Alien Versus Predator: Google-Padding Fan Review

One review described it as "Boring Versus Stupid" and I am inclined to agree. Now I went into this movie expect a far amount of cheese on my burger, but I got a lot more corn than I bargained for.

I've been a fan for many, many years of each franchise. I've seen all of the Alien and Predator movies, I've read the Alien, Predator, and Alien versus Predator books and comics; I even played with the action figures when I was a kid. I loved both PC games as well, and I would love to see an AVP 3 using the new kickass, super-scary Doom 3 engine, but that's just me. All of this background meant that I went into the movie as something of a fanboy, expecting little more than fucking aliens fighting fucking predators with some human meat inbetween. I got crap.

There are a few fundamental problems with the film itself. As a personal fan of the Aliens movie, I would have prefered a story set in the future using the Space Marines from the Alien franchise, which is what the comics and books do heavily. This movie was set in disappointly modern times. Okay, fine, I can live with that. Then came the next big blow... THE MOVIE Is RATED PG-13! Why?! None of the other films in either franchise, that's six fucking movies, were rated lower than "R." Not only that, I saw more gore in the Jurassic Park movies than AVP, which should never, ever happen. Finally, the biggest pre-movie mistake was the fact the movie had a woefully small budget, as evidenced by the length, acting, script writing, screen writing, editing, special effects, and just about every other feature of the film.

I knew the script would be bad, but the lines they had these people reading reached out of the screen and slapped me in the face. I thought Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom was hackneyed, but lines like "laugh it up" and repeating "sacrificial chamber" over and over... The acting didn't help either. I agree with the critic who said that this is the only movie that included the "Aliens" that I didn't feel a drop of sympathy for when they had showed chest bursters popping out.

Then there were the special effects, which should have been spectacular. The terrible set design continued to bring the film down. The "enormous" temple under the ice is so obviously a miniature that I imagined my action figures in strategic places around the Ziggaraut's base and sloping walls. It looked like something out of an MST3K film. In addition, the costumes were, not bad, but not nearly the quality of the "regular" franchise; paticularly the predators. You'll notice that the big dreadlocked warriors spend quite a bit of time "uncloaked" but always draped in heavy shadows so you can't see the poorly detailed masks or contrived armor. The film purosfully gives you TONS of shots of the aliens face and little inner mouth thingy- I swear, I spent half the film looking at an alien's face- but very little "action" shots.

That brings me to my last big point, the action. Everything else I could have put up with. The acting, the costumes, the special effects, if I could just see some kickass fight scenes. The movie is about 90 minutes long, and you spend the first HOUR waiting for the much anticipated battle between Alien and Predator. When you finally get there, it SUCKS! These are by far, the most pussy, inadequete, and retarded predators I have ever seen. It took a single predator, using multiple different bladed weapons, over ten minutes of battling with an alien, to come close to killing it... AND IT STILL FUCKING DIED WHILE THE GODDAMN ALIEN LIVED UNTIL THE END OF THE MOVIE! There are three predators in the movie, two of them only managed to kill the unnamed human extras. The last predator fucked some shit up, but that was in the last 15-20 minutes of the movie, and by that time, very little was salvageable.

There were a few redeeming factors, however, such as we finally got to see predators, well, moving like killers. The movie went to lengths to show them doing cool acrobatics, flips, and surprisingly graceful stunts as they used staves, claws, and their bare hands to fuck people up. In addition, they got the guy who played "Bishop" in the Aliens and Alien 3 to play Charles Bishop Weyland. I thought that was cool. Also, the special effects weren't all bad as the Predator ships were so sleek and deadly I wanted to make sweet love with them in the theater. I practically shit my pants when I saw the last predator do that flip stab thing to spear the queen at the end. But these moments are few and far between in a film that you are better off renting.