An Underrated Movie that Lives Up to the Franchises that Spawned It

Rating: 8/10 (6 March 2005)

Alien vs. Predator has been given crap by avid fans of both the Alien and Predator franchises ever since Fox gave the go for Paul Anderson to direct it. As bad as people say he is, Anderson is no where down to the level where Uwe Boll is, but that's another story. Although his interpretation of Resident Evil was bad in my eyes, I gave Paul the run of the doubt and sat down to watch AvP the day it came out.
The beginning of this movie kind of reminded me of how Jurassic Park opened, with the main characters being gathered by an old man who's head of a company. However, this isn't any run in the park with the raptors. Underneath a small island off the coast of Antarctica, a pyramid has been discovered.
Lance Henriksen plays Charles Bishop Weyland, the head of Weyland Industries (providing two nods to the Alien series: Henriksen played the android Bishop in the second Alien movie, Aliens, and Weyland-Yutani was the evil company who always wanted their mittens on an Alien), has assembled a group of scientists, oil drillers and mercenaries to stake the claim. Sanaa Lanthan is Alexa Woods, a mountaineer and environmentalist requested to guide the team. Raoul Bova is Sebastian de Rosa, an archaeologist. They and others make their way to the pyramid, where someone, namely the Predators orbiting Earth above, have already tunneled to. From then on, the crap hits the fan.
The pacing in AvP is excellent for a movie of its short length (100 mins). Nothing drags on, and lighting and sound are used to their highest potential. CGI is not overly used, just for some long or fast motion shots where it's required. In other words, almost every shot of the monsters you see is a man in a suit. And good suits at that. Tom Woodruff Jr., the man in the Alien suit since the equally underrated Alien3, plays all the Aliens, specifically Grid, a heavily cut-up Alien with a sadistic edge to it (providing a throwback to the interstellar psychopath of the first Alien movie). Ian Whyte honours the late Kevin Peter Hall, who played the Predator in both Alien movies, as Scar, a young extraterrestrial hunter trying to ascend the ranks of its people.
Overall, AvP does not get the respect it deserves. Fans bash it for not being as scary, but that's not really giving the film credit. The Alien series ran out of scares after Alien3, with the unneeded fourth installment, Alien: Resurrection. The Predator movies provided me with more of a "Wow" factor than any fear in particular. With this in mind, Anderson capitalized on the action, proved in a particularly excellent sequence where the pre-scarred Grid takes on one of Scar's hunting buddies. Anderson has made a great movie, which although not as scary as the Alien Quadrilogy, still holds a bright candle up to.
See AvP. It grows on you . . . or at least impregnates you with an Alien fetus. Sorry.