Totally bland and dire. One for 12 year olds only.....

Rating: 3/10 (22 October 2004)

If you have a 12 year old little brother who has never seen any of the "Alien" or "Predator" films, show him AVP. He'll like it.
However if you were brought up on mature, cool films such as "Predator" or "Aliens" you should avoid this like the plague.
The film fails completely in some very basic aspects:
1) The Aliens should be f****** scary (like the originals....even Alien: Resurrection managed that to some degree!). Here they're not at all. That's a crime. 2) The Predators should be cool, with their gadgets and armour etc. They're not in AVP! 3) The temple?? Was it based on a rejected idea for "The Temple of Doom"? It just seemed like a way to split up the group of nobody characters so the monsters could pick them off. 4) The whole point of the film is to see Aliens fighting Predators, so it's pretty disastrous when the AVP fights are pish-poor. They're badly edited and filmed so you can't really see what's happening some of the time. And every single fight is mostly bloodless. Why skimp on the blood? The originals were pretty gruesome and they went down okay. Oh, I forgot. If you've got any gore you can't show it to the kiddie audience that this film is aimed at....... 5) It mucks about with the lore of the franchise. For example the Alien chestbursters should take days to be "born". Not 15 minutes.
6) Huge gaping plot holes you could fly the Predator mothership through. Why did they take assualt rifles into what they thought was a deserted temple? Anyone know? I don't! 7) I went to see this, despite the reviews, because I thought even if it was a bad film it'd still be engaging enough in a "so bad it's good" way. No chance. Not once did I ever care what was going to happen next. 8) To make something so bland from 2 of the most imaginative sci-fi franchises ever seemed like an impossible task, but Paul WS Anderson pulled it off, which is an achievement of some sort....
In short, they've taking the idea for what could have been a good "guilty pleasure" film and crushed all the life and soul out of it. Please don't watch it at the cinema or buy the DVD. It'll only encourage them to make more mindless rubbish like this.
2/10