Movie Reviews - new films reviewed

Time: 2004 / Place: Earth – Antarctica
When a satellite discovers a heat signal in Antarctica, Weyland Corporation assembles a team of experts and dispatches them to investigate. Also on board is Charles Bishop Weyland himself (Lance Henriksen). They find a pyramid buried under 2000 ft of ice which seems to be the template for the Aztec, Egyptian, and Cambodian Pyramids.
When they find Predator weapons and pick them up, the pyramid starts to transform – doors closing, walls moving, corridors closing and others appearing.
And then they come – facehuggers, Aliens, Predators, and the Alien Queen. Quickly recognizing the Predators come to Earth every 100 years for initiation fights against the Aliens doesn’t really help when the explorers are cut off from each another and find themselves surrounded by facehuggers, Predators, and Aliens …

The movie starts quite OK but it’s standard stuff you’ve seen before in Armageddon, Deep Impact, Sphere, etc. – a discovery is made, and a team is assembled to investigate, allowing a brief introduction of the characters. VERY brief indeed in this one. Solid handiwork continues while the team explores the pyramid in search for the script – but they find the creatures from the movie title instead. After that, it’s face huggers, slime, acid, blood, slicing and gutting until the very end. No real tension arises as the characters are so poorly introduced you don’t really care who lives or who dies, and Anderson doesn’t hold back his trumps – he throws in what he has right away, and you wait and wait for the tension to rise and finally climax – but you wait in vain.
The sceleton plot ain’t watertight – purists may complain about the strangely fast Alien lifecycle that doesn’t match what you know from previous Alien movies, and the team doesn’t look quite surprised about finding not only one, but two alien races and finds out the story behind it all in a couple hours – but hey, they are the best experts money can buy, so what do you expect?
Conclusion: for fans only, one star for the Aliens, and one for the Penguin ….

Alien vs. Predator movie trailer

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 9th, 2004 at 11:02 pm and is filed under 1-star-movies, 2-star-movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.