“You’ve got to do something different”: the films Paul WS Anderson called “genius movies”
A lengthy directorial career doesn’t necessarily have to be defined by top-notch movies that win widespread acclaim and compete for the most prestigious prizes in the business, as Paul WS Anderson has spent the last 30 years proving.
Without a shred of malicious intent, it’s unlikely the filmmaker will ever find himself competing for Academy Awards. To his testament, though, he found a niche, and he’s stuck to it ever since, keeping himself working for decades and regularly finding his work and making a killing at the box office.
He made his debut on 1994’s grounded crime drama Shopping, but ever since then, Anderson has been a genre guy through and through. More specifically, he seems to be near the top of the list whenever a bestselling video game property is being developed for the big screen.
The director has gone on to wield the megaphone on Mortal Kombat, four of the six Resident Evil movies starring wife Milla Jovovich, and Monster Hunter. The former was the highest-grossing console-to-screen film ever made for a while, and Resident Evil is the top-earning video game franchise of all time, so he’s found plenty of success.
The best entry in his filmography is Event Horizon, though, which overcame its initial box office catastrophe to become a perennial cult favourite, but arguably the most disappointing of all was Alien vs Predator. It seemed a home run on paper to take two iconic extra-terrestrials and pit them together in a fan-baiting battle for supremacy, but the end result was disappointing, to say the least.
Watered down to a PG-13 rating for the sake of earning more money, the bloodless beat ’em up didn’t even make the most of its central premise, a sin many supporters of both Alien and Predator found unforgivable. Understandably, for someone wading into those waters, Anderson bowed down to the films that gave him the opportunity to begin with.
Referring to Ridley Scott’s Alien, James Cameron’s Aliens, and John McTiernan’s Predator as “genius movies,” Anderson explained to the BBC that he was trying to put his own spin on something inimitable. “You’ve got to do something different with it, and make a slightly different movie,” he said. “So in a way we were definitely making an Alien and a Predator movie, but a different one from the one the other directors had made.”
It was certainly a different kind of movie for both Alien and Predator in that it was lacking in the action, thrills, suspense, and terror that had made the two 20th Century Fox properties titans of sci-fi and horror in the first place. It was the weakest instalment in either franchise up to that point, but at least it was a record taken away rather sharpish when the follow-up Alien vs Predator: Requiem turned out to be exponentially worse.
