It's PG-13?! OMG It Must Be Horrible!

maybe I don't want to see Alien vs. Predator after all

Published on August 4, 2004 By Gene Nash In Movies & TV & Books

This looked to be a fairly lame summer movie season for me. My must sees were pretty much Spiderman 2 and Alien vs. Predator. (I didn't know about Exorcist IV till the commercials started playing recently.)

I've been excitedly looking forward to Alien vs. Predator. Then tonight I saw a commercial for it and caught something I hadn't heard before. It is PG-13. My reaction was, "It's PG-13?! OMG It must be horrible!"

I know there are people who refuse to see anything less than an R rated film because they can't believe PG-13 and lower could offer them anything. They are snobs. I'm not one of them. I'll even watch a G film if it interests me. But Alien vs. Predator? No film in either series had ever been anything less than R. It's hard to imagine how this film could stoop to PG-13 and be faithful to its predecessors. It's hard to imagine how a film by such obvious sell outs could be any good at all.

What a blatant attempt to reach a wider teen audience and their parents' disposable income. I guess it never occurred to them that R ratings aren't much of a handicap for most teens. If they want to see a film they are going to get in there. Meanwhile, the studio is alienating (no pun intended) their core audience. What happens if the kids don't care and the people who cared are totally turned off? You get the soon-to-be flop that is Alien vs. Predator.

There's quite an argument going on over at the Internet Movie Database forums and elsewhere about this whole PG-13 thing. The consensus seems to be, sure it will probably be garbage but they'll pay to see it anyway. Once I see one I have to see them all but that doesn't mean I'm going to pay to see it in a theater. I don't know if I want to see it anymore. Maybe I'll save my movie dollars for Exorcist: The Beginning instead. At least that is still rated R. (Though it has it's own controversies.)

The official Alien vs. Predator website is running a poll for who you think will win the battle. My thinking is that the Aliens are functionally just big insects, ant-like in their ways. There's not a lot of intelligence there. By contrast, the Predators are highly intelligent humanoid creatures who dedicate their lives to hunting. Now really, who's going to win, the ant trail or you and your can of Raid? The Predators should win hands down. I mean, come on, for the last 4 movies one woman has kicked the Aliens' butts no matter how many of them there were!

That said, the official poll has most people choosing the Aliens. Aliens 2,093,697 to Predators 1,670,482 at the time I was there. The only thing that amazes me is that there are 3,764,178 other nerds out there besides me who actually took the poll. (Unless there's just me and two 12 year-old hackers warring with automated software to pump up their own side. No, that's right, those two have already been hired by the Democrats and the Republicans to tamper with the electronic voting machines. My bad. The Alien vs. Predator poll is totally clean.)

Comments

bakerstreet

on Aug 04, 2004

I have taken my seven year old to see several PG-13 movies this year. In my opinion the ratings are a bunch of crap these days. You find very, very adult-oriented, even sexually suggestive dialog in G-rated "kids" movies, and then they slap movies like Harry Potter with PG ratings. I don't get it.

You'll also find that the new Yu-Gi-Oh got a PG rating for scary combat and monster images." People really need to re-arrange their priorities, I think.

Mr_Frog

on Aug 04, 2004

No, that's right, those two have already been hired by the Democrats and the Republicans to tamper with the electronic voting machines. My bad. The Alien vs. Predator poll is totally clean

Hah! That's too funny. I was looking forward to AvP too (Yeah, the Predators will use the Aliens to wipe their collective asses with them), but I have to agree with BakerStreet. The ratings system is so skewed anyway...I've seen sexual situations in a PG-13 movie. Is that something you really want your 13,14,15-year old to see? I'll likely go see it anyway, because I'm a fan of both series.

The movie I'm waiting for: Spongebob. He'd kick both the Predators' and the Aliens' asses together. And look good doing it.

-- B

Gene Nash

on Aug 05, 2004

Maybe I am making too big of a deal out of it. I've heard other people say recently that now PG-13 is like R, etc. (Heck, I remember saying that in the 70's. -- I was a hip child.

) And I've certainly been surprised by some of the language, etc. allowed in PG-13 films lately. It used to be "f--k" was an instant R. I think I saw a PG-13 recently that had the word, though.

I'm trying to think of another series where all the previous films were R but the most recent was PG-13. I know there are some, I just can't remember them. It might sway the discussion one way or another.

As for AvP, I still can't see a PG-13 film delivering what I want from this movie. I still think the intensity, action, and horror (there are humans trapped in the middle of it all, after all) can't be achieved in a PG-13 film. They were saying at IMDB that some things will just be done off screen instead of on, or that instead of seeing an alien kill a person you'll see the alien's back while the killing is done out of view in the front. "Wait for the R-rated special edition DVD," they say. I don't know, though. I want the thing to be so thematically dark and mean that there's no way anyone would ever imagine letting a child see it, even with the gore done discretely out of sight. I want a level of psychological terror that would drive a 13 year old insane, darn it! (Okay, so I watched the original Alien long before I was 13, but you get what I mean.)

Some other people on IMDB said, "Well they show things from the other movies on TV now so if it's okay for TV why would it be getting an R?" (These are paraphrases, not direct quotes.) My response is, they showed the goriest scenes from Alien on TV at the time of its release but it still had a contemporary R. (That year's horror and SF awards, which was shown on television, showed several of the goriest scenes from Alien, including the creature through the chest, completely unedited that year.) They just re-released Alien recently and I think it was still R. It's a false argument. I believe all the previous films would still be rated R even if made today. Which leads me to think AvP has probably been watered down for the kiddie masses. Maybe not to the Star Wars point where Lucas has been making extended toy commercials since Return of the Jedi, but still watered down.

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