8 out of 8 people found the following review helpful:
*** May contain spoilers ***

Aaaalllmmmmmost there...
Talyn from from Edinburgh,
29th April, 2008
From what I had heard leading up to seeing this I was led to believe that this was good enough to close the book on the whole Aliens (and Predator) saga. After being a hard core geek for all things Alien (tm) I have been longing for closure on the franchise, if anything to end the heart-wrenching pain of watching progressively worse sequels and the studio's mangling of the original concept. 1st the good point: The detail they go into with the Predator is astounding! It's been too long waiting for someone to properly bring the Predator as a species to the screen and I feel this does it. There is much more info about there home-world, technology and social structure. Now the bad: Ignoring the hopeless character introductions which just annoy you by interrupting the interesting stuff (who cares who's dating who or why someones job sucks, they'll probably be dead in a few minutes anyway..) my first annoyance comes by the way they rush through the Alien's growth. Something which is such a major point of the other movies and woven into the story is rushed through in literally 5 minutes here; going from chestburster to eggs to facehuggers to chestbursters to army of Aliens almost before the intro credits have stopped rolling. I know the fans will say 'but it's a PredAlien so grows faster and anyway we're watching the movie for the fights not the plot'. Whatever. I like action AND story. Secondly, after the first half of the movie comes my next problem: Every single scene, line, camera shot, sound effect, special effect etc. is a clone of the best bits from all the other Aliens movies; there is nothing original from here on in. The lead Actor/actress both look and sound like Hicks/Ripley, the APC looks and sounds just like 'the' APC. There is a newt clone. The guns sound like pulse rifles. There's a character called Dallas! They rape the whole 'maternal' theme to the movies - literally. They duplicate scenes line-for-line, shot-for-shot! A fan boy wet dream but an original movie suitable for closure - No. So why 4* then? Because it's good. Damn good!...From an action movie/special effects point of view. And fun. But from a story, script, acting, plot-line integrity and originality point of view, it falls short. For a proper end to the Saga I think they need to look to the Comic books...in my opinion the answer lies there.