The two directors Paul WS Anderson hails as the “gods of filmmaking”
A lengthy career in cinema isn’t always marked by critically acclaimed films that grab all the Oscars during award season. Sometimes, it’s simply making what you love on the budget you can find and being happy that a very niche audience might enjoy them. This is the very same way in which Paul WS Anderson has kept working over the decades.
After his more grounded debut with the crime drama Shopping, Anderson became a genre director, mostly creating blockbuster adaptations of bestselling video games. Most notably, he directed the first four of six Resident Evil films, which has gone on to become the top-earning video game franchise of all time. Before that, he created the highest-grossing video game to film adaptation with Mortal Kombat, and more recently came Monster Hunter.
So, while Anderson might not be earning an Academy Award anytime soon, it’s safe to say he’s found his version of success. However, there is one entry in his filmography that can truly be regarded as a crime against cinema: Alien vs. Predator. What on paper could have been a major success with two of cinema’s best bad guys of all time was a PG-13 mess.
Trying to capitalise on young people who would be eager to see the film, it was watered down to fit the younger rating and what is left is a bloodless bore that lacks the suspense, action and terror of its predecessors. However, Anderson understood the scrutiny he was up against, taking on two of the most iconic extraterrestrials in cinema history and who he refers to as the “gods of filmmaking”.
“I don’t think it would be possible for me to respect people like Ridley Scott or James Cameron more than I already do. They’re gods of filmmaking. That was something we were very aware of when we were making this movie,” he explained to the BBC. Being two of cinema’s most prolific and iconic filmmakers, Scott and Cameron were two huge shoes to fill, and Anderson knew that. It would be hard not to unless you’d been living under a rock.
Anderson was aware of how difficult other directors had found it to fill those shoes. After Scott’s instant classic Alien and James Cameron’s equally beloved Aliens came several disappointing entries into the Alien franchise. Some would say that even Scott struggled to match his original film with his own three recent follow-ups. The same can be said for John McTiernan’s Predator, which really was the only great instalment in that list.
So Anderson was incredibly aware of the risks of taking on not one but two huge franchise movies, “When you’re looking at franchises where very good directors have come in and have failed to follow in the footprints left by Cameron and Scott and John McTiernan.” Sometimes, even David Fincher isn’t good enough, as with Alien 3, and there’s nothing like that to put the fear of god in you.
However, despite his knowledge of the difficulty of the task, Anderson went ahead and did it anyway, which is nothing if not ballsy. But it didn’t really pay off. While Alien vs. Predator was a box office hit – it would have been surprising if it wasn’t – it was critically panned, making it the worst entry into either franchise. That was until its sequel, Alien vs. Predator: Requiem. So if Anderson can say nothing else to his gods of filmmaking, at least he can say his film wasn’t the absolute worst.
