Something like this is hard to rate

Rating: 7/10 (16 November 2004)

Being a die-hard fan of both Alien and Predator movies, the prospect of combining both in the same movie is very alluring. While the sheer charisma of the Predator creatures (created originally by Jim and John Thompson) carries a long way, there are multiple reasons why this film does not reach the final distance. The biggest flaw in my opinion is the running time of 90 minutes. There is simply no way you can completely deliver the story successfully in that time without compromising the available potential of it.
Paul W.S. Anderson, the director, takes (voluntary or forced) disturbing shortcuts too many times. Particularly, the pacing in the sequence where the Italian archaeologist explains with his lightning speed interpretation of the ancient wall-markings the history of predator-alien-ancient civilizations on earth is just lousy. That is just one example of not-so-great pacing of the film. I liked Anderson's Resident Evil because of its straight-forward style that does not spell everything out for you -- action that trusts audience's wits at least to some extent. AVP needs to spell out everything so that nobody misses a thing. Admittedly, the Italian guy is the one explaining everything (and BTW, there are such people in real life as well), still it manages to destroy the joy of figuring things out yourself.
I have heard reports of studio pressure to modify the end product quite a lot (less visible violence & gore to get a PG-13 rating, at least). I am hoping that the real thing will be released on DVD sometime in the future as I also witnessed very good action sequences and suspense in the movie. Many reviews complain the lack of character development in AVP, but that is a minor concern in my opinion - humans play the third fiddle in this one anyway.
A low seven is the verdict. Hope to see the dir.cut some day for higher ratings.