AVP RETRO REVIEW IN 2022 (ALIEN VS PREDATOR 2004) - Road to PREY

AVP MOVIE RETRO REVIEW IN 2022 (ALIEN VS PREDATOR 2004) - Road to PREY

Directed by Paul WS Anderson and released in 2004, Alien VS Predator promised to deliver the crossover movie fans had been asking for since the Xenomorph skull seen in Predator 2, and the series of comic books from Dark Horse; it was a long time coming and the film had a lot to live up to.

The plot and setting of the film revolves around a team of scientists on an expedition led by Weyland Industries

to an isolated island in Antarctica, Weyland Industries is the precursor to the Weyland Yutani Corporation, and one of their satellites had picked up a heat-bloom coming from the island.
When analysed, the signature showed the shape of a pyramid thought to have been made by some undiscovered ancient civilisation.

When Weyland’s team reach the island, they find the pyramid is in fact a Predator Testing-ground where they return to every 100 years in order to breed and hunt Xenomorphs in a right-of-passage, and the Humans are caught in the middle between the two species.

I actually do kinda like the setting of Antarctica, it is a barren, isolated, and harsh landscape, like Predator 1, Alien, and Aliens; and it does a good job of establishing that feeling that there’s no help coming if they need it; The best kind of setting for these films; Also, the abandoned Whaling Station does give me a Hadley’s Hope vibe.

Although, it doesn’t make much sense from either an Alien or a Predator film perspective, as in the Alien films, the whole point was to not let the Xeno’s reach Earth, but here, they’re already on Earth hundreds of years before.
And in Predator, one of the main themes was how they came to hunt when it was hot.

And it does get criticised by fans a lot for this instead of being set on another planet.
But despite this, at least Antarctica is isolated from Human civilisation, and it’s not set in a town full of people like they did later in the sequel.

I think an isolated setting far from civilisation is where these films do best, especially with the Alien films, as the thought of Aliens in a town or city just sounds so silly to me.
I think a good compromise would have been to set it in the future and on another planet, but make it an ice-planet,


so then they could have made the film like they wanted, but they wouldn’t have gotten backlash for setting it on earth; They could have made it like Prometheus where they travel there on a spaceship.

I feel like the film does a fairly good job of setting itself up and introducing the characters, we get a couple of brief scenes of what the main characters are doing before they are recruited for the expedition. It attempts to build up to things in the way Alien and Aliens both do; maybe not executed as well, but I do appreciate them doing that, as one of the things I dislike that some movies do, is to not effectively fleshing out the main characters so we get a feel for them, and then you don’t care about them and they all just kinda blend together and are just a bunch of NPCs you don’t care about.

But here I was able to differentiate the lead characters and learned what makes them tick, and I found them all likeable and there was no one I found annoying or boring.
The acting I thought was pretty good and it seemed believable and made the film immersive.
It takes it’s time to build tension, and delays the arrival of the creatures, offering short glimpses over time before revealing them completely; and then the overall story and plot and pacing and action scenes I enjoyed too, and it does have some cool moments and set-pieces.
It also takes itself fairly seriously, and the people act realistically for the most part, without too many unneeded quips and jokes being said through it, though I do wish they’d left out the couple of lines that were just there for cringey fan-service.

The film’s score is also really good, and definitely sounds like it belongs; and also has a hint of Aliens in it to my ear.

There were bits I didn’t like as well, like some of the story elements; the main character teams up with one of the Predators which is something I’m not really much of a fan of.
Also there’s stuff that makes no sense, like how in one instance an Alien goes from FaceHugger stage to Chestburster stage in about 5 minutes, just to serve the plot; Where it should take like 12 to 24 hours.

And I swear there were like 2 to 3 times as many Aliens as there were impregnated Humans to make them in the first place.
One section where the film is severely lacking in though, is the gore; there is almost no Human blood or guts or anything, I could count on one hand when we see blood, and then it’s just like a few specks of it. Which is really odd coming from the Alien and Predator series’ which up until this point had all been 18 rated films.
I heard they added a bit more CGI blood in afterwards in a later version, but that’s not in the basic original

#prey
#avp
#predator