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The film comes with an artifice of a secular triangulation among the human, the Aliens and the Predators. The title of the movie suggests a third party position of the human who seems to remain a bystander whereas the diegesis frames the human as a 2nd party directly involved in the battle. As the film brings the 2 famed sci-fi movie characters into the same screen, it has a high degree of vertical intertextuality (i.e., prompting the audience to refer to the same means of media he/she read before) with its predecessors in terms of costume, staging, names of characters (e.g., Bishop), mise-en-scene and even cinematography (e.g., light beams of torches in a dim enclosed space).

It resembles the masterpiece of this genre, "Alien" (Dir: Ridley Scott, 1979) and its several successors in narrative logic and story causality in beginning with a spaceship scene and proceeding through the organisation of an exploratory mission to an unknown area. The narrative is predominately unrestricted because the viewer knows almost every thing about the story (save that some minor hidden information embedded in a hermeneutic code is revealed only in the middle of the film). Nevertheless a flashback sequence in the middle unlocks the misery. There are 3 hierarchies of information distribution in the film: (1) the lowest level being those known by the human (i.e., who knows the least); (2) the next higher level being those known by the Predators and the Aliens (i.e., both know more than the human but less than the viewer - this is visually brought into CG enabled mise-en-scene by showing the Predators' surveillance on the team of humans); and (3) the highest level being those known by the viewer under the omnipresent camera.

Made explicit by the dialogues "a party must take side in a war of three" and "the enemy of the enemy is our friend", the 2nd half of the story exhibits the surviving human, Alexa "Lex" Woods (Sanna Lathan)'s taking side with the surviving Predator in her survival from the Alien's attack. This carries a wisdom of battle (and political) tactic. The story also creates a differentiated profile among the 3 parties: (1) the Aliens are primitive creatures which attack with their inherent physique; (2) the Predators are hi-tech chaps who attack with advanced weapons; and (3) the humans are in-between the two. Yet the screenplay seems to have skewed to the Predators because they are humanized (the humour in making a weapon and a shield from a dead Alien) and described as warriors (the makings on the face) whereas the Aliens are depicted as pure evils. This time the Predators are less evil than they were on the screen 14 years ago ["Predator 2" (Dir: Stephen Hopkins, 1990)].

Although the film creates a layer of suspense by captivating the ontological triangulation of the 3 parties, the plot comes with less tension than "Alien", "Predator" and their several offspring. Another feature of the film is the rarity of dialogues because neither the Alien nor the Predators speak human languages. Like "Alien" and "Predator", the denouement carries a cue that a part II is highly likely. Wait and see……

註：本評論純屬影評作者個人意見，並不代表本網立場。
Note: This views presented in this review is solely the views of the critic who wrote it and do not represent the stance of our website.

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