Ill quote a great post from someone from a different board
AVP is an underrated movie. I'm not saying it's a great film or a sci-fi rhinestone, but it gets slashed for everything while there are many areas where it really succeeds. As aforementioned, the setting couldn't have been better. It is not a rehash of what came before, yet it retains that same spirit. It's a place with no civilization or help around, and a place that looks like a setting from a horror movie. Which, ultimately it is. The Thing and The Shining proved that an isolated, windy winter environment can be extremely beneficial in a stories like those. It's cold, harsh, unfriendly and brings forward feelings of isolation, helplessness and terror.
The set designs are quite good and never go over the top. The pyramid is believable, and the hieroglyphs and chambers well designed. The colors are saturated, but not ashed. The navy blue hue fits the arctic feel.
The movie also seems to have a very large, epic scale thanks to production value of shooting in Europe.
The idea for the story is one that almost never fails. A team comes to investigate and finds shadows and ghosts of whatever else happened there before with no one else around. Aliens, Event Horizon and 2010 are just some of the examples that used a similar premise with a horror overtones. Then there's the buildup which takes an unusually long time for newer movies
The characters are glossed over, but Henriksen does just enough with the little time he has to develop his character into a believable person. At some point the movie turns into a mindless fight-and-shoot monster movie and it loses me there. I also liked the old fashioned horror cliche ending with the chestburster
There were several very talented people working on the movie. John Bruno, who had a long working relationship with Cameron and worked with him on every movie except for The Terminator and Aliens. Steve Burg, who worked on The Abyss,T2, Prometheus, The Martian and Interstellar, designed the Predator ship
AVP:R had very unlikeable characters. It is aiming for the truck drivers approach, to have regular everyday people that the audience can associate with, but all of those characters seem cliche nevertheless. There is a bullied boy with a bad job who is in love with a girl that has a bully boyfriend whose popular in school. It cannot get anymore cliche than that. The boy's boss is a cliche bad boss from the 80's teenage movies. The other characters are fairly decent, like the sheriff and the soldier, while some are purely undefined, like the convict.
There arent many good aspects of the movie. The hospital setting and scenes are one, and the Predalien actually makes for a good movie monster. While it's not on the level of Alien that we know from the original pictures, he works as a monster from some gory 80s monster flick
The setting is plain wrong and along with direction, cinematography and special effects, reminds us that this movie is a cheap B monster flick set in a small town. This movie could work as a low budget horror in the 80s
