Masculinity in Alien vs Predator: Requiem

It was going to be “Masculinity and Femininity”, but the women don’t do anything. Spoilers follow, assuming you care what happens and didn’t already work out the entire plot half way through the trailer.

Despite the fact it’s an embarrassing trainwreck, there’s still elements here that are worth discussing. I wrote about horror tropes earlier, but this isn’t going to be a repeat performance because AVP:R, despite its pedigree, isn’t really a horror movie, or even a sci-fi movie. What we’re actually dealing with here is a weird hybrid of a 70s disaster movie and a 90s action movie, in which a large group of characters from different backgrounds band together in order to survive a catastrophe, only they do this by shooting at it and screaming ‘Motherfuckerrrrrrrrrrrr!’ a lot. The Alien / Predator conflict is really just a way of making Whatever The Town Was Called into a hostile environment for the heroes, rather than the point of exercise, and the characters are disturbingly nonchalant about the whole extraterrestrial thing, up to and including using ‘We found his skinned body in the woods’ to break the ice at a bar. I also can’t remember any of their names, so we’ll use their single character trait as a pseudonym.

Once again (cf. Transformers) our de facto identification figure is a dorky high school kid who’s lusting after the hottest girl in school. But, disaster! She’s dating The Jerk who doesn’t deserve her, unlike The Nice Guy, who does. Sort of. This is actually the most accurate part of the movie; The Nice Guy is a fawning creep and pseudo-stalker who stares at The Hot Girl during class and waits for a few seconds after he parks his car outside her house so he can see her bend over. Due to his total lack of redeeming qualities, the only way the movie can make him look good is to put him up against somebody worse, in the form of The Jerk. The Jerk is… Look, there’s no other way of saying it: He’s Freddie from Scooby Doo. Same build, same hair, same primary colour sweater. Because the movie is trying to set up half a dozen plotlines in the first act, there’s no time for subtlety, so within five minutes of appearing on screen, The Jerk has beaten up The Nice Guy, called him a faggot and thrown his keys down a drain.

On one level, it’s just lazy writing, but it’s interesting when we consider how the remainder of the movie constructs masculinity. In this scene, The Jerk is adopting the role of a hyper-masculine defender, making sure his opponent steers clear of his property - The Hot Girl - by proving himself to be physically stronger than his opponent, as well as undermining his opponent’s sexuality. We do, rightly, side with The Nice Guy in this situation, and The Jerk’s behaviour is enough to get him dumped (off camera) by The Hot Girl. All’s well and good, if predictable and badly written. But then the monsters attack, and The Nice Guy responds by… proving he’s the best at inflicting violence on his enemies while keeping his woman safe and screaming ‘Motherfuckerrrrrrrrrrr!’ at passing xenomorphs. This is supposed to be him maturing into a leader, but all he’s done is become the kind of aggressive, testosterone-fuelled alpha male he was fighting against an hour earlier. His targets may be Aliens who are just as capable of killing him if he doesn’t fight back, but the point remains that he spends the final act on a massive wank fantasy power trip, proving he’s the world’s biggest badass while protecting a defenseless woman who’ll fuck him when it’s all over. The cycle of domination that he was earlier suffering under isn’t broken, it’s reinforced. Whether or not The Hot Girl notices that The Nice Guy has effectively become the guy she dumped isn’t mentioned. Nothing about The Hot Girl is mentioned after she dumps The Jerk, actually; her usefulness to the plot is over, so she ends up being killed off in order to provide The Nice Guy with motivation to be an even bigger badass and survive being impaled (much, much more on the various impalings later).

Now, given the multiple storylines going on, there’s obviously room for the film to provide a counterpoint to the “I’m only nice because I’m not strong enough to beat the shit out of other people” twaddle. It almost does, but it manages to completely undermine it shortly after it gets going. One of the characters, Not Ripley, is a woman who’s been serving in Iraq and has just come home on leave to see Her Kid and Her Husband. The family’s got an interesting dynamic going, at least as far as shite action movies are concerned; Her Husband is a stay at home father who’s been primarily responsible for raising Her Kid, while Not Ripley’s the one out there risking life and limb in a warzone. Her Husband and Her Kid have a really nice relationship in the few scenes they have together. He manages to be a competent authority figure while also being warm and affectionate and never resorting to shouting or sniping to get his point across. Now, all of this is established prior to Wherever It’s Set being overrun, so I was genuinely interested in how this was going to turn out: Not Ripley is the military veteran with firearm experience, so are we actually going to see a woman play the role of the family protector while a man is the emotional core, perhaps to balance out all the macho bollocks going on elsewhere in the story?

No, of course not! Her Husband is killed off instantly as soon as Wherever It’s Set is overrun, so we never have to suffer through the misandric torment of seeing a relationship where the woman is the tough one which isn’t played as comic relief. Big, big wasted opportunity (after the whole “Aliens fighting Predators” thing, obviously). Now, Not Ripley and Her Daughter manage to escape, so, OK, there might be something worth salvaging here. Aaaand… No.

What happens next makes The Nice Guy’s transformation into Maddox look tame. Not Ripley and Her Daughter manage to make their way to a group of survivors, led by The Ex-Con. The Ex-Con is the alpha male of the human survivors; he’s protective, he’s violent, he’s got stubble, he’s the best shot and he also yells ‘Motherfuckerrrrrrrrrr!’ a lot. So much of a badass, in fact, that he even learns to use the Predator’s gun and holds off multiple aliens single-handed. He locks eyes with Not Ripley and… Yes, you can see where this is going. Nothing explicitly happens between them, but she’s clearly got a thing for him and it’s reciprocal. Her Husband, the father of her six year old daughter, died less than hour ago. It’s not that she’s moving on too quickly, it’s that she’s moving on from a gentle, controlled, affectionate man to a gung-ho, hyper-masculine psycho who can only define himself through blowing shit up and shouting, and it’s meant to be an improvement. There’s so much wrong with this I don’t know where to begin. I can see this working, just, if Her Husband had been a total spineless weakling who she was sick of, but he wasn’t; all on-screen evidence points to him being a strong and supportive husband and father. But he’s killed off, forgotten about and replaced because the movie is only interested in macho sociopaths whose pent-up aggression at nothing in particular is supposed to be a virtue. Not only that, but in the one scene where she’s in a position to save him, he just yells ‘Give me the gun!’ and does it himself, even though this takes longer and puts him in greater danger. Keep in mind we’re basically dealing with adult versions of The Nice Guy and The Jerk here, only this time it’s The Jerk who’s depicted as the one who deserves her more. Who’s side is this movie supposed to be on?

The ultimate in hyper-masculinity is, of course, the Predator. He has no dialogue, no feelings, no character, no point to his existence beyond proving he’s better at being tough and killing shit than anybody else in the universe. This makes him an effective monster, but in AVP:R, we’re asked to both empathise with him and admire him. He’s an idealised reflection of the other male characters, possessing superior combat skills, aggression and strength, and no personal flaws because, well, he doesn’t have a personality. As mentioned previously, Ex-Con’s biggest badass moment is when he manages to work out how to use the Predator’s gun, just to underline that he’s the second most manly man around, and that men gain real strength by identifying with symbols of violence and predation.

Finally, cocks.

One of the oft-repeated “secrets” of the original Alien’s success is that ‘It doesn’t ever give you a good look at the monster’. This is twaddle; it gives you plenty of good looks at the monster, just not the entire thing at once. The shots are explicitly fetishistic in the way they isolate and draw attention to certain parts of the creature’s anatomy and sexualise them. The most famous shots are, justifiably, the ridiculously phallic chestburster resting inside a sticky, open wound, and the alien’s moist, slowly-parting lips. This element was gradually lost as the series progressed, culminating in the idiocy that is the original Alien vs. Predator commentary track, in which the cast and crew snicker at the fact the underside of a facehugger kind of looks like a vagina. That’s because it’s supposed to, you cretins.

Damn if this isn’t back with a vengeance in AVP:R, though! See, the “leader” alien gestated inside a Predator rather than a human, which apparently gives it superpowers. Not only is it the alpha male of the alien pack, attacking its own kind to make sure it gets the first meal, but it’s got a big prehensile tongue. This has been part of the creature’s physiology since Alien, but this time it’s different. It’s floppier and rounder, it springs out and becomes erect when it’s being used, and… Look, the reason I say ‘being used’ is that it doesn’t kill people per se, it, uh, impregnates them. This, on its own, is at least in keeping with the sexual themes of the series, but it’s how AVP:R deploys it that enters whole new universes of wrongness. The tongue is used on several people, but the only times we don’t cut away at the last second, it’s being used on young women. And it doesn’t just not cut away, it gives us a loving, lingering closeup of the thing being shoved into their mouths and pumping baby alien goo down their throats while they choke on it. Yeah.

The movie’s climactic battle is between the Predator and the Alien/Predator Hybrid. By this point in the movie, I was expecting them to settle it by going into the toilets and seeing who can get closest to the ceiling, but they just slug it out on a rooftop. As a parting reminder of the movie’s underlying philosophy, the Predator wins by ripping the Hybrid’s cock-tongue off and then shoving his long, firm blade into the newly-created hole. The moral of the story: Use ‘em or lose ‘em.

On the plus side, it gave me something to talk about.

Various post-review questions:

• Why “Requiem”? This isn’t a sombre, funereal production to mark the end of the series, it’s a bunch of action movie cliches with an ending that explicitly sets up a sequel. Alien 3, now that was a requiem. Presumably the original title Alien vs Predator: You Drooling Fanboy Idiots Will Watch Anything wasn’t commercial enough.
• The Predator ship only crashes because the Alien’s acid blood ate through the hull. Except we later see the Predator happily slashing, spearing and crushing Aliens to death with no ill-effects, so why not just make the hull out of whatever wrist-blades are made from?
• Why does the Predator homeworld consist of one guy watching TV in a high tech Lay-Z-Boy?
• Speaking of the Predator homeworld, the entire movie takes place over the course of about 24 hours, if not less, yet the Predator has no problem zipping over there and cleaning up the mess before sunrise. If their technology is that advanced, why do they still insist on fighting with spears and (again) not making their ships acid-proof?
• The movie ends with some captured Predator technology being given to… Ms. Yutani! Obviously she’s meant to be the head of what later becomes the Weyland-Yutani corporation. The same corporation who are so convinced that aliens don’t exist that they ignore everything Ripley tells them at the beginning of Aliens. Also, the original AVP had Mr. Weyland in it, and he knew that there was an alien pyramid under Antarctica. So was their database a casualty of the Y3k bug or something?
• Why can I dash off 2196 words about something this shallow and moronic, but struggled to come up with a page about Hana-Bi in November?