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How do!

An experimental thread, in which I hope to encourage discussion about why certain poorly received films went wrong. I’ve done a few fairly successful threads about finding gold in the midden of ropey films, but I think this may be a more interesting topic. Becuase it’s one thing to watch a film, any film and simply not enjoy it. But it can be worth stopping and thinking why you, I or we didn’t enjoy it. Essentially to give ideally constructive criticism.

As is best when trying a new format, I’ve gone for low hanging fruit. And as the title suggest, it’s the somewhat disappointing 2004 movie “Aliens vs Predator”.

Background wise? I for one had be waiting for this movie all my pubescent years. Because as a shorty greasy spot spot, I regularly got Dark Horse’s “Aliens” comic. Alongside the serialised strips and short stories was news about the franchise. And I distinctly remember that from oooh….1992 or so? There was talk of an AvP movie coming. So to say it took its sweet time would be an understatement, particularly as Dark Horse had been churning out Genuinely Very Good AvP comics since 1989.

Yet what we got just sort of missed the mark. It felt like those times when you’re out and about, perhaps driving home. You’re an hour out, and there’s no service stations between you and home. Yet….there’s a mole at the counter not taking no for an answer. You get back and parked up, scuttle off to the cludgey. Lid up, breeks doon. And all you get is a Little Tommy Squeaker. Though to be fair, AvP is, in this crude analogy, more a Brown Stainer. Still not the depth charge your nethers had threatened to the point you didn’t dare step on that duck, but at least better than the most pathetic, lipless raspberry as it has some life to it.

Now the set dressing is really good. A visually pleasing blend of Predator architecture as seen in Predator 2, and more than a dash of Ginger’s signature biomechanical horror. At least…when we can see it. Once the nonsense kicks off? Hey, who turned out the lights? What’s going on? Wait, I thought he just got jobbed a minute ago? Well if that’s him dead now, who got dedded in the previous scene? This would be a curse doubled down on in its sequel, but that’s another thread.

The plot is….so-so. The very basics are pretty cool. But again the devil is in the detail. For instance. Our Predator Hunting party. They turn up at the Arctic Base, and the first thing they do is murder some of the planet’s natives. For no particular reason. One of the victims is crippled and nearly frozen to death at the bottom of the shaft, and they just…off him. Not only is that against the established lore of the species (if you’re not armed or not a threat, you’re not a worthy kill), but against their implied mission, which is to get down to the Pyramid and hunt them some Xenomorphs. Possibly as a rite of passage. I’m watching it right now, but I can’t remember if the Rite of Passage thing is explored only in the Directors Cut. To be fair I do like the Rite of Passage “Predator Crystal Maze” thing, where they have to get to the centre of the eventually shifting maze to get their pewpews.

And oh those Predators. Those big, beefy, burly utterly incompetent Predators. Who spend the film getting their glowy arses kicked and stabbed and gutted. Oh, and face hugged. The face hugged one really annoys me. Because out of everyone in the film, surely he’d know what that means.

The Humans could be seen as Prometheus Levels of stupid. But I’m gonna cut them an honest break. Yes it’s a Weyland mission, but this is the first encounter, which if it was canonical explains why and how Weyland Yutani first had such a drive to find more of the species. And to be honest? They don’t really make mistakes the crew of the Nostromo didn’t in Alien. But few of the character are fleshed out much. I think a slimmer cast, where we can get to know them a bit better would’ve been preferable. Because other than Weyland and our Heroine, I don’t give a rats ass about any of them. Not even Spud or Chibs.

Now earlier in my wibbling I touched on the Predator lore being inconsistent. As for the Aliens? Man they grow fast! Tiny wriggly chestburster to fully grown adult, capable of gibbing a Predator in like….20 real time minutes. If not less. Which is ludicrous.

The pacing leaves it largely uninteresting. The humans barely get a hit in. I’d at least have liked to see someone find out the hard way that Aliens have acid blood and gets all dissolved. The CGI is also pretty poor, so when we finally get a half decent bout of fisticuffs, the Alien just looks rubbish and emaciated, which of course detracts from how cool they are. The Predators are also turned into lumbering great brutes, when in the original they were shown to be really quite spry and athletic.

And it’s those flaws which hamstrung it for me. We just don’t get the showdown we expected. It simultaneously denigrates everything fun and cool about both species. And that I’m afraid, is entirely unforgivable. Two properties utterly squandered for no good reason. Even Jason vs Freddie was a better crossover.

But how about you, Dakka? What are your critiques of this particular movie?

Everything about the movie felt both half-assed and overworked at the same time.

Like you said, the predators didn’t act like the ones we knew, and instead of fight choreography or cool, planned out action scenes the studio decided to make them buff guys with 90’s testosterone chins, and that’s good enough. The aliens are a reuse of the fleshy Alien 4 CGI for cost reasons, even though it makes them feel off-brand. The movie gives just enough lore to be stupid, but not so much as to really add stakes or character for either side other than the most basic cliches. The time scale and pacing both make the film feel breezy like a kid telling a story.

See, I kind of explained the predators behaviour to my self as that they were juvenile and kind of meat-headed, and we're acting much like our own teenagers out without their parents for the first time, sort of thing...

I think it’s all the more frustratingly poor because it has its genuine moments. Or almost has them.

There are some touches, like a “blink and you’ll miss it” scene of Weyland doing Bishop’s trick from Aliens. The initial exploration of the Pyramid is an excellent rejigging of the Nostromo crew entering the Engineer’s ship.

But then it all goes pants on head, and squanders it.

I think I want to find some making of docs, because I can’t rule out hefty studio fiddling, even if it was a Paul W S Anderson flick.

The fight scene is especially disappointing, as we see a Xenomorph literally flat on its back. A position which shouldn’t be possible due to those signature vents on its back. And the fact that’s pretty much the only fight scene just makes it worse.

Also, I’d need to back and watch, but I swear we end up with a good few more Aliens than there were victims!

Just that low level lack of attention to detail, which was something so important to the Alien films in particular really took away any chance it had,


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Crispy78 wrote:
See, I kind of explained the predators behaviour to my self as that they were juvenile and kind of meat-headed, and we're acting much like our own teenagers out without their parents for the first time, sort of thing...

Kind of, I can certainly see where you’re coming from. But it’s not presented that way in the movie. It is a rite of passage for sure. But it seems one for experienced hunters to test themself against the most dangerous foe, not one for rookies.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen it, but I don’t recall hating it. (unlike AvP 2, which I do solidly dislike). Sure it had a few plot holes, as was a little cheesy in places. It feels like a high quality B movie that just happens to be wearing the name of a pair of A list franchises. Crack open a beer, turn off your brain, and enjoy the fun.

...which I might do once the pizza come out of the oven. I’m pretty sure I have access to it somewhere.

Getting back to something you mentioned in your OP, MDG, I feel like following Freddy VS Jason was a mistake for AVP. Freddy VS Jason was better written, better acted, and did far more justice to the two franchises it was based on. It got hopes up for what an Alien VS Predator movie could be, in terms of success.

Freddy vs Jason benefitted from not taking itself too seriously.

It was an Internet Dispute Over Who’s The Scarier in movie form. It even had a decent premise for why the two were fighting.

I wouldn’t call it a great film by any stretch, but it tried and mostly succeeded, at least where it counts.

By the standards of a Nightmare on Elm Street or a Friday the 13th, it was a top bracket film.

The premise for the fight also felt well-thought out and continued to inform the plot and the fight throughout the film. Compare that to AVP, which seemed to grasp for the lowest of fruits and had few ideas what to do with it.

As a fan of both IPs, I hated this movie.

It just reeked of a director looking at successful and established source material and saying: "Nah, I'm gonna do my own thing."

I like Paul W. S. Anderson, he'll always have good credit in my book for Event Horizon, Resident Evil (just the first one for me) and making the first Mortal Kombat movie better than it had any right to be, but this was a big creative fail.

I only read some of the predator comic books and novels, and it was near 30 years ago, so don't consider myself an expert on either IP, but there were a few things in this movie that I loathed:

1. Making the Xeno's a disposable tool used by the Predators. Ruins their mystique.
2. Having the Predators hunt as groups. I know it happened in expanded lore, but I never cared for it. It reduced their prowess and scariness
3. Having Xeno's on Earth, whether in the distant past or present day. In the future, sure. in fact I think they take over Earth in one Dark Horse comic story?
4. The Predators establishing these "game preserves" on Earth.
5. Making it "present day".

The movie would've been better served by being set in the future where the rest of the Alien movies take place, with a setup similar to Aliens(ie, Marines exploring a base that went mysteriously silent) but with a Predator thrown into the mix.

I don't recall it all but yeah this was a very poorly written film that didn't really lean into the strengths of either franchise.


Like the "Prequel that totally isn't a prequel but is" of Prometheus - its again another story that tries to shoe-horn humanity into the primary universe mover/focus of the galactic setting. Only this time our world is apparently where the Predators bring their pet aliens to breed to then fight over. Only one time they escape, enslave a bunch of people and the Predators blow up the temple and then just randomly decide to leave.

They leave no hints of their being present on any other part of the world; no hints in culture nor technology; they just have 1 base of operations and when it got a bit threatened they blow it up and run away.

It tries to shoe-horn Earth in as a focus where it was never meant to be. At least in Predator original films we got a better sense of the Predators just finding worlds to hunt on as a loan warrior for their maturation quest/fun/whatever. It made some sense that they were not heard much of in history because they only appeared in ones here and there at random times and place. They didn't build facilities, temples or anything.




Another pain is the fact that its Wayland. A firm that shouldn't really exist in the present time and yet it does and they are obsessed with Aliens; and of course are the only firm to have found them. It's recycling tropes and elements from the original films just way out of context and feels uncreative.



Then you've other daft things. Your very smart CEO and his elite team arrives at the abandoned base. They find a perfectly drilled hole in the ice. All the way down to the temple they are going to investigate. A perfect hole that no one else is using and was clearly just drilled.... They don't really show any concern for this at all. They just accept it as a really good way to save themselves months of time digging a hole.

Instead of perhaps calling for reinforcements from their multibillion industry; or finding out why there's a massive hole bored into the ice.



From there things just get more daft or lazy with the writing and in the end it doesn't feel satisfying. You get some cool moments like the lead actress standing there with an alien spike tail spear and head shield facing off against a Queen. That's cool - but its whole story is just a mess.











And yes in the Dark Horse comics, Invasion Earth is a huge storyline that arises from events that evolve from the original films (I believe 1 and then 2; 3 I think is just right out of the comic timeline since it game way after).

The thing is that works because it evolves from events in a clear logical fashion of humans discovering and continuing to mess with the Aliens in various ways.

OK, just rewatched it.

Pair of rum and cokes, as I don’t have any beer on hand ATM.

It has its share of WTF moments. Like let’s reconfigure the stone temple every 10 minutes. Sure, you are backed by alien tech, but it’s still hundreds of year old stone grinding around in bizzaro configurations. I get that they are going to tomb raider dungeon crawl trap-o-rama, but please.

Also, I don’t care how fluent you are in ancient languages, you do not get to decipher the backstory written in 3 mixed dead languages of the history of the temple in 10 minutes while you wait.

The egg to facehugger to chestburster timeframe is way accelerated. I can forgive that a little bit due to the set up. Maybe they doped the queen up with fertility/growth steroids before stasising her.

How long is that tail? As long as the plot demands.

There are plenty of smart people doing stupid things. Some I’ll pass on by greed. They needed to stake their claim and get the credit first, so were moving faster then they should have. It’s also a horror movie. You grab the flashlight (without checking the batteries) and go out into the dark to see what made the noise.

CGI was not the best, but the movie is a few years old at this point. I’d have to check up on what it’s peers were doing at the time. I’ve seen worse.

From memory its CGI was good for its day. Not top league but good solid quality for its time as I recall. It didn't "stand out bad"

AvP sucked because the base line minimum thing you need to have happen in an AvP movie is for the Aliens to behave like Aliens and the Predators to behave like Predators. Neither happened.

Short list of problem events.

-The temple transformers every 15 minutes. The face huggers got on the people. 15 minutes later chest bursters came out. (The face hugger was on Kane for 12-20 hours before falling off and the chest burster didn't happen for another few hours after that. The process of gestating a new alien from facehuger takes hours to days. Not minutes)

-15 minutes after THAT the Aliens were fully grown. Again, bs. It's a process that takes hours or days. The crew of the Nostromo had a funeral for Kane, prepping and ejecting his body into space along with tiem for burke to build a make shift motion tracker, Parker to find the cattle prods, the crew to make a plan, and then time searching.

-An aliens tail came down out of a 10-12 ft alcove, all the way down the wall, a bit across the room, stabbed through a predator, turned it around, lifted it up into the air, AND THEN the alien came out of the shadows with it's own 5-6ft long torso. That aliens tails was like... 24 ft long. It's insane.

-Drones are not problem solving smart. They run on instinct. Grid shouldn't have had it's tail cut and then understand the physics involved to fling it's blood from it's tail.

- Pred tech that preds bought to fight aliens specifically are wildly inconsistent in acid resistance.

Knife - Immune
Bladed Disk - Immune
Bladed Net - melts
Armor - melts
Mask - melts a little bit
Claws - Immune

wtf is going on here?

-A pred hunting aliens knowing what aliens are took off his mask, got face hugged, passed out, woke up presumably 15 minutes later and didn't immediately blow himself up knowing what happened to him. Instead he ran around a temple for the next hour I guess in denial of his own fate? bs.

-The drones attacked the queen to put acid blood on her chains to release her instead of attacking themselves. Also why were the chains used to restrain a queen not immune to acid?

-The Elder pred gave a human pred tech. feth that.


Special effects wise, these predators are the only predators on film that cannot close their mouths. When their jaws close their side flaps puff out instead of in. Downgrading your special effects from decades ago is an embarrassment.

Pretty much all of the above

(although i might give it a pass on the infected Predator as i could see the aliens having some memory blurring effect so victims don't know what's happened if they don't have friends or gloating megacorp scientists telling them after the face hugger has fallen off)

plus the Dark Horse AvP comics had already done such a good job of telling the story, and were ripe for adaption instead of this mediocre effort

On the CGI? I agree that in the finish, it’s not bad. There’s a definite sense of weight and momentum.

Some of the action looks a bit crap, but then it is 20 years old.

My issue is that the model they used make to Xenomorphs look all gangly and weedy.

We also see the Xenomorphs adopt pack tactics, until they don’t. Then they do again. Until that would mean the final Predator would get mobbed and deaded, so it’s back to one at a time.

This goes against what we saw in Aliens, where in numbers they will try to bumrush you, but from multiple angles.

The overall inconsistencies do annoy me. Because I think if just a bit more thought had been put into it, and those tidied up, the film would’ve been better.

I don’t agree the Xenomorphs don’t have problem solving capacity. We see it in Ressurrection, and in Aliens to certain degrees. Certainly previous films haven shown they’re not simply beasts. The tail flick? I’m ambivalent about. It doesn’t bother me but I absolutely see why it bothers others. The magic tail is definitely a Big Stupid.

Overall it feels amateurish. Like a bunch of well intention, enthusiastic franchise fans filmed a bunch of scenes they thought would look cool separately, and later tried to hammer them into a single cohesive movie. And they never learned editing. The rule of cool overruling any consideration of cohesion and sense.

Oh, and I totally agree the Facehugged Predator had absolutely no reason to not detonate himself there and then. Hunt failed. He lost. Time to go boomboom. Not just as we saw in Predator, but as AvP shows us itself when describing what happened to that civilisation.

And on the film showing us the cleansing detonation? How. How did the temple survive that completely intact? It was at the epicentre of the detonation. A detonation said to have ended a civilisation. Except for that temple. And there was no failsafe to horribly murderise the captured Queen? Give over.

The big problem for me is in the discrepancy between the title and the movie.

This is called Aliens vs Predator. That sounds cool and awesome. Sadly, the movie is more accurately titled "Aliens vs Predator (and a bunch of random, mostly annoying, humans)". It's the humans that mess up the concept of the movie. I'm not sure any studio would greenlight a movie with just Aliens and Predators in it, though, so it's sort of understandable. Even so, I'd have much preferred the humans to all be totally expendable mooks completely out of their depth. It might have been a much better movie if the central female character dies early instead of being elevated to honorary Predator, for example.

As a dumb action movie it's fine. I do recall seeing it for the first time and thinking the action sequences and ideas already felt quite tired and uninspired. Then there are the various nonsensical bits like the tail and the acid resistance, as already mentioned.

One thing it does have going for it? It's not the sequel.

In fairness AVP comics and video games are also AVPVH. Humans are supposed to get in the way, that's intentional.

If anything humans being in the wrong place at the wrong time and getting in the way is the premise, the issue here is the execution is poor.




On the timeline front the other thing is that the polar expedition never really gives the sense that they've got many resources with them to actually sustain themselves for weeks, let alone days. If they'd let the Temple reconfigure every hour or something more sane and if the Aliens had gestated and all according to normal lore, then the humans would have likely died of lack of water, or been heavily malnourished and dehydrated. The Predators also started their hunt way too soon. They should have appeared, activated things and then waited for the prey to hatch.



Heck considering the Predators didn't engineer the humans into the situation you could argue it wasn't a hunt but an expedition. Hence why there's more than one. Otherwise they'd not really have had anything to hunt in the halls barring one or two face huggers (which can't threaten them so long as they don't take their mask off); and the Queen who was bound in chains (and yeah we've seen Aliens harm themselves to release themselves, the Queen would certainly have thorn a limb off to release herself if those chains could be broken by acid)

I…actually prefer the sequel.

I know it’s not a good film. And is in fact pretty awful. But it has more of what I wanted to see. Xenomorphs running rampant, and an incredibly badass Predator making it look easy.

Biggest drawback is the god awful lighting, which means we can’t see anything of what’s actually going down,

I’m going to stick that on tonight, as with a UHD TV, perhaps I’ll get better lighting? I think that’s how it works, anyway?

AVP2 felt a bit more like Alien 4. Fanservice showing cool stuff.

But I 100% agree the lighting is horrific. It leans into a lot of "lets just make everything dark". Which is a trick you often see from lower budget films with aliens/monsters to get around the fact that they don't have high end visual budgets to make stuff look good.
Which is then really jarring when you have what is basically an action film (not a horror where darkness makes sense) with a high budget for visual effects then hiding everything that you should be showing to the audience behind just lots of darkness.



Also I want to go on record that even though Alien 4 has some VERY sketchy science behind the resurrection of a key character and the Aliens in general - it is at least fairly good story wise AFTER that bit of science mess. And yes the humanised alien at the end looks horrid and horrific and monstrous and that's the intent for it to look that gastly

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
And on the film showing us the cleansing detonation? How. How did the temple survive that completely intact? It was at the epicentre of the detonation. A detonation said to have ended a civilisation. Except for that temple. And there was no failsafe to horribly murderise the captured Queen? Give over.

I thought that was a different temple? Like something in Central or South America. I seem to remember that sequence showing people that weren't dressed for a breezy Antarctic summer.

Caveat, I haven't seen the movie in a good while and may be completely off.

 Overread wrote:
Heck considering the Predators didn't engineer the humans into the situation you could argue it wasn't a hunt but an expedition.

Same caveat, but I thought it was at least applied that boring the tunnel or activating the pyramid was bound to attract nosy human volunteers. The Predators would know the tech level of Earth and general human behavior, so it might even be plausible(ish).

In a way it would be cool if that was commentary on humans in Alien movies. Every movie after the first one relies on humans making foreseeable stupid decisions without which the plot wouldn't happen. Okay, maybe the convicts get a pass. But the Alien franchise has every reason to be called Aliens vs Idiots instead. Would be kind of funny if Predators had that kind of meta-knowledge.

Considering the Temple is in the middle of nowhere and a depopulated area and the speed with which things happen, its honestly more chance that the Humans and Predators are there at the same time.

I don't really buy that the Predators thought the humans would jump through all the correct hoops to investigate and get infected to provide sport.


They 100% could have done that storyline, but it would have required more foreshadowing of what the Predators were up too - eg perhaps arriving much earlier; activating the Temple; shown ensuring that the Queen was alive, healthy and producing eggs etc... Testing that the thousands of years old Temple encased in ice actually could work etc....

Then have humans arrive to investigate odd goings on and so forth. Though honestly if that were the storyline I'd expect more people (which makes it even more interesting and such cause more can get infected and soforth).

The explosion is described as ending the civilisation, hence it seems to be the same Pyramid.

Chalk it up as another instance of the film being very messily made, and not really explaining anything cohesively.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:
I…actually prefer the sequel.

I know it’s not a good film. And is in fact pretty awful. But it has more of what I wanted to see. Xenomorphs running rampant, and an incredibly badass Predator making it look easy.

Biggest drawback is the god awful lighting, which means we can’t see anything of what’s actually going down,

I’m going to stick that on tonight, as with a UHD TV, perhaps I’ll get better lighting? I think that’s how it works, anyway?

I am in that exact same boat. The sequel is not a great movie by any means, but to me it was a fun reel of highlights from both franchises while also giving us a glimpse of Aliens amok on Earth in an inhabited location.

Also also alsö?

We see in AvP that one, and by extension all, Predator helms can do x-ray vision.

Given how badly the hunt went, the Predators don’t even bother to check the corpse. We see it laid out (as is respectful, and fair enough), and not one. Not two. Not three. But four all just figure “Pub? Pub! Pub? Puuuuub![/i] and leave the corpse, which had recently got it and its mates heads kicked in by a species that reproduces via parasitism. A species the Predators are clearly super bloody familiar.

And do zero basic checks. None at all. In fact, I’m gonna make this negative checks in the circumstances.

All to setup a sequel I admittedly enjoy more than it deserves. When given neither species was on the brink, did not need to be setup in that manner.

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

I don’t agree the Xenomorphs don’t have problem solving capacity. We see it in Ressurrection, and in Aliens to certain degrees. Certainly previous films haven shown they’re not simply beasts. The tail flick? I’m ambivalent about. It doesn’t bother me but I absolutely see why it bothers others. The magic tail is definitely a Big Stupid.

The aliens in resurrection are not actual aliens. They are alien/human hybrids. They gain intelligence in the same way Ripley 8 gained acidic blood and other benefits. Their DNA was mixed in the cloning process that resulted in creatures who were only superficially representative of their parent DNA. Those drones are not representative of a standard alien drone.

The aliens in Aliens cutting the power is a result of drones being directed. The QUEEN is problem solving smart. The drones need to be directed. Left on their own they gather food and stick people to walls and then hibernate until directed otherwise.

It was honestly an enjoyable movie for me and while not perfect I don’t think anything needed to be changed. I’ll also say I liked the sequel more than the original.

Just regarding the "magic tail", I do remember seeing that scene and thinking "OK, that tail is too long, but damn, that's cool"
But I agree with the other stuff said here

 Lance845 wrote:

 Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:

I don’t agree the Xenomorphs don’t have problem solving capacity. We see it in Ressurrection, and in Aliens to certain degrees. Certainly previous films haven shown they’re not simply beasts. The tail flick? I’m ambivalent about. It doesn’t bother me but I absolutely see why it bothers others. The magic tail is definitely a Big Stupid.

The aliens in resurrection are not actual aliens. They are alien/human hybrids. They gain intelligence in the same way Ripley 8 gained acidic blood and other benefits. Their DNA was mixed in the cloning process that resulted in creatures who were only superficially representative of their parent DNA. Those drones are not representative of a standard alien drone.

The aliens in Aliens cutting the power is a result of drones being directed. The QUEEN is problem solving smart. The drones need to be directed. Left on their own they gather food and stick people to walls and then hibernate until directed otherwise.

I think they are smarter than that. In general we see them do a fair few smart things through the films; however in many of them we are often dealing with just a single drone and often not a very old drone. Alien 1 and 3 we have a single isolated drone that's in both cases only hours to days old when we see it acting. It's not really had time to learn many things, and yet it appears far smarter than most creatures would at that age and isn't as drone-like as one might think of an ant or such. Certainly there are instinctive behaviours built into it such as nesting/gathering behaviours. Clearly without a Queen and Hive they are somewhat limited in scope.

Alien 2 we do have a more mature hive and they do display some less intelligent behaviours; though I feel like that was almost mostly when they charging the guns head on. Considering how most times we see drones and aliens they shy away from direct fire and attacks and will avoid harm its a tricky one to work out. Were they rushing because of a learned behaviour that it worked against the original colonists; or because the Queen gave them a very powerful direction to attack at all costs; or because they were just following one another on instinct.



In general the films never really give us a mature, long term established hive to base behaviours off. The comics do but they also go way further and introduce even more things such as their telepathic abilities.

Another layer of thought on intelligence is that the Aliens are often described as "perfect hunters" by scientists in the setting. This presumes that they might well have more problem solving capacities to out-think their prey. Even if it might be the Queens who really are the big thinkers

 Overread wrote:


Also I want to go on record that even though Alien 4 has some VERY sketchy science behind the resurrection of a key character and the Aliens in general - it is at least fairly good story wise AFTER that bit of science mess. And yes the humanised alien at the end looks horrid and horrific and monstrous and that's the intent for it to look that gastly

So a lot of that story was essentially lifted from a eu book. It's one of the reasons I really liked it. They shoe horned in Ripley and scaled back the scale of the project in the novel but overall it's insanely similar.

I will say that it is the closest I have ever got to walking out of a cinema, and I saw Street Fighter in one (that at least had the benefit of making the audience laugh).

I think like Terminator 3, it suffered from following up from some excellent earlier films (at least if you went as far as Aliens). But whereas Terminator just deeply disappointed me, AvP was a bad film by almost every measure. Everything about it. There have been some great posts above giving it more of a critique than I think it deserves. And unfortunately I won't ever be able to bring myself to watch it again.

Perhaps the most egregious thing for me was how excellent the (original) early 90s DC comics were, and they had the storyline sitting right there ready for the taking. And that someone (I am guessing some 20th Century Fox execs who have a good history of fecking up both franchises) read the script for the AvP film we eventually received and decided it was better.

There are relatively few films that are so bad that they cast a sort of miasma around them which damages anything it comes into contact with, but AvP is definitely one of those.