As I mentioned in my review of Spider-Man 2, I like comic books. I’ve been reading them fairly consistently throughout my life, with the exception of a few years in my mid- to late teens when I thought I was too grown-up for such things. (Ironic, since the teen years seem to be the time of life when most comic fans are most heavily involved in the scene, but then I’ve always tended to be out of synch with whatever my peers are doing.)

My interest in the medium was rekindled while I was a student at the University of Utah. It happened almost by chance: I was passing through the Student Union one afternoon when I spotted another student setting up a table in the large open area between the video arcade and the food court. People were always selling items there of one sort or another, and sometimes those wares were actually kind of interesting, so I stopped to see what the guy had to offer. It turned out that he was a comics fan who’d decided to liquidate part of his collection. I wasn’t too interested — I figured comics were something I’d put behind me long ago — but one title caught my eye before I could walk away: Aliens vs. Predator.

I remember picking up the book with a wary half-smile, intrigued by the idea but certain that it couldn’t be any good. I was very familiar with both of the film series that had inspired the comic, and in my estimation they shared little that suggested a combination of them would work. True, there was some precedent for a team-up in the film Predator 2, namely one quick scene in which an Alien skull is visible in the title creature’s “trophy room.” However, the movie calls no attention to the skull and I’ve always taken it as nothing more than an inside joke for the handful of fans who were lucky enough to spot it. To actually expand on the concept that the extraterrestrial Predators hunt the acid-blooded, chest-bursting, face-hugging Aliens… well, I just didn’t think it could work. The very notion seemed cynically high-concept and commercialized, or else really silly, like the fanboy arguments over whether the Starship Enterprise could win in a fight against an Imperial Star Destroyer. (By my reckoning, no, but that’s another post…)

Still, I was curious, so I gave the guy a couple of bucks and took home the first comic I’d read since middle school.

The next day I tracked down the same guy and begged him to sell me the other three issues in the series (AvP was a four-part mini-series, not an on-going monthly title). To my surprise, I’d found that the comic book match-up was intelligently conceived, well-written and beautifully drawn. Its creators had somehow done what seemed so unlikely to me: they’d found a way to put Aliens and Predators into the same story without sacrificing the conventions, rules, or even the moods of the original films that inspired them.

The idea they came up with was that young Predators, those nasty big-game hunters from another world, must undergo a coming-of-age ritual that requires them to successfully bag an Alien, one of those nasty biomechanoids that use molecular acid for blood and like to implant embryos inside hapless hosts. Basically, the Alien hunt is the final test of Predator “manhood” before they become full-fledged members of their clan. To keep the numbers of rapacious Aliens from getting out of hand, the Predators use an uninhabited planet as a kind of a galactic safari park, which they only seed with Alien eggs shortly before a hunt. Predator hunts, as fans of the Schwarzenegger film should know, only occur every few decades. The problem that drives the comic book’s story is that silly humans have colonized the planet since the last time the Preddies came by and neither side knows the other is there. The mere presence of the humans messes up the parameters of the hunt and much chaos ensues, during which a human woman teams up with an elder Predator for the mutual survival of both. At the end of the story, the Predator makes this woman an honorary member of its hunting clan by marking her face with a ritual scar.

The AvP mini-series was a revelation to me, a grown-up comic book that showed me how comics could have sex and violence and brains and excite me in ways that quaint old superheroes hadn’t in years. (If I’d been paying attention during my “gap time,” I would’ve found that the costumed hero-types were changing in some very interesting ways and weren’t quite what I remembered, but that also is a subject for another post.) All of that aside, however, AvP was simply a damn good read. It inspired me to start reading comics again, and I’ve never entirely stopped.

So, you’re probably asking by now, what has all this biographical crap got to do with the new Alien Vs. Predator movie? Not much, I suppose, except that I was thinking about the comic during almost every minute of the new movie. While the comic Aliens Vs. Predator (note the plural Aliens, as opposed to the movie title which uses the singular Alien) would make an excellent movie, the filmmakers chose not to use it as the basis for their story. Nevertheless, much of what they did film seems familiar.

The storyline begins with a group of humans investigating a mysterious heat-bloom on an Antarctic island. (That’s right, this movie takes place here, on Earth, only a couple of months from now. Literally. The titles at the beginning place the date as “October 2004.”) The source of the heat turns out to be an ancient pyramid located far beneath the ice, built there by the Predators at a time when primitive Aztecs, Cambodians and Egyptians worshipped these guys as gods. The pyramid contains a frozen Alien queen that is occasionally thawed out to provide game for the Predators by laying eggs that hatch out loathsome facehuggers, which are supposed to implant their embryos in human sacrifices selected by those aforementioned Aztecs, Cambodians and Egyptians. (Why these three cultures? Because they’re the ones that built pyramids, and, uh, the Predators build pyramids, and, uh, well everyone knows that the pyramids were built by spacemen, right?) The heat is coming on because the Preddies are here for their hunt and they need some Aliens to kill, which means they need to attract some cannon fodder, er, humans to get implanted by embryos and… well, and much chaos ensues, during which a human woman teams up with an elder Predator for the mutual survival of both. At the end of the film, the Predator makes this woman an honorary member of its hunting clan by marking her face with a ritual scar. Sound familiar?

“Yes, yes, Bennion,” you’re probably saying, “the similarities between film and comic book are obvious, but what about the movie? Was it any good?”

Well, yes and no. It was good in the sense that it entertained me and did not contradict or otherwise dishonor its parent franchises. There was some cool action and some very striking visuals (I really liked a flashback image of Predator starships landing atop a whole complex of Aztec pyramids while throngs of stone-age humans prostrated themselves), and there were a number of nods to both the original Alien and Predator films through particular camera angles and such. There was also an attempt to provide a thread of continuity with the futuristic Alien movies, which is something I particularly appreciate (I love continuity, at least when it’s well thought out).

But none of that makes this a particularly good film. In fact, I think it would be a pretty baffling film to someone who wasn’t already familiar with (and a lover of) both of the earlier movie series, and possibly even with the comic, an opinion which is born out by the movie’s dismal reception among mainstream critics. At its core, AVP (the film, as opposed to AvP the comic) suffers from the same problem as the Star Wars prequels, which is that all of the movie’s drama depends on the viewer knowing what’s going to happen. The SW prequels only really work if you know that cute little Anakin Skywalker is going to become nasty old Darth Vader. Similarly, much of AVP only works if you understand the Alien life cycle and the purpose of the Predators. We’re supposed to feel dread, for example, when the Alien Queen is unfrozen and begins laying eggs — but that only happens if we know (a) what the hell an Alien Queen is, and (b) what happens when those eggs come into contact with some stupid humans. Even the attempt at continuity that I mentioned a moment ago only works if you’re a hardcore fan of the Alien movies. It exists in the form of actor Lance Henriksen, who played the android Bishop in Aliens and a representative of the evil Company in Alien3. In AVP, he is Charles Bishop Weyland, a billionaire expert in robotics. Get the connection? I’m willing to bet a lot of people won’t, and that’s just the obvious connection with the Bishop character. (There’s also a much more subtle connection that only supergeeks like me would get: the evil Company that Sigourney Weaver’s character works for is called Weyland-Yutani, and there was always an unexplored notion running through the movies that the Company knew the Aliens were out there long before Weaver’s crew ever found them. AVP suggests that the Company has known about the Aliens for centuries because one of the Company’s founders — Mr. Weyland himself — encountered them in 2004. Kind of neat, but also very, very esoteric.) AVP was unquestionably made only for the fans and it doesn’t make any effort to speak to a wider audience. Maybe this doesn’t matter as much as I think it does — after all, I’m one of the target audience and obviously I knew what was happening, right? — but the democratic part of me rebels at the thought of limiting your audience so drastically, by preaching to the choir, as it were.

In addition to this flaw, I could pick a lot of nits and deconstruct a lot of logical problems. Take the setting, for example. Having this all happen on Earth accomplishes nothing in particular, aside from letting the film take place in modern times. In fact, setting it on Earth introduces some problems. From what we know of Predators based on the earlier films in that series, they’re only interested in hunting the biggest and baddest animals available on a particular world. On Earth, that would be humans, as depicted in Predator and Predator 2. But wait! If there are Aliens on Earth, why would the Preddies bother with us weakling humans in the first two films? Why not just activate the pyramid complex every time they come here? Also, the flashback sequence depicts the Preddies detonating a nuclear device when the Alien population gets out of control. Nifty image with thousands of Aliens swarming up the sides of the Aztec pyramids, but kind of hard to rationalize why there isn’t a nuclear blast crater to this day somewhere in Central America, or why Aztec glyphs and Egyptian heiroglyphics don’t show animals that look more like Preddies and Aliens.

And then there is the Antarctic setting. Oh boy, so many problems here (not the least of which is that this terrain is already staked out by a third movie monster, The Thing). First of all, both the Predators and the Aliens have always been shown in the earlier films as liking hot environments, hot enough that human beings are at a definite disadvantage. You could rationalize that the pyramid was built before Antarctica iced over, but that would be before the last Ice age, which definitely predates the Aztec, Egyptian and Cambodian cultures. It in fact predates large human cultures altogether, thus making the flashback sequence into total nonsense. (I guess the filmmakers figure — probably correctly — that most audience members won’t know the difference when it comes little things like Ice Ages and ancient cultures.) But even if you cut the movie some slack on this point, why would the heat-loving Preddies continue to use this frozen training ground? And even if you let that one go, you have a problem with it being nighttime during the film’s events. The Antarctic night lasts for months and gets so cold that humans wouldn’t last long with exposed faces and no coats, both of which we see in this movie.

All of these problems should earn AVP a thumbs-down from me. And yet I find that I can’t entirely condemn it because, as I said, it entertained me. Yes, it was derivative and illogical and aimed squarely at the fanboys. But so are a lot of the B-movies I catch on Saturday afternoons, the ones that I know are bad but for some reason just can’t bring myself to channel-surf away from. And this brings me back to comic books, because I remembered while I was watching AVP that when I was a kid, before comic books became grown-up, self-important and collectible, they were very simply cheap, disposable entertainment. And I liked them. Alien vs. Predator isn’t Aliens vs. Predator, but it is still, in its cheap, disposable, entertaining way, a comic book. And I liked it. Your mileage may vary…