AVP and Jumper

Recently, once in a blue moon happened to me that I was able to stay home undisturbed for a whole lazy afternoon. I chose to spend the time to watch two movies on my 20’’ monitor. They are “Alien vs. Predator” and “Jumper”. Both of them are kinda B movies. However, I think I enjoy them both since I didn’t have much expectation on them.
AVP is a movie of few years old. I’ve not watched AVP2, but after watch AVP, I think I will see AVP2 in future if I can find time to do that. I’ve been a fan of Aliens movies and Predator movies for many years. No big fan of them, but at least I saw all 4 alien movies and the 2 predator movies. The concept of AVP is supposed to be based on video games, one of the typical crossover of characters among franchises to fulfill the wild dream of young fans. Usually, such video game concept movies sucks, crossover movies also sucks too. Surprisingly, AVP is not bad. Before I watched this movie, I only remember 2 things about this movie, James Cameron said that AVP wasn’t as bad as he had thought, also, the Predators in this movie looks very dull as if the stuntmen were in heavy thick suit to jump along that they looks more like ninja turtle than the speedy killer that Predators are supposed to be. Well, I found both comments are quite true, they don’t anyhow diminish the entertaining value of the movie. I’m not gonna dig into the details of the movie as usual as they can be found in many sites. What I like about this movie is that it is convincingly established a relationship between Aliens and Predators, and brought the fight to earth which is new for Aliens. Also, the rivalry of these 2 species is quite balanced. Unlike the respective Alien and Predator movies that human is mere the helpless preys that got slaughtered, yes, human got slaughtered too in AVP, but at least both species got into some nice fights that both sides got upper hands back and forth. As the story goes, human is more on the Predator’s side to against the Aliens which simply deemed as beasts while Predators are more intelligent warriors. Anyway, the flow of the movie is actually very predictable as you can pretty much tell which character may survive till the end, cos most one dimensional gung-ho characters are simply pawns to be slaughtered. The movie ended with the birth of a hybrid of Alien and Predator which was named as Predalien, which is supposed to play a bigger role in AVP2. That would be nice to see how they handle this hybrid, hopefully it would be better than the human/alien hybrid in Alien Resurrection. As a side track story, a reboot of the Predator franchise is going to come out this year. It is called ‘Predators’. I don’t see that to be too much different from the original based on the trailer online. Also, Ridley Scott is said to be the director to film a prequel to Alien. Not sure what he will bring out since the birth of the franchise in early 80s. I will stay tune.
“Jumper” is like a subset to ‘Heroes” by focusing on one single super power of ‘teleporting’. It is about some young kids having such power and there were designated arch rival to capture and kill them. Logic about controlling worm holes is gimmick. The story is kinda predictable, cos a main character falls for a girl, and they will be fine at the end, very typical Hollywood story. I think if they can make the movie more edgy, it would be much better. Now, it is more like an expensive episode of Heroes with scenes in various geo-locations (surely, some of them may be CGs). Anyway, the fun factor of the movie still there, it wasn’t a bad movie, just not good enough.

I was glad to enjoy a lazy afternoon by watch these 2 movies.