E.I.S.

Alien vs Predator: Requiem. Where Pregnant Women Die Horrible Deaths

The best thing I can say about AvP:R is that it represented a wholesale departure from 2004’s AVP. 20^th Century Fox presumably made every effort to find a director and a script that succumbed to none of the pitfalls of their first effort. They lifted their ban on the R rating, which was enough for most fans to declare it better than AVP before the movie even came out. The red band trailer that circulated online months before the movie hit theaters already showed an arm falling off, a small child getting face-hugged, a human head getting burned by sizzling alien blood, and a Predator with dual plasmacasters blowing peoples’ heads off. I, for one, was shitting my pants with anticipation for this movie. What I didn’t know was that the trailer included about half of the excitement of the full-length film. I digress, however, because a savvy moviegoer is met with similar disappointment with most films these days.

This being said, AvP:R isn’t as predictable as I thought it would be, and that is definitely something for which it deserves a bit of credit. For one thing, a nuclear bomb levels the entire town where the film takes place, which I think few people predicted; children and pregnant women get totally rocked by Aliens (the latter, in my opinion, in extremely bad taste); the army “comes to the rescue” only to be made to look like complete pussies, which was totally at odds with the current trend of armed forces hero worship in Hollywood; the obligatory hot blonde gets cut in half and pinned to a wall by a giant shuriken (Wow! I’m still wrestling with this one… truly a bold move). As a rule, I’d say that where AVP failed, AvP:R tended to succeed. That doesn’t mean it was a good movie. Oh, and I forgot one very important thing that they didn’t manage to fix: Nobody who saw the movie gave a single shit about any of the human characters or what happened to them.

I would be willing to trade back a few of the improvements in the other areas for a little, even a smidge, of empathy for the goddamn protagonists. But alas, the movie is practically structured toward the Predator being the hero. As a devotee of the Predator, I guess I was able to live with this. It terms of judging the film objectively, however, I feel like this was a huge problem. The Predator may have an honor code and might be trying to “clean up” a small town in Colorado, but a Predator character is never going to be relatable because we don’t know what the life of a Predator is like or what he might be feeling or thinking at any given time. Does he consider himself an interstellar janitor at this point or does he think his occupation is sacred and glorious? Who is to say? The humans, though pretty bland, are still comparatively full of juicy emotions that we understand and pretty much have to connect with in order to enjoy a movie.

The natural choice for a human-centered plot (operating on the assumption that the movie has to be set in fucking… Colorado) is for one or more of the human characters to be separated from their friends and for a rescue attempt to be mounted. In the movie we all saw, the humans are all in a cozy little group for the duration of the story, unless you count the douchebag sheriff that we are supposed to like but just… don’t. The brothers that lead the main team of survivors aren’t that horrible. I actually liked them. The problem is that the script didn’t allow them to perform any heroic actions. Of the two of them, it is never clear whether we are supposed to view the pizza boy or his ex-con older brother as the actual main character. The female soldier and her daughter are ineffectual when it comes to the plot and don’t really open up any themes or opportunities for dialogue that are worth exploring. They might as well have not been in the movie at all. As for the teenagers, they are allowed to stay because they provide opportunities for the Aliens to kill people. It would have been nice to get to know them somehow so that we care about their deaths instead of looking forward to them. In my opinion, the only character who I didn’t want to see get iced was the pizza boy. His lady friend was also not unwelcome, but we all know what happened to that poor thing.

Depending on how you prefer to look at it, the hot blonde who gets cut in half was either under or over-utilized. Apart from presumably dating a douchebag at the start of the film, she doesn’t really do anything to deserve her genuinely surprising and abrupt demise. I suppose she did take her clothes off at one point, but in such a movie one expects females to be rewarded for sultry behavior rather than being pinned to walls without their legs. As I hinted at previously, I don’t necessarily declare this moment in the film a mistake, because the fact that it has remained a talking point lends itself to the argument that it was in some way successful.

Only in a Strause brothers picture do people not receive the free pass typically granted to hot girls, pregnant people, and small children. I’m still not sure if realism or restraint is more important, but I am sure that the Strauses took the violence against these demographics a touch too far in AvP:R. The Predator isn’t guilty of any of the movie’s major affronts to human ethics and decency, as his slaughter of Generic Blonde Hottie was kind of an accident. It’s the Predalien hybrid that is largely to blame, and I for one would have been completely happy had the movie left that thing out completely and replaced it with a good old-fashioned Alien Queen. The Queen is just better. It’s bigger and probably harder to kill, it’s established in the source material and it doesn’t require the dubious fabrication of a whole new reproduction method that fans were always going to complain about. The throat fucking of innocent pregnant women could have been avoided entirely! Well, I suppose the possibility would still exist, but not in quite the same way… Shit. Continuing on the topic of the Predator’s relative innocence in ethical terms, I would like to divert the flow of this discussion to the depiction of the Predator(s) in the film.

Though the movie briefly features a number of other Predators (huge dumbasses who destroy their own vessel), the only one who matters is the dude who receives the distress call from the downed scout ship and visits Earth on a kind of cleanup mission. Presumably, his intent is to remove all evidence of the escaped Aliens’ presence on Earth. Strange, then, that this Predator decided to leave a conspicuous indicator of his own presence by skinning and hanging a policeman’s corpse in the forest right in the area where the community is conducting a search. This, though a ridiculous blunder, is pretty unimportant and doesn’t exactly ruin the movie.

The rest of the Predator’s decision-making and general performance is extremely badass and a 100% improvement from the debacle that was AVP. The Predator takes a number of xenomorph and human lives in ways that are far cooler than anything seen in AVP, and he actually displays some regard for efficiency in his approach to battle. Thank you, Strause brothers for at least understanding the nature of the creatures in the title of your film. I cannot stress enough how happy I was to be able to respect the Predator again. The ease with which he disposes of individual drones on his short-lived yet prolific killing spree is a welcome sight to those of us who favor the Predator over the Xenomorph.

The bias toward Predator in this movie is a little much even for me, however, as the dozens of drones provide little more than cannon fodder to a single heavily armed adversary. The way this plays out makes some degree of sense if you see this film’s Predator, known as “Wolf” in the fan community, as the seasoned veteran to the AVP Predators’ rookies. Those guys were just starting out and were basically chicken shit while this guy’s been in the game for a while and knows a thing or two about not being a bitch. Even with this consideration being made, the balance of the movie is not where it should be. The Aliens aren’t formidable enough. Their acid blood is a non-factor for most of the film, with the Predator never so much as recoiling away from it. This makes for a watchable film but doesn’t really makes sense in the context of the Alien canon, throughout which the acid blood is the stuff of constant nightmares.

I’ve mostly addressed improvements and simple differences up to this point, which is highly generous of me. At this juncture I think it’s about time I focus on why this movie is such a complete disaster, and only slightly better than AVP in my estimation. The main reason for this is that this time, they didn’t even try to make a good, complete film. The studio tweaked an idea they had already made money off of just enough to repackage it and slap it on a DVD jacket. With all the criticism I gave AVP, at least I was able to conclude that Anderson had something that could’ve worked and simply didn’t put the pieces together. With AvP:R, no such praise can be offered. It is a B-movie to the bone. The setting makes it into a farce before it even gets started, the slasher movie system of character elimination ruins the human element, and the ending is so cheap and uneventful that I can hardly believe it.

The improvements in special effects, creature concepts and design, and rating are canceled out by the fact that the filmmakers resigned themselves to making a movie that is comprised of a mixture of fecal matter, slime, blood, and cheese whose rightful place is in the straight-to-DVD section of your local Blockbuster. Ironically, it was one of the highest-selling DVDs of the year when it came out. After this, it is highly unlikely that another crossover film will ever be made. Some fans even declare this prospect a welcome one, as the first two films have threatened their fandom enough. Ridley Scott and Robert Rodriguez have thankfully taken the helm on the original franchises, and they seem intent on keeping them separate, which I am forced to conclude is a great idea. Predators was incredible and Prometheus, though apparently not directly featuring Xenomorphs, looks to be even better. I am extremely excited for these two directing powerhouses’ further contributions, with each confined to their own distinctly separate mythos. My grades for AvP:R are shown below.

Film Grade: D-

Fan Grade: C

Design Grade: B+

Design Highlights:

Predator Gear: This time, the design team for the Predators earned their paychecks. If I may be so bold, I believe the Predator in this film is better than the original 1987 Predator that Arnold encountered in Guatemala. His bio helmet is an improvement on all of its predecessors. Underneath the mask, his actual face is less pig-like than those seen in previous movies, and without changing the important facets of Predator biology. He is outfitted with a streamlined armor set that allows him to move better, and his weapons are as diverse as they are believable in their implementation in the movie’s array of poorly lit fight sequences. The exception would be the stupid Transformers­-esque power glove that he uses to clear his path out of the sewer. This is likely a case of the directors forgoing logic to get something onscreen just because they think it’s a cool idea. On the other hand, the dual plasmacasters, combistick, shurikens and wrist blades were all deployed to great effect and were redesigned effectively for this movie.

Predator Homeworld: This was a fan’s dream come true, and it lasted all of twenty seconds. We are treated to a fascinating look inside the Predator’s personal space, which includes a swivel chair complete with an awesome interactive holographic display that alerts the Predator to the distress call relayed by the scout ship. The Predator growls and approaches a wall lined with his enviable collection of bio helmets and exotic weaponry, from which he selects a few choice favorites before embarking in a small craft from a landing pad overlooking a dusty orange landscape dotted with rectangular buildings, all of which probably took the matte painters about three hours to complete. Despite the cursory treatment it is given, the homeworld scene was the highlight of the movie for a lot of hardcore Predator fans. Taken for what it is in the confines of the movie, it is not explicitly clear that this is the Predator homeworld, because the possibility remains that it is simply a planet that the Predator civilization has colonized. Considering the dominantly jungle terrain planet seen in Predators, the contention that the planet seen in AvP:R is even more dubious. It is possible that either planet is the true homeworld, or that neither of them are and that it has actually yet to be seen.

Design Low Points:

Predalien Hybrid: The hybrid is just a worthless idea. The idea that the Alien takes on some of the characteristics of its host species is a really cool one, but which traits of the Predator does the hybrid exhibit that distinguish it from the drones made from human hosts? Apparently, these traits are dreadlocks, mandibles, greater size, and (inexplicably) the ability to implant embryos via the mouth. This is just complicating something that doesn’t add anything to the movie. As I said earlier, the simple replacement of the hybrid with a classic Alien Queen would have gone a long way toward salvaging this movie. This would have provided a valuable opportunity to establish continuity between AVP and AvP:R by showing the retrieval by the Predators of the Alien Queen from the icy depths of the Antarctic (because I don’t think Aliens should be able to be killed from drowning anyway).

Gunnison, Colorado: I don’t need to explain why a rural town in the American southwest makes a bad setting for a science fiction film. This decision virtually guaranteed that the end product would be a complete clusterfuck.

AVP: The Film that Killed My Soul

It might seem illogical to begin my account of the franchise I love with Paul W.S. Anderson’s 2004 megaflop Alien vs Predator, but I fervently believe that it only gets better from here, and I’d rather not disappoint readers by addressing the classics at the outset and reminding them of the downward spiral that ensued. The expectations placed on this film were high, and disappointment was all but guaranteed. For one thing, enthusiasts tend to have a partisan attitude toward one of the two monsters and it’s difficult to make a crossover film that doesn’t visibly favor one species over the other.Though I’m sure that controversy still exists on this front, I think AVP clearly favors the Aliens. I will address my reasoning on this later in this section.

To be fair, it was always going to be difficult for a filmmaker to figure this crossover thing out in the event of a script being given the green light. The balancing act includes humans as well as the monsters, of course, and this was the basis of the most common and valid criticisms of AVP. Fans just weren’t made to care about the human victims/combatants as they had in the original films. Dutch was charismatic, powerful and believable as a challenger to the original Predator. Ripley was a revolutionary protagonist in Alien, and not just because she was a woman. She was, again, believable in every sense – courageous and headstrong but also appropriately vulnerable. Both characters have deservedly established themselves as action and science fiction icons.

Needless to say, there were no Arnolds or Sigourneys on the set of AVP. The film’s 50 million dollar budget made that impossible. The casting was obviously not the only thing affected by 20^th Century Fox’s stingy offerings to the production, however, with the film being shot in two and a half months and wrapped after four months of post-production due to budgetary concerns. This is not exactly a rock-solid excuse, however, when one considers that much better films like Neill Blomkamp’s District 9 were made on even smaller budgets with even lesser-known actors and managed to be much more compelling and even… (shit, this hurts) scarier. This is probably the worst thing I can say about AVP: that with an unrivaled bank of scary source material to draw from, it was still less scary than other sci-fi films like District 9 that didn’t even have scary in their mission statements. Also, just for perspective regarding the budget, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen cost 200 million dollars to make. I’m aware that these are different kinds of movies, with Transformers being a primarily computer graphics-driven picture and AVP being more focused on animatronics, costumes and props, but the gap seems completely unreasonable.

Fans also blamed the PG-13 stamp applied by 20^th Century Fox, who were presumably pandering to teen audiences with this fatuous mandate, but the problem runs much deeper than that. There are countless PG-13 films that are scarier than AVP, and there really isn’t much of an excuse for that. This has to have at least something to do with writing.

With this in mind, I don’t exactly think AVP is devoid of good writing on a micro level, as individual scenes remain (in my eyes) extremely cool and well constructed. The film’s techno-historical backstory, for instance, was about as creative an explanation for the crossover as could have been hoped for. What is missing is a strong focus on character, as the film follows the Weyland Corp. team according to the slasher movie model where the viewer is encouraged to take sides as to which human character(s) will make it out alive. This reduces the human element of AVP to a crude and uninteresting guessing game. The same might even be said of its Predator initiate characters. With the film having three of them, one correctly assumes from the outset that only one, if any, will survive the trials ahead. As for aliens, I think I am safe in my reasoning that not even the most adoring fan would form a bond with an individual drone. This leaves the movie without a rallying point for viewers to latch onto when everything goes to shit. As the humans panic when the pyramid swallows them up and the action begins to cut haphazardly between the dim-witted humans and the clunky, inept Predators, the viewer is left without a sense of the film’s priorities. By the end, fans and casual viewers alike are left hanging on what they hoped the film would deliver: suspense. This cements the film’s position as the most consummate failure in a strong field of contenders for that mantle that are addressed in this book.

My thoughts on AVP are not as negative as one might think based on what I have said up to this point. As hinted above, I believe Anderson was on to something with the backstory, the setting, and the structure of the initiation rite that he used as the set-up for the film. The only thing I would have changed in this regard is the time period in which the humans encounter the pyramid, because the colonial marines are simply missing from this movie and everyone wanted them to be in it. The plot already involves the Weyland-Yutani Corporation, so why not take one small step further and connect with the classic AVP scheme provided by the computer game?

Sci-fi fans want to see fucking plasma rifles and smart guns, not submachine guns and icepicks. The balance of power is intentionally slanted against the humans to such a degree that it makes for a one-dimensional set of battle scenes. The whole point of the alien is that they are almost impossible to kill even with futuristic weaponry (a fact that the Predators waste no time demonstrating). With no good weaponry at all, the humans would have been equally fucked had they been trapped in a pyramid with hungry grizzly bears. I might have enjoyed that movie more than the one that was actually made, because at least my expectations would not have been so high. To close on this side note, only minor edits would have been necessary to move the story’s events fifty years into the future, as the civilian world is not seen or addressed in any part of the film. Costumes and props would be the only areas that would require attention in effecting this kind of hugely impactful change in the movie. The marines are a big deal to most fans. Throw them a bone here.

But getting back to the positive stuff, I would like to drive home the idea that there was hope for this film, somewhere deep inside the heap of shit we were handed by 20^th Century Fox and their hired stooges. The basic idea is cool as hell: Underground pyramid with moving walls, young Predators in a rite of passage hunt, dormant Alien queen awakened as part of a centennial tradition, etc. I am a sucker for the kind of archaeological bullshit they used as the explanation for the Preds coming to Earth, and the flashback scene depicting the Preds as the gods of prehistoric humanity was fucking rad. Never mind the fact that the Italian/Spaniard/Portuguese guy who explains everything was able to decipher all this information in about thirty seconds of looking at runes in a language he didn’t know existed until that same day. That shit was cool. Though this part of the movie makes the Predators look like immense badasses who are on top of their shit, the rest of the movie does precisely the opposite.

As you can tell, I was deeply disappointed in how the Predators represented themselves in this movie. When their decisions, abilities and equipment are examined carefully, it is revealed that they are completely retarded. This is perhaps most readily shown in the long duel scene in which the “Grid” Alien ends the bout with a tongue-bite to the face of the Predator, who had actually been doing pretty well up to that point. He grabbed the Alien by its tail and flung it in a circle through stone pillars, cut off the tip of its tail (I’ll come back to this), and then subdued the xenomorph with his trusty net gun. Then the Predator decided to walk slowly and dramatically up to the temporarily restrained Alien, presumably thinking of killing it in a really cool-looking ceremonial fashion, but instead ends up getting tackled after the Alien’s acid blood burns through the net and the dumbass Predator is swiftly owned and dies like a bitch. I don’t think I’m alone in remembering myself seeing the end of this fight in the theater and simply thinking: “What. The. Fuck. Was. That.”

Predators are supposed to be intelligent and resourceful. In this fight, the Predator seems completely out of his element when either of these things is concerned, and fares much better when using brute force. This is not how it is supposed to be. The Alien is clearly better equipped for close quarters, and the Pred is supposed to rely on stealth and cunning. This is sci-fi 101 material and the millionaire Hollywood filmmakers entrusted with bringing it to an informed fan base pissed all over it. Furthermore, the Pred that dies in this fight seems pathetically ignorant of the function of its own equipment and how best to use it. At one point, while on the ground, he inverts his wrist blades and cuts off the tip of the Alien’s tail, and the blood melts the blades, rendering them useless. This is not only a poorly considered move by the Pred, but it also raises difficult questions about Predator equipment. Are the weapons acid-repellant or not? The shuriken used to behead the drone that interrupts Scar’s kill ceremony doesn’t seem bothered by the acid blood, and neither do the Preds’ spears, but it completely fucks the wrist blades? That doesn’t make any goddamned sense! The wrist blades are generally thought of as the Predators’ favored weapons, so it makes no sense at all for them to be susceptible to xenomorph blood while their other weapons are not. In AvP:R, the lone Predator’s entire arsenal appears to be acid-proof. It depresses me that the filmmakers don’t appear to even consider these things. It would have been great to see a film in which the Predators face the incredible disadvantage of having no acid-proof equipment. This would have given the screenwriter and special effects teams plenty of opportunities to showcase the resourcefulness and skill of the Predators while making the Aliens seem more formidable.

It would also be great to see a movie in which all of the Predators’ equipment is acid-proof. This would free up the Predators to use their melee equipment in more badass ways and allow greater range in the fight choreography. Problems arise, however, when you as the filmmaker forget what happened five minutes previously in your own movie and make some weapons acid-proof and others not. This is not one of the available options. Seriously, what the fuck.

Still on the topic of filmmaker and Predator ineptitude but also concerning the plot a little more directly, I must ask the following: What the fuck are the elder Predators thinking when they take “Scar” onboard with a chestburster inside him? Don’t they have equipment they could scan him with or something? The filmmakers clearly just wanted to end the film with the cheesy hybrid chestburster shot and were willing to do forgo all logic in order to get themselves to that point. An interstellar civilization isn’t likely to be guilty of the kind of oversight that will fuck them over to this degree. The Predator civilization appears to have been in contact with Xenomorphs for thousands if not hundreds of thousands of years and the proposition that they would allow a fallen comrade onboard after a battle with the most infectious life form in the galaxy without checking to see if he presents a danger to them is just fucking stupid. Again, the fan base for this kind of movie is highly informed and notices these things right away. The failure on the part of the studio and the crew to realize this important fact about the target audience when they made this movie is probably the central reason for its overall piss-poor quality and putrid reception.

I’ve addressed the Predators. As for the Aliens, I actually think they were done some degree of justice in the movie. The Alien animatronics and CGI were strong and hold up reasonably well even now, eight years after the film came out. The Queen was awesome early in the movie and the drones were about as imposing as they could be within the confines of such a silly script. Fans who favor the Xenomorph can’t complain about how the showdown played out, because the Queen and her hive clearly got the best of the adolescent hunters. Two of the Predators were killed rather easily without even being ganged up on, and the third was done in by a rookie mistake (you’re taking your helmet off? Seriously?). Oh well, you’ll have better luck next time, hunters. Oh, shit! Spoiler alert!

Overall, as a stand-alone film I am forced to give AVP a failing grade. Its poor reception by critics and fans was completely justified, and production decisions crippled it from the start. AVP was never going to be good. I might be crazy in my defense of the film, which is that there is a promising nugget in there somewhere that might have been salvaged with a few changes. We’ll probably never know if it was possible for this one to have turned out better. Though I fully admit to enjoying the film as a fan, I also completely condemn its actual quality in pretty much every respect. To put it openly, I think AVP is one of the worst movies released by a major studio in the last two decades. It just also happens to be one of my favorite movies. Hopefully fellow fans understand this seemingly irreconcilable coupling of opinions. One last upside I will close on is that AVP made enough on DVD sales for a sequel to be green-lit by Fox. Or at least I thought that was an upside until AvP:R came out.

[The grade below refers to my appraisal of the quality of the movie while attempting to remove my natural appreciation as a fan of the series. In other words, this is the objective grade.]

Film Grade: F

[The grade below is the grade I give the movie as an AVP fan, with an eye for the aspects that the general public probably doesn’t appreciate.]

Fan Grade: C

[As with every film in either franchise, the design changes made in the creatures, sets and costumes figure prominently in how the film is received by the fan community. We all obsess over the details – the Predators’ bio helmets, the ridges on the drones’ heads, etc. This is the kind of thing that saves fans from complete misery in the face of the realization that their movie totally sucks. The Design Grade is a reflection of my appraisal of these elements.]

Design Grade: C-

Design Highlights:

“Grid” alien: The net deployed by one of the Predators burns through the skin on its cranium, forming a sick acid-burned grid pattern on the head of the most successful drone in the movie. This is also a clever way for the filmmakers to allow the audience to recognize an individual drone that would otherwise be lost in a group of others that are indistinguishable.

“Scar” bio helmet: This helmet design echoed the original design and didn’t have any superfluous bells and whistles, which is good. I consider it a thoughtful nod to the original that the hunter with the classic bio helmet made it the furthest in the film and slew the most xenomorphs.

Weyland-Yutani logo: Granted, this isn’t a design element original to this film, but its inclusion is a much-needed lifeline to the source material.

Design Low Points

Predator Armor: The Predators look far too bulky, as if they are wearing the shoulder pads of an NFL linebacker. The classic, tribal design of the original Predator was flawless in its combination of streamlined heavy tech with raw muscle and ferocity. AVP’s chrome-plated, modernized Predators seem silly and sterile in comparison. The plasma cannons are about three times too big. The overall body proportions are so out of whack that they look cartoonish. The Preds’ movements are clumsy and oafish, and one is left wondering how such a dim-witted species rose to such technological heights. I hope for their society’s sake that the young Predators featured in this film are some of the biggest fuck-ups of their generation, because if that isn’t the truth their culture is surely doomed. Also, the elder Predators wear capes? Fucking… Why? I’m starting to wonder why I’m a fan of these guys at all. Could someone remind me? Oh, yeah – because they are fucking sick in every other movie. Pffew… I was worried there for a second.

Colorful Human Outfits: This might be a little nitpicky on my part, but it was infuriating to me how Weyland’s team wore colorful puffy coats into the pyramid, which is not exactly unrealistic, but is subconsciously distracting and just plain unnecessary. Why couldn’t the jackets have all been grey or black with a simple Weyland Corp. logo? Alien and Predator have no bright colors anywhere in them except for blood and they were totally right not to. In a production design sense it just doesn’t work to have huge blocks of primary colors on screen unless they are supposed to convey something other than “this character’s jacket is red” or “this character’s jacket is blue”. If there is one thing that I loved about Alien and Aliens, and I obviously respect those films a whole lot, it is the commitment of the production design to the gritty, stark and “lived-in” feel of the technology and the atmosphere. This was something I saw as a no-brainer to carry over to AVP and the filmmakers completely dropped the ball. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the human costumes.

Best Moment:

The best moment in AVP is a tough call. The “Scar” predator is behind all of the moments that might be considered, all of which occur in the same brief stint in the movie in which the Aliens don’t savagely own all in their path and make everyone (including the predators) their bitch. My personal pick is the nonchalant beheading of the skulking drone with the giant shuriken. After the xenomorph’s gooey skull falls satisfyingly to the stone floor, the Predator initiate sheathes his weapon with the corny yet awesome shing shing sound effect. Hell yeah.

(Source: imdb.com)

The follow-up to Christian web hero Jefferson Bethke’s “Why I Hate Religion, But Love Jesus”, has arrived. While the “Religion<Jesus” video seemed to be intended solely for Christians in an effort to expose religious hypocrisy, this one seems to target married people and couples in general. I’ll waste no time telling you why I think this video is vacuous and horrifyingly prejudiced, and it’s mainly that Bethke makes the claim that all marriages not based on Jesus are based on “something broken”. Were this true, the majority of marriages would be in this category, which leaves an awful lot of people out there wasting their precious time under the illusion that they share something meaningful with their spouse - children, life experiences, anything. In my opinion, any marriage that makes the lives of both partners richer or better in any sense is a successful one. Striving for an idyllic vision of marriage where partners don’t argue, have sex every night, and raise polite God-fearing mini-me’s is something we ought to abandon right now. Relationships are about shared experience, and most people do the best they can. It’s the kind of black and white attitude Bethke shows in this video that divides communities, nations, and the entire world: “love is only possible when you love jesus” may seem like an innocuous statement to someone who DOES love jesus, but there are people who fucking don’t. They just don’t, and there doesn’t appear to be any connection between that trait and how loving and compassionate someone can be. So Bethke fans, here’s my challenge to you: DON’T LIE ABOUT SHIT. Don’t say that your religion has a monopoly on happy marriages. Don’t say that without Jesus, nobody can really love their family. It’s insulting, not only to individuals, but to the very basic idea of humanity.

Bethke is way out of his jurisdiction here, and I think he needs someone near and dear to him to whisper in his ear and tell him to shut the fuck up. But given his fame, and the promise of more of these web disasters, he is probably making a little side cash off his new hobby, and he is thus unlikely to quit any time soon. Bethke just climbed through the ceiling of douchedom and is way out in the stratosphere. The air is thin up there… I wonder how long he can stay. Lamar Smith has joined the race and leap-frogged some of the heavy hitters, including newcomer Newt Gingrich, whose lofty promises to colonize the moon indicate his mind-blowing ability to prioritize.

MOST IMMENSE DOUCH OF 2012 PRIZE RANKINGS - JAN 27th

Bethke: 100%

Romney: 95%

Lamar Smith (creator of SOPA): 94%

Gingrich: 90%

Nic Cage: 75% - honorary participant

Mike “the situation”: 63%

John Mayer: 33%