I watched both of the AVP films this week and I couldn’t tell you why. The concept of these films is so obvious and stilly, it’s a playground argument Fox spent 100 million dollars on. I think the first one is great and it’s really more of an Alien film than the other one, with Weyland (not yet -Yutani) and multiple references to that franchise. This maybe comes from there just being more Alien than Predator lore, but perhaps is the preference of Writer/Director Paul W. S. Anderson. I feel like it meaningfully expands on the lore of both franchises, the predators still have the Klingon problem, where you just can’t understand how a society of suicidal hunters are able to travel though space, or even contain xenomorphs. I’d ask if there were scientist Predators but I’m sure there are multiple comics and ancillary media that explains this. The second film subtitled ‘Requiem’ (a word surely made meaningless by now) is not as good. It generally felt like no one wanted to be involved, much of the action is shaded in darkness and there’s just slightly too many moving parts. It goes the Predator route for its story, distrusting the government rather than corporations, which I just find less compelling.

The Rainmaker was the worst thing I saw this week, it’s a legal ‘thriller’ adapted from a John Grisham book. Adaptions of his work are surprisingly common, of the 10 this is also the authors favourite and you can see why. It has a lot of voice over and has the kinda sprawling subplot loaded structure you see in a novel, it desperately needs a lot of cuts and some kind of satisfying, concise ending. I was mainly disappointed because of how much I’d liked other Grisham adaptions, A Time to Kill and Runaway Jury are good and fun.

My recommendation is M3GAN, it was my first time back in the cinema in 2023 and it was super worth it. M3GAN has hit just at the right time, it’s about kids spending too much time online and tech companies moving fast & breaking things™ without considering potential dangers. It’s got a nice balance of being aware, scary and like, socially relevant? I do wonder if all the dancing would have been it it without TikTok, but I it’s not a complaint I really liked those bits. My girlfriend and I mused on the titles for it’s sequels, M3GAN 2.0 having already been announced, M3G4N is obviously the 4th, M3GAN5 the 5th, but for the third we figured on just ‘MEGAN’. I also think it should cross over with SE7EN.