AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)

Strong and Moving!

The movie's neither hopeful in contrived ways, nor hopeless in different contrived ways. Somehow it manages to be wonderful

It's a movie as timely as it is provocative and amazingly, for much of its running time, it is weirdly funny.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

You would think that a crossover between the "Alien" and "Predator" franchises would be interesting, right? Well, no. It failed."Alien vs. Predator (AVP)" wasn't terrible like "Alien 3" or "Alien Resurrection", but it really was not good. The only redeeming aspects of it were the action was solid, and the special effects were well done. Other than that, the chatacters are not really worth caring about, the movie was slow paced, and the Alien and Predator barely fight each other. In fact, there were clones of the Alien and the Predator. To me, there should of just been one of each and they could've made a story about the two creatures battling each other from start to finish.Not very good, but check it out if you want.

This is a pretty epic installment to both the alien and predator franchises, even for a PG-13. I don't understand why it was hated on. Some fans of Alien and Predator may complain because of lack of gore, but they did get away with Aliens getting their faces split in half or Predator head explosions. I think it would have fared better if it was and R-rated film, but then again, the sequel was R-rated and that one didn't do too well either. I dunno why people dislike it, Nostalgia Critic reviewed it saying "It is overall worth watching." And there are tons of worse movies getting 4-star reviews, so yeah, I blame the economy. At least try it, but I do warn you, It starts out a little slow.

From the review scores it would seem a lot of people were disappointed with this first installment in the AVP franchise. I counter that the setting and story are almost perfect for the scenario of the film - Aliens fighting Predators, in a sort of earth game reserve, with unwitting humans caught in the middle. The film moves fast and there's not a lot of fluff or wasted scenes. Every story element advances the viewer faster and faster to the bloody battles that are the whole reason for "alien vs predator" and for the most part, they don't disappoint. Predator and Alien species seem more then evenly matched and it's hard not to simply want to see the two creatures destroy each other - which they very nearly do with the crew of an antarctic research team caught in the middle. Is it the best Alien or Predator film, certainly not. However for die-hard AVP fans there's plenty here to like. I was a fan of the dark horse comics series, (at one point Dark Horse most popular comic book)and there are elements from several of the comics present, in this competently made and reasonably suspenseful story.

For me, it was an okay film, it was well directed and has pretty good action sequences. The scenes with the human characters are a little dull, but you can care about them sometimes. The dialogue isn't too good, but the action sequences are amazing and the practical effects are awesome. I liked the way the facehugger eggs opened up, how the actual aliens and predators look, even the queen looks impressive. Usually with such a small budget but with enough of a budget, you can do so much with practicality. The CGI does look bad, but that just means there's more room for practicality. Paul W. S. Anderson did such a good job at trying to make a good film, its hard not to respect him for that. Again, the writing isn't that great. Not great writing, but not the worst either. The climax of the film is the best part. Seeing the queen battle the predator and our main star makes for good visual storytelling. The set design? Just great! The sets look so real. It looks like they're in a pyramid built by predators. But what really gets me is the different styles of writing in the pyramid. In this universe, humans clearly did learn writing from the predators, with the Aztec and Cambodian writing (supposedly) things get kinda confusing, because these are two different styles of writing. So how do you blend the two together?Well that's my review of AVP. If you're a typical film-goer just looking for two aliens fighting, you're gonna get it. It's just really late in the film so you can't do a whole lot with it. But if you're an Alien/Predator fan, you might not like this film. Although, I would prefer to spend more time with our main human characters rather than watch mindless fighting between our two title.