AVP: Absolute vapid piffle!

Rating: Null/10 (30 September 2004)

My mother used to tell me, 'If you can't say anything nice about something Noel  shut the hell up!' I never was able to live up to her high standards!
AVP my friends, is an unmitigated disaster.
If one were to rank the two franchises in order of merit, one would probably end up with the following. ALIENS, ALIEN, PREDATOR, ALIEN 3, PREDATOR 2, ALIEN RESURRECTION, ALIEN 2 (lets see who's alert here  there IS an ALIEN 2, I have a copy!) Now not everyone might agree with this order. I will concede 1 and 2 are interchangeable. AVP however ranks somewhere after PLAN 9 FROM OUTER SPACE!
'Loopy' doesn't cover it. Considering the events are taking place some seven years after Danny Glover escaped without a singe, despite being in the immediate nuclear-powered wake of the departing Predator craft (huh? did they come back during a lull in the ratings period?) surely someone in this admittedly dumbass search party would be thinking 'God these critters look vaguely familiar?' Meanwhile, at the other end of the time-line, would not data-records of the AVP encounter have survived until 3946? the year that Ripley blew deep-space insurance premiums out the window, when she fried the Nostromo, just 57 years before she stepped up in class and nuked LV 426.
Anderson is a tried and tested hack, the guy you call-in when you want a brain-dead popcorn movie in release. I personally resent his being given the opportunity to bury two sci-fi legends. What were the producers thinking? Was ANYONE thinking? Very much on a par with THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICKULE in terms of lacking meaningful scenes as opposed to excessive Dolby destruction, AVP is so damn dark, the viewer needs a light saber to see what the Hell's going-on in places.
So wrapped up in his attempts to link Egyptian, Inca and Cambodian (huh?) pre-history with modern Predator-hype, the audience is left gasping at the plot's unoriginality. Even a cursory glance at the Predator hieroglyphs enables one wannabe stormtrooper-cum-Indiana Jones to regale the audience with the entire Predatorial dynastic history. Sheesh!
Meanwhile Anderson and his mega-financed bunch of third-year film-makers are trying to make up their minds whether in fact they are actually shooting an ORIGINAL movie or simply blending a remake of ALIENS, CUBE, FROM DUSK TILL DAWN, PREDATOR 2 and KRULL to name but five derivative sources. The script is abysmal, the actors lack-luster and completely overshadowed by the digitised mayhem. When your best actor is a guy the wrong side of 60 in the twilight of his career, things are serious! Perhaps Henriksen has plans of his own to clone himself for future sequels. He sure as hell looked so old here I was wondering if he had actually died mid-shoot and they had digitised his last few scenes. VAN HELSING proved better than most, the fallacy of digitisingread my lips guys.it just doesn't work. The only two films have used CGI to virtual perfection are JURASSIC PARK and GLADIATOR. Those pesky aliens running amok up and down the Inca pyramid here made THE SCORPION KING seem like a class-act!
Did Ridley Scott need CGI for ALIEN? James Cameron for ALIENS or John McTiernan for PREDATOR? No, and that is why those films were so damn good. The creatures looked real. They were THERE! But there again, who but an idiot would speak of Anderson in the same breath as those other three meticulous directors  craftsmen not journeymen.
Having said all that, the film could have been a winner in different hands and with some more hands-on casting. Well, toss in a decent script, some intelligence and a bit of sunlight maybe.
The last scene was puerile, illogical, crappily shot and edited and absolutely par for the course given the previous 99 minutes.
To summarise: A disappointing, inept, underwhelming and ultimately insulting episode in the lives of two of our favorite extra-terrestrial soapies.