Disappointingly unoriginal, but visually nice.

Rating: 3/10 (26 January 2010)

The visuals in this piece are, for the most part, stunning! Probably a little too much unnecessary CGI (E.G CGI faces never look real, masks would've been more convincing) but on the whole the 'world' James and his visual team have created is quite spectacular. I don't feel the 3D version really added much, I remember seeing 3D in the 80's and it was equally patchy.
So the visuals get a couple of stars, the other one goes to Sigourney and Zoe for their actually quite convincing performances, unfortunately this is where the good news ends as Sam Worthington's performance is over contrived and awkward, Stephen Lang as the colonel would have been better cast in the A-Team or Rambo for his OTT stereotypical portrayal of a military leader.
But the originality of this piece is the biggest downfall. Design wise everything is stolen from other films, the gyro-copters are from terminator and the 'walkers' are from alien. Most of the environment and half of the so-called story line has been extracted directly from Princess Mononokee so nothing new at all and the 'human-exploitation-of- aliens' piece has been tackled in episodes of Star Trek since time began. I even think they managed to squeeze the presidents speech from Independence Day into the middle somewhere.
So in short, if you limit yourself to blockbusters you might like this because it's extremely easy to watch and requires little brain power, however if you're looking for something even remotely challenging or interesting I'd give this one a miss.