Overall, this movie wasn’t terrible. It was just boring.

Sure, there was some fun action – the usual type from alien action movies. But, there was one predator and it didn’t even make nice with humans. I keep waiting for these predator things (“yautjas”) to somehow use humans to help do their hunting bit. OK, there was one thing in this movie: the predator uses one human as bait to catch an alien.

And was that supposed to be some sort of Alien/Predator cross-bread thing? Who knows. It doesn’t really matter.

The only remotely interesting scenes – as usually happens with me in science fiction films – are the last minute feeling back-stories. We see the predator home planet (or maybe a colony?) ever so briefly when the predator – we’ll call him Jerry – figures out there’s some aliens to hunt.

But then I’m thinking – ever searching for the back-story – “is Jerry going to hunt the aliens, or clean-up the crashed space-ship? Is Jerry someone important, or is he like, ‘oh, here’s a fun way for me to get some glory hunting the Alien-thing.” And then, it’s sort of like, “why is Jerry the only one there? Why didn’t Jerry’s friends come?”

And then there’s this guy called “Colonel Stevens” who flies around in a AWAC and at the end delivers the Jerry’s left-behind gun to some skinny Asian lady in a washed out city-scape. What the hell was that two minutes at the end?

With a little research, you can figure out that the Asian lady is Yutani of “Weyland-Yutani”, the corporation in the Alien backstory. So, you know, it’s like, “hey, that’s how they started things” or something.

Maybe we can get an Umbrella Corp. tie-in. That’d be great.

Let’s recap some good stuff in the film though. These are mostly “novel” things:

• We see a kid get attached by an alien face-hugger thing. Yay! Films seems to shy away from showing us kids eating it. On the other, they only imply that a room full of new borns get killed by aliens. Who wants to show a blood soaked nursery. Not “The Brothers Strause” apparently.
• A room of pregnant ladies getting infected with aliens worms.
• At least we get to see the predator home (?) planet. That part was kind of cool.
• Dual, stoner head explosion at the hands of Jerry. Nice work.
• Seeing the predator city and inside of predator ships. Nifty!

Yup. It’s not really bad like you’re expecting. It’s just not too interesting. Like a burger with just buns.