Review Detail

I watched this edit with my wife who’d seen Predator, the Alien quadrilogy, Prometheus, and Covenant. It’s been ages since I dusted off the AVP movies so I went in having forgotten most of the details. My wife felt that things weren’t being explained and that the movie was just action piece after action piece with no real plot to speak of. I told her that’s how I remembered them unfortunately, but perhaps the decision to shorten and combine these two films made that flaw even more drastic. Paul W.S. Anderson’s movies aren’t exactly known for great character development.

We hadn’t even finished the AvP portion of the edit and both of us decided to stop watching, although we stuck it out to the resolution of the first movie. AvP was definitely a lot worse than I remembered. I’m going to go back and pick it up from the Requiem part, but sandwiching two bad movies together into a long edit wasn’t really the solution I’d hoped for. Perhaps these movies just aren’t able to be saved, but I give Wraith plenty of credit for trying.

My wife mentioned that making the Predators the protagonists in this one was an odd decision and didn’t really sit right with either of us. Same goes for the Predator-human tag team. I can’t even remember the humans’ names aside from Weyland and we just watched it last night, so that goes to show just how little the characters matter in AvP.

We watched a 2.68GB (SD) copy from the editor. I wish we could have watched an 8GB or higher version but I was happy to get my hands on the edit regardless. I had to play around with settings in VLC to get the a decent viewing size our 42" TV, but once that was done the edit didn’t look too bad considering the small file size. I didn’t notice any A/V or other editing issues, aside from the breakneck pace which I seem to recall was the same in the original movie, so my qualms are only with the source material. I’ll update my review after watching the Requiem part but wanted to put these thoughts on AvP down while they're fresh. My thanks to Wraith for sending the edit and trying to salvage a couple of misguided, big budget bombs. Even though the enjoyment factor doesn’t rank high for me because of the source material, I am grateful that editors take up the challenge with movies like these!