This film really gets a lot of crap, that it doesn’t actually deserve. Okay, maybe I have a slightly different view of films than the general population, though I have discovered that my feelings of a film generally sit well with the ratings that appear on IMDB, in most cases that is. Okay, I can sort of understand how people have reacted to some of the gore that appears in this film, and also the rather lame attempt at creating a Pred-Alien, though I don’t necessarily think that it was as bad as some people believe (though its ability to generate eggs as if it were a queen was something that sort of came out of the blue).
Look, sure, there are a few scenes in this film that do break the cardinal rules of storytelling, such as never killing kids, or suddenly killing off a character with no tension or lead up whatsoever, but that didn’t actually undermine my enjoyment of the film. Sure, one could argue that there is either the shock factor, or pushing the boundaries, though I still find the onscreen killing of kids to be going just that little bit too far.
As for the sudden death due to friendly fire, well, that goes beyond lazy story telling. Sure, in movies like this, we expect that pretty much a majority of the characters are going to die, but the thing is there are ways to kill of a character in a cinematic way, and the more important the character is, the more cinematic the death should be. Unfortunately, at one point in this film they did drop the ball somewhat.
So, the film is pretty much set straight after the first in this series, and we have a predator that has been infested with an alien. Well, the alien escapes, causes damage to the ship, escapes in an escape pod and returns to Earth where it crashes in the Colorado wilderness. Also, the pod contains a number of face huggers, so you can be assured that this scenario is going to be set up with lots and lots of Aliens running around this small American town.
Actually, this is a scenario that had yet to be explored, so I guess this is one of the reasons that I actually quite liked the film. However, before one of the predators was killed, it managed to send off a distress signal, so another predator travels to Earth to basically clean up the mess, thus we have what one could consider a true Alien vs Predator film. Yeah, now that I think about it, that previous film really did let me down a bit, namely because of the whole idea that the predators created the Aliens to hunt, and us humans were really only fodder to fuel their hunting desires.
While the pyramid under the ice was pretty cool, simply turning us into just another game reserve for a bunch of hunters really didn’t do it for me to the same extent. However, this film was much better in that regards, particularly with not only having an alien infestation reach Earth, but also having a Predator, and a particularly will trained one at that, coming in to attempt to clean it all up.
Whereas the first movie pretty much had a bulk of the predators being taken out by the aliens fairly quickly, it was much better watching a seasoned hunter deal with them with no problem whatsoever. I guess that is another reason why they had to create the Pred-Alien, even if it is only to give this particular guy a challenge. Still, with the speed at which the Alien’s propagate he certainly wasn’t in the position to clean the area up completely, which is why they had to end it the way they did.
Still, it is pretty clear that the only way to bring this film to a close was the way that they brought it to a close. Maybe it seemed to be one of those situations that pretty much everything was lost so they pretty much pressed the reset button. However, considering that there were a lot of scenes which were reminiscent of the earlier films, when we consider Aliens, then the ending here was rather appropriate.
My Score! - 60%
Plot and Storyline - 54%
Structure - 60%
Engagement - 58%
Plausibility - 63%
Acting and Performances - 63%
60%
Not that bad but actually pretty good. Do not understand the hate.
