I saw this movie in the theaters but wasn't doing this yet, so since my love for Aliens and Predator are unmatched, my long time lust for them to be combined was great, only to see the first film totally suck and the second...well you will see how I felt about it in a minute.
AvP2 starts off where the first ended. We see our B.A.M.F. (bad ass mother fucker for short) Predator from the first film on the table and dead. After a moment, the chest burster that busts out of him is obviously a hybrid. I tend to call the opening of this film the "No more fucking around" opening. We quickly see a ship of predators being fucked up by the Predalien (an Alien and Predator hybrid, remember I am a huge geek). Escape pod jettisons from the mother ship and and crashes back on Earth.
Cut to the forest where the ship crashed and a father and son off hunting. They find the crashed ship and quickly face hugged. Its rare in a movie is a child killed, much less in a fashion as gruesome as having a chest burster eat its way out of the child's chest. So things quickly move forward with what I am sure the director thought of as good character development. We see a mother, Kelly O'Brian, ( Reiko Aylesworth of 24 fame) returning home from war. There is also our male hero, Dallas Howard, (Steven Pasquale of Rescue Me and Six feet Under) returning from what we have to assume is a stint in jail. The writer obviously wanted to set up another Ripley and Hicks clone from Aliens. A tough as nails woman and a gruff but kind hearted bad ass male to lead the movie. I will get back to that later though.
So we have some character development and we see our B.A.M.F. predator hauling ass to Earth. Now, we have to assume that this Predator is a king or the leader of some kind of clan. We also can figure out that his son is one of the Predators that was fucked up by the Predalien. Our BAMF Predator quickly goes about dispatching any proof of aliens or the Predator ship. Search parties are dispatched looking for the missing father and son and one of the cops is popped by the BAMF Pred. Things in town quickly start turning to shit in the quiet little mountain town and the BAMF Predator starts hunting down the aliens and the Predalien.
That is going to be the end of my spoilers. The director is a fan of the franchises that spawned this movie and you can tell. He re-creates a number of famous scenes from the films. Its a nice nod to the fans but to be honest, they are forced. The alien close to Ripleys face in Alien 3 being one of the more obvious ones. Even the APC evac in Aliens is done but its no where near as excellent. Its at around the 45 minute mark where things start to fall apart. Things for the town are going from bad to worse but its done in very rapid succession. One of the bigger questions, at least for me, is how long it takes for a little alien baby to be created. In Alien it takes at least a good number of hours before we see the baby alien hatch. Here, the first two aliens hatch in what seems like a very limited amount of time and as the movie goes on, the aliens seem to hatch quicker and quicker. This could have been solved with better pacing by the director but its like he wanted things to go to shit quickly but it just took way to long. In Aliens, for example, the last colonist doesn't have its chest burster come out till the marines are already there and located them, which makes me think it had to have taken days.
Thats not the worst part though, not by a damn sight. Oh no. Some how, our Predalien is capable of impregnating pregnant women with a half dozen or more chest bursters. What. The. Fuck? I swear to Christ that this was done for the single purpose of making more aliens and its a fucking terrible idea. I have to think the director KNEW the pacing was going to fucking suck and had came up with this terrible fucking idea. This is really the biggest problem with this movie. The pacing was just God awful and totally ruined the film. Which is awful because the rest of it is pretty bad ass.
The Predator is actually a bad mother fucker this time around and instead of being bitched out by a couple of aliens, he ruins them. He tears through aliens like tissue paper and his only foil is the Predalien. The action scenes are wickedly done with enough gore to take care of most peoples blood lust. Humans and aliens are ruthlessly dispatched by the Predator, the aliens and the humans get to kick a little ass to boot. Reiko does a good job playing the bad ass Ripley clone and protecting her daughter, a Newt clone. The acting isn't amazing but its decent enough for this type of movie. The Aliens look good and sound pitch perfect. The Predator looks great and even the Predalien doesn't look all that bad. Hell, the douche bag of the film gets his face melted off, its awesome.
The only real real problem for me is the Predalien being able to stuff a shit load of eggs into pregnant women to hatch a fuck load of baby aliens. Its a fuck bad idea and I'd like to punch the writer and director in the face for letting this into the film. Bad pacing can, and will, always fuck a movie right up and this is an excellent example. Go into this with a blank slate and its a fun popcorn flick.
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