for hard core Alien or Predator fans only

Rating: 3/10 (14 August 2004)

As a fan, I had to see it, but I think it was the worst of the seven Alien/Predator films. It's not so much those two put together as a combination of Jurassic Park and Stargate. It borrows so much of the premise and plot points from those two movies. The dialogue is atrocious, the scenes are completely cliche, put together from other action films in the last few years. The sound is probably the worst, lots of cheap "gotcha" sounds designed to make you jump out of your seat for no reason, like something as loud as a gunshot going off when someone lights an emergency flare in the darkness, and because of that it's the first film I'd say is ruined by watching it on the big screen. It would be hard to overblow the sound on a television.
All of this could be forgiven, of course, if the scenes of fighting between the aliens and the predators were enough. They're the best part, they ARE definitely very cool, but there's not a whole lot of them considering the movie's title. The predators spend a lot of time slaughtering humans at first, which makes no sense considering they built a gigantic temple in humans were supposed to breed aliens for them to hunt. Humans are bait, not prey.
The film contradicts a lot of what we learn about aliens in the first few alien movies. It takes place in 2004, and yet in Aliens the humans claim they've never come across anything like the aliens in several hundred catalogued worlds. Also the founder of the android company, played by Lance Henriksen, is depicted, and the inside elbow to the audience is that in the future, all the androids were made to look like him, the company's founder, yet they only looked like him AFTER they looked like the Ian Holm android in Alien, so HE would presumably be one modeled after the founder. It's consistency errors like this which can turn off die hard fans. There are others completely within the realm of this film which may turn off fans who don't care about that, like the idea of pre-Egyptian humans basing their calendar's zero year on Jesus' birth thousands of years in their future, and Aztecs having a base 10 (metric) timekeeping system but using modern base 60 (standard) seconds and minutes, and I'm not sure an experienced mountaineer (the team leader) would rely on a cheap watch compass right at the south pole. It would be best if the movie just refused to try and come up with a detailed explanation for most of that.
The characters aren't that likable, even Lance Henriksen this time, and he's the only brand name actor in the thing. See it for your Alien/Predator fix, but not for full price.