yes-men for far too long.
Nobody taught them how to play nice. I've met eight year olds with more civility and maturity than those two...
Oh well. Reminds me of that Alien vs Predator movie: Whoever wins, we lose.
Oh, it's very easy. Watch Terminator: Genisys sometime. Or the Alien vs Predator movie.
TLDR; US: nudity & sex: no, violence: yes!, Europe: nudity & sex: np, violence: not so much.
> Movies and TV shows are things to watch with friends/family. It's awkward and annoying for sex scenes to come up.
I and all pretty much all my pan-European friends that I talked to about this issue are always flabbeghasted about this.
Can you elaborate why this is awkward and/or annoying to you? This is an earnest question out of pure curiosity.
Specifically weird for us is that in PG13-rated US movies/series/etc, depiction of sex (and nudity) is not ok but violence (and even death!) commonly is (as long as there is no blood or the blood is from aliens, i.e. green or purple). "Alien vs Predator" is an example.
In Europe it's literally upside down. When kids are watching we don't have an issue with sex scenes as much as with violence. Depiction of consensual sex is ok. Sex is fun, it's natural, it's wonderful (hopefully). You can explain that to kids. Violence -- not so much.
Nudity? What's the issue? When I leave my house in Berlin in summer the park next door is full of kids running around naked (as are most playgrounds). The issue with nudity (and the obsession of taking offense with female breasts/nipples) is completely beyond most people in northern Europe.
Basically, if many European family movies ever made it to the US market (they don't, ofc), quite a few would probably be edited for nudity (or even sex scenes) for that market.
Vice versa, US movies often do get edited for violence to become more "family friendly" for the European market. "Lilo and Stitch" is a good example; Disney edited the German version down by 1.5minutes to get a FSK-0 (no age restrictions) rating here. [1]
Specifically, female breasts occasionally visible in a kids movie won't raise eyebrows in atheist/agnostic/protestant northern Germany but in catholic southern Italy they may.
And speaking of the latter: Berlin is the first city that has acknowledged that actual gender equality requires women (or any gender for that matter) to be topless too, in any public bath [2].
So if you go with your kids/teens to a public bath here, they will see nipples (i.e. "nudity").
[1] https://www.schnittberichte.com/schnittbericht.php?ID=1004
[2] https://www.dw.com/en/berlin-clarifies-gender-equality-rules-for-topless-bathing/a-65149849
It is kind of interesting, it looks like the Weyland timeline is kind of a mess. They apparently ignored the Alien vs Predator backstory when writing Prometheus.
https://www.avpgalaxy.net/forum/index.php?topic=45645.0
So Prometheus has Weyland Corp from 2012. AvP has Weyland Industries, which the folks on that forum think is supposed to be founded in the 80’s. So hypothetically there could be an AvP/Stranger Things crossover.
But I think a more likely explanation is that a character in the Stranger Things universe is a fan of the Aliens series, since the first two movies came out in ‘79 and ‘84. Hopefully the world will be sufficiently diverged from the real life timeline by the upside-down, and they will be spared the horrors of Alien 3.
It is partly due to new media however lets consider some other things which are really important.
1) The problem is that a lot of the remakes/sequels and reboots are quite frankly crap. I don't care too much about Disney. But other remakes and sequels are generally awful.
So lets take some case studies:
* Robocop (2013). The movie except for on 2 minute scene was dire. It was a PG-13 remake of what was at the time a shockingly violent film (the effects look awful now, but they were quite convincing back in the mid-90s still) that completely missed the point of the original movie.
* Ghostbusters (2016) was another movie that not only looked completely awful in the trailer, it completely again misunderstood the original movie, added nothing much new and they outright attacked the fandom after they said to the studio "What the hell are you doing". The original Ghostbusters movie wasn't really a comedy movie, it was a Action Horror with some Jokes. The new movie was just a comedy movie, which looked like a Spoof along the lines of "Scary Movie". I have no idea who they were marketing it towards.
Lets take sequels:
* They have also totally squandered two solid Sci-fi Action Movie franchises (Alien and Predator) to the point where the previous low points of the franchises look good (Alien vs Predator and Alien 3 & Alien 4: Resurrection).
* Star Wars has been completely ruined from a fan's perspective. The prequels (in the 2000s) has some terrible acting, iffy CGI now but I can at least appreciate what they were attempting to do and it was an honest attempt by Lucas to flesh out Star Wars universe. However the new Sequels go from "This is Okay, but it is the 1977 movie retold essentially" to terrible (The Last Jedi).
The Last Jedi doesn't make any sense on quite a number of levels. It also ruins one of beloved characters on screen and it was probably intentionally written to not only upset the fans but also kill the franchise i.e. there is at least one scene where Kylo Ren says to audience pretty much "Let the past die, kill if you have to", which is the director pretty much sticking his middle finger up to the fans. Yes in the scene he was speaking to whoever the main character is that doesn't seem to have a personality, but it was really a message from the director to the fans.
They also attacked the fan base (not a good move) because they didn't like a terrible movie. While the movies made money, they have tarnished the brand in the long term.
Disney bought Lucas Film because of Star Wars and monetising the fan base. Lucas Film under Kathleen Kennedy have tried driving away their a dedicated fan base. This strategy is madness.
2) The Hollywood Elite (and they are Elite) have forgotten they are actors and actively show distain for the audience. I don't really want to get into a political commentary, but they literally had The Avengers do an online piece of activism where they told the Electoral college to defy the 2016 Presidential Election result. This doesn't go unnoticed by the average movie goer. Just under half of the Country voted for the current president and then they do an advert where they are pretty much putting a middle finger up at the people who voted for Trump. A lot of those people took their kids to see those movies or saw went to see them themselves.
Audiences will forgive actors for quite a lot of things, but if they continually keep on pushing this audiences will associate them with their politics and not what roles they played.
They are actors. I want them to pretend to be Black Widow, not lecture me about Politics. I will go and listen to a political commentator if I wanted that.
3) Bollywood and the rest of Asia are making their own movies which kick ass. Take "The Raid 2". It has plenty of brutal fight scenes, but it also has a top quality plot about gangs, undercover cops etc. It is amazing to watch. A lot of guys are looking at overseas cinema because Hollywood isn't catering to them.
4) User generated content. I think the only movie I've watched recently was John Wick 1, 2 and 3. I recently listened to a recorded lecture series of the History of Islam on Youtube made by some guy who lives in Azerbaijan. I can listen for effectively nothing 1000s of hours of interviews of Joe Rogan and a Guest just talking for 3 hours about sometimes absolute nonsense or talking about say Leaving a Cult (Megan Phelps interview). I recently watched a series of lectures about the database as a filesystem from some Linux conference. There is a guy who made loads of mini-documentaries about old defunct computers systems and the quality now is on par with the Discovery Channel shows of the late 1990s.
5) Longer stories. Game of Thrones, The Wire and other shows that have very long running stories, lots of characters and complicated plots with lots of Lore have proven that audiences want more complicated stories. There is a guy called Alt-Shift-X on Youtube and he has huge number of people watching him and he just explains the Game of Thrones Lore of the Book vs the TV-series. Most Hollywood movies are pretty simple affairs in comparison.
All of Paul W.S. Anderson video-game movies are entertaining AF. Mortal Kombat, Resident Evil, Alien vs Predator. ALL well crafted & inspired movies. They're not going to win Cannes Palm d'Or, but they will hit the spot.
> Alien vs. Predator: At the end the last guy in the cinema pissed on the screen before leaving.
I have never seen a movie summed up in a single sentence so well.
Indeed, the title brought to my mind the Alien vs. Predator movies, so I clicked to see what it meant when you replace Alien with Artem in that context...
Ok, admit it, #2 is simply Alien vs Predator (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alien_vs._Predator_(film)#Plot)