When it comes to the first AVP film I would of loved to of seen a straight adaption of the original Dark Horse Graphic novel (One of the first I ever read when I was a kid). If they were going to make a 3rd film which is pretty unlikely now I would hope they would do this BUT anyway...
Lance Henriksen was apparently the first person to be cast in this film according to director Paul W.S Anderson and with that gives us a bit of continuity between this film and the Alien films. Along with Colin Salmon I'd say these were the best members of the cast despite the fact they don't make it to the end of the film.
Most of the other cast in this are terrible. Sanaa Lathan as Alexa Woods (this films Ripley) is terrible. At no point in this film do I feel for the character and even when she is telling Weyland how her dad died I just yawned and scratched myself a bit. Her line about stopping the serpents from getting to the surface is a poor woman's Ripley speech.
Whose idea was it to cast Spud from Trainspotting in this film? The bloke is awful in this. You know he is going to die as soon as he mentions his "Kids back home". I do cringe at his final scene in the egg chamber.
Saying
that though it's pretty fast paced and it's only half an hour before
all the action starts kicking off and I do like how they accidentally
trigger the Queen Alien being defrosted. If you have read the various
comics of AVP from back in the 90's there are a good few nods to them
with the look of some things. Things like that please me.Maybe it's just a bit picky but I don't understand why Anderson felt the need to make the Predators HUGE. The 3 in this are much bigger compared to the previous 2 we had seen but at the same time we do see some fantastic visual effects for the Predators.
One of my favourite sets in this is the facehugger chamber. It's creepy as hell when the eggs open and we have the slow motion shot of the huggers jumping at the unlucky folks in it. Correct me if I am wrong but not since the Ripley/facehugger scene in Aliens have they been so cool to watch.
One thing I don't like though is how short the time it takes for the chestbursters to appear (It's about a minute).
Are we to presume a huge amount of time has passed since?
This films suffers a bit from what I like to call "Terminator: Salvation Syndrome" where lines from the other movies are pointlessly thrown in to pay tribute. The "Ugly MoFo" line springs to mind which is uttered near the films end.
I do like the Predator/Alien mash-ups in this
though. Having only ever seen panels of such fights in the various
graphic novels it was pretty damn cool to see them fighting on the big
screen.When it's just her and the Predator at the end and it makes her a shield out of the Aliens head and a spear from it's tail I give a little geeky yelp of joy but I don't really like the ending with the Queen as I am not convinced she wouldn't come out of the water again once she got free from the water tower. Although it is nice to see a fully mobile CG Queen. The bitch had never looked so good before this.
Overall though I do kind of like this film and I don't think it is as bad as some people make out.
I'd rather watch this film by Paul W.S Anderson then his terrible Resident Evil adaption any day.
