Saturday, December 31, 2005

Alien vs. Predator: The Unrated Edition Comments and Sorta-Review


Yesterday I picked up and have now gotten through all of the Unrated Edition for Alien vs. Predator. For the film itself, there's about 8 minutes added which really help flesh out the characters and some of the conflicts and motivations between them. The pacing of the feature was slightly less rushed, which is a definite improvement over the theatrical version, however it could still have used more character development and a bit more plot development. For example, there is still no explaination what-so-ever on the vastly increased Alien life cycle.

Special Feature wise, this DVD has a lot. It comes with a second disk that has documentaries on pre, production, and post as well as docs on the McFarlane Toys, Comic series, and it also features all the movie's trailers. There's even a mini comic included, featuring Alien vs. Predator shorts by Dark Horse Comics.

Essentially, this is the version of Alien vs. Predator that should have been released to DVD in the first place. The added gore in the Unrated Edition isn't anything fans of the franchise haven't seen before, and I'm also speaking of the comics and video games as well as the films. The special features are very comprehensive and take a good couple of hours to get through.

What's interesting to note in the docs is how confident and compitent Paul W.S. Anderson sounds. I think he really knew what he was doing when he wrote and created this film, and I know believe that it didn't reach its full potential due to intervention by Fox. In their attempt to make something more marketable, they fucked up. My guess, anyway, as there was indeed more plot to the film originally.

If you are a fan of Alien vs. Predator, and also enjoy watching how films are made, you'll want to pick this one up.

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