Alien Vs Predator Details

Enjoyable and Interesting

I am a hard-core fan of both the Alien and the Predator films, so when I found out that hollywood were mixing the two, I desided to be optemistic, afterall, it had already been done with games and books.

The film doesn't follow on with the Alien of the Predator films, and alot of the diologue is stolen from other films (look out for the line from True Romance!), but I did enjoy the film.

The film is about a rich guy (who made the Bishop robot) who finds a pyramid under the ice in antartica. So he gathers a group of people (includeing the guy who played Spud in Trainspotting) and ventures towards the primid. When they get there, they acsidentally unfreeze a queen alien and the predators come down from the stars and, as the title would suggest, a big fight between Aliens and Predators kicks off. Some great bits, includeing an acid-blood spreying Alien.

The creatures are really well done and hold all of their original charatreistics, although the Preators no longer record snippets of conversation.

It is an enjoyable film, and the 'bullet-time' face-hugger leaps were pretty dam cool, and I would give it 3 1/2 stars, but I cant, so I'll just give it 3.

[Highly rated reviewer]

Tomb Raider meets Alien Vs Predator

Paul Anderson is not my favourite director. I never forgave him for SHOPPING, my skin still itches. I found EVENT HORIZON really interesting, but ultimately empty and very unscary. I can't remeber which MORTAL COMBAT he did because watching paint dry is considerably more gratifying. So Anderson somehow got his hands on not one but two franchises combined, and promptly rewrote the script, which when you consider his previous films is a recipe for something not very good really. He makes the Predators and Aliens meet on Antarctica in a very Tomb Raider-ish pyramid set. He tries to explain a whole mythology of why this set up exists, but you feel the backlog of the previous six films is weighing this one down. Predator is set in the 1980's, Predator 2 in an anarchic 21st century, and the Alien franchise is set in the space-travelling future. So setting this on Earth in the 21st century (ie modern day) is a very contemporary idea which doesn't really fit into either franchise. The film's effects are very good, the sets are superb, but the characters are very weak (I miss Swarzenegger and Weaver), and the story - such as it is, stretches believability to its limits. There are also logic problems with things like the gestation period of the Aliens inside humans (the film fluctuates between almost instantaneous rebirth to waiting several hours). This shouldn't happen in a franchise so heavily established. Ultimately, the personality of the Alien has been ignored for the Predator (maybe because they are more humanoid in shape) being given the lead, and changing identity from Predator, to Ally, to the hunted.

Anderson has mustered a film without a true identity, and I'm afraid it won't please fans of either franchise much.