A Pointless Cash-In

Rating: Null/10 (9 September 2004)

I really wanted to like this film. I really did. I wanted it to be a summer blockbusting, action packed roller-coaster with plenty of action-hero one-liners and inventive set-pieces. The film I saw was a pointless and really rather dull franchise cash-in from pointless and really rather dull writer/director Paul Anderson, which wheezes it's way towards the end credits.
Witty, insightful, character-building dialogue is dropped in favour of dry and unconvincing exposition, our heroes work out complex mathematical puzzles in seconds explaining them in over-long, plot intensive, pseudo-scientific jargon. The poor characterisation and weak dialogue is compounded by an uninteresting story, which is muddled and particularly badly plotted.
There's no real challenge for the human cast to take on - nothing to involve the audience. The humans get in the way a lot, stumbling into Alien lairs, walking into the Predators (forgivable since the Predators use their invisibility-cloaking thingy).
The Aliens fight the Predators and vice-versa. And that's about it. The facehuggers, chestbursters and Alien Queens are all here, but the final mix is well below par - the originating films (and in the case of 'Alien' we're going back over 25 years here, people) are far more entertaining than this join-the-dots concoction.