A great movie for fans of the Alien and Predator films and AvP comics and games

Rating: 5/10 (18 January 2007)

As a fan of both the Aliens and Predator films, and especially the Alien vs Predator PC games, I thought AVP was a great movie. It wasn't perfect but it's far from the over-exaggerated garbage that most reviews seem to feel it is. Ideally, the Alien Vs Predator movie should have been set in the Aliens timeline, on some colonial world with the marines in the center of the conflict. When I first heard that AVP would be set in present day Antarctica, I thought that would be the biggest mistake of the film. But I think it worked out great. I especially love how the film establishes the beginning of the powerful and ominous entity later known only as "The Company." I've heard a lot of people complain about Lance Henriksen being in this film as though it breaks continuity with the previous films, but I think it works to establish continuity as it was intended to. Henriksen plays Charles Bishop Weyland, the founder of the Weyland corporation and the person that the Bishop android would later be modeled after and whose descendant would try to coerce Ripley into helping the company. The film begins with Weyland's company discovering a pyramid in Antarctica and building a team of scientists to go be the first to discover it. Meanwhile the predators are on their way to begin a hunt. They show up and resurrect a queen alien that's been kept frozen inside the pyramid. The queen starts producing eggs for the unsuspecting explorers walking into the pyramid. The characters are all pretty forgettable canon-fodder that get killed faster than they should. To the credit of the director, some effort is clearly made to develop the characters, but the very nature of the film restricts the amount to which one could do so. This movie is Alien Vs Predator after all, so a lot of it is going to be about them. My biggest complaint with the characters is that the one woman who brings a gun, which is pointed out in a great scene, never gets a chance to use it before being arbitrarily killed. The aliens look great in this movie and I love the idea of the hero alien with the cross-hatch markings on its head. Now the problem with the aliens is that they grow from facehugger to chestburster to full grown xenomorph in a matter of minutes rather than hours or days as in the previous films. This fact is made even more prominent by the fact that the pyramid changes every ten minutes, so it only takes about twenty minutes for the entire xenomorph life cycle. But the length of the alien life cycle is never really specified in any other film so one could assume that it varies depending on conditions. And, even though twenty minutes is a bit ridiculous considering the amount of growth they go through, it's a movie; it doesn't have to be perfectly believable. If this is the only complaint one could have with the aliens, then it's not enough to ruin the movie, unless you're the kind of person who wants to hate this movie. Then there's the predators. I'm not sure what's wrong with them exactly. They just seem to be too big. I don't think they're really much bigger than in the other predator films but they just seem bigger. It especially seems that they are too thin at the waist and too wide at the shoulders. But this is a minor complaint and barely noticeable if you're not obsessing over it. Now we come to the meat of the film: the fights. The big problem with the fights is that they happen to fast with the camera too close and shaking. This is something that's become all too common in a lot of action movies lately. Every new action movie has to be faster and more intense than the last. So to make it more intense, let's put the camera right into the action, so now you can only see an arm or a leg flailing about. But that's not intense enough, so let's shake the camera so it seems like there's more happening. All these things combined together make for a bit of a mess. But, again, I don't want to over-exaggerate this. It's not as though the entirety of the fights do this, just some parts of them. The rest of the fights are great, and there are some really clever things that we've never seen before (I especially love the slow motion facehugger scene). And that's about the extent of complaints one could have with this film. As I said, overall, this is a great movie for fans of the Alien and Predator franchises, unless you're the kind of obsessive fan who wants to hate the film before you even see it and who is going to get hung up on some small issues.