AVP: Alien vs. Predator (2004)

Hear me out. I know, I know. The name alone is enough to make certain people roll their eyes so hard they risk a medical incident. But I'm going to say it: AVP: Alien vs. Predator is genuinely not as bad as its reputation suggests. Not even close.

That's not me lowering the bar until it's buried underground. I went in expecting a train wreck and came out actually having a decent time. Yes, it's been sanded down into a PG-13 crowd-pleaser. Yes, the studio fingerprints are all over it. Yes, it's a far cry from the raw, suffocating dread of Alien or the muscle-and-menace brilliance of Predator. Nobody's arguing otherwise. But taken for what it actually is, a big, brash, popcorn crossover event, it does more right than people give it credit for.

The central concept is genuinely clever sci-fi world-building. The idea that Predators have been visiting Earth for thousands of years, using Xenomorphs as the ultimate prey in their hunting rites, is a properly interesting mythology to hang a film on. An ancient pyramid buried under Antarctica, civilisations built around these extraterrestrial rituals, a timeline that slots into both franchises without completely mangling either. I was on board. That kind of lore expansion is exactly what you want from a crossover. It's not just "what if these two things fought," it's an actual attempt to knit the two worlds together with some internal logic.

Now, the problems. And there are problems, let's not kid ourselves. The human characters are almost comically underdeveloped. The dialogue has that particular flavour of mid-2000s blockbuster scriptwriting where nobody says anything you'd actually remember five minutes later. And some of the CGI hasn't aged especially well, with certain shots looking a bit rushed in a way that pulls you out of it. These are real criticisms and I'm not going to wave them away.

But then the Predator and Xenomorph fights kick in, and honestly, they're a lot of fun. There's genuine creative energy in watching two of horror and sci-fi's great monsters tear into each other, and the film earns its moments. The choreography has weight to it. You feel the clash of these two very different kinds of killing machine. And then there's the human and Predator team-up toward the end, which is absolutely ridiculous in the most gleefully comic book way imaginable. It shouldn't work. It kind of does. I was grinning like an idiot.

People compare it to Aliens and find it wanting, which, fair enough, but that's a bit like ordering a burger and complaining it's not a three-course meal. AVP isn't trying to be a lean, terrifying survival film or a propulsive action masterpiece. It's trying to do something messier and more playful with two beloved properties, and on those terms it earns a pass. It's not without genuine imagination, and that counts for something.

Three stars. Underrated for what it is, and I'll stand by that over a pint any day of the week.

Rating: ★★★  | Year: 2004  | Watched: 2025-04-10

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
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