Alien Vs. Predator Review

I went and saw the midnight showing tonight at my local college, and it was pretty crazy. The theater was extremely packed. I went with a group of friends and we couldn't find (4) seats together anywhere, so we ended up sitting in the very front row. Surprisingly it was actually neat sitting there, put us right in the action. I halfway ducked when the 2nd predator was swinging that alien around by it's head.

I've been waiting to see this movie for years and years. I've been a Predator fan since I was young, have read the novels and comic books, and seen both movies numerous times. I've been an Alien fan nearly as long. I watched the first movie as a child, and it was scary, but didn't really get me hooked. It was Aliens, the second film, which really got me hooked on them. So when they started producing novels and comics combining the two I was ecstatic to find out that they were making a movie. Little did I know it would take them over 10 years to create it, much like it was with Jason Vs Freddy.

The problem with these Versus movies (still haven't heard anything about Robocop Vs. Terminator, but I'm waiting) is that they have so many different scripts to choose from. As soon as one person pits two massive icons against one another, every Joe Shmoe who is a fan thinks they can write the best script for the movie.

These movie companies have to sift through dozens and dozens of scripts before selecting one which is faithful to BOTH series and will satisfy the fans. This of course, is no easy task. In Jason Vs Freddy they eventually narrowed down scripts until they found one which made the most sense for both series of films, and shot it. As you all well know, this didn't work too well. While the movie wasn't a complete letdown, it left a lot to be desired.

This is where I believe AvP excels. Instead of choosing a script in such a fashion, they combined many of the better scripts with existing novels, basing a lot of the story on the Predator culture which is widely accepted in used in almost all of the books, comics, and films.

Many people were making fun of the fact that a mighty Predator would befriend a human woman and actually help her escape. But what many people haven't done is read the novels, in which a doctor woman is befriended by a Predator after healing him from near death. She is marked with the hunting symbol, just as in the film, and is left behind on Earth until their return a short time later. In the books it is a different planet, and a different time period, but this is clearly what they are basing it from.

I don't believe this movie will appeal to casual fans, because they simply do not know enough about either series of films to understand why certains things happened in the movie. But, to fans such as I, who have delved into both series and grown to love them, I highly doubt you could walk away disappointed after seeing the film.

I ask you this: After seeing the film, were there any parts of it which didn't make sense? any part that just had no rational explanation? I challenge you to find something that can't be explained through information already in the novel/comics/movies.

We've already found the explanation for the Predator befriending the woman. She slew an Alien, which for a human, is quite a kill. Thinking of it from the Predators perspective, it must be rather impressive. After all, hadn't the other two predators just been royally raped by an Alien of equal size? I think any notion that this is rediculous comes from people not wanting to accept that Predators are much more than mindless killing machines.

Sure, on camera it looked a little corny for the Predator to be motioning signs for "Explosion" and to be running along side a woman. But again, it makes sense. She had already proven her worth in battle, and how would you tell someone who speaks an entirely differently language that the device you're holding will explode?

The problem with this movie was it's incredibly predictable directing. For some reason the director seemed to set up shots waaay too early. You would see the dark corner an alien is going to pop out of 10 seconds before it does, and the whole time you're left thinking "Well, an alien is about to pop out of that hole". Sure enough, every time an Alien would pop its head out. It rarely ever tricked you, except for in the beginning with the penguin, and that was pretty weak. Take the very last part of the very last scene for instance. The camera centered on the body of the Predator for a long period of time before the chestburster came out, making it extremely predictable.

This brings me to the only negative, sense-wise, that I saw in the film. The chestbursters erupted waaay too soon at the beginning. In every other Alien film it took anywhere from a day to almost a week for it to occur (the queen hybernated much longer in Ripley, Alien 3). In AvP it occured almost immediately after the facehugger died, except when it came to the last surviving Predator. But even then, could it make sense that they would hatch sooner to get the brood started faster? Possibly, we'd have to know more about Aliens. Perhaps someone does know, I haven't read every Aliens novel as there were far more of those than Predator novels.

All in all, it was a good film, and I look forward to seeing it again. I think this is a must-see for anyone who is a fan, afterall it is 10 years in the making. But don't get too disappointed over the crappy directing. There is a very good chance we will be seeing a sequel to this, and it will hopefully be with a new director. We can also hope that the next film will be a little less action, and a little more scary. We will see.