On the points that you have made Deathdrop, I see myself agreeing with most of them, so I'll comment on each of them:
1. Though it would be better in terms of the fight because the creatures won't get killed easily, it isn't necessarily bad to have many Aliens and Predators. They just have to know how to make each fight last instead of killing one right away like in 3 seconds (which was more than what it took for Scar's swipe to the Alien)
2. True, but then the problem would be trying to develope characters we will actually care about. This will make people actually sit through the whole time the creatures are killing off the humans with suspense instead of boredom.
3. This would be kind of hard, since in almost everyone's mind, the steroetype remains that by the Predator and Aliens movies (where 1 Pred killed 7 soldiers and where 1 soldier would kill on average 10 Xenos) that their "calculations" says that 1 Pred = 70 Xenos. This resulted in the sense that Preds should dominate Xenos (something I do not believe), which is why people protested when Grid took out 2 Preds.
4. Totally agreed. I've stated the reason above on point number 2. This will help us to identify more with the characters and so we actually get the feeling of suspense.
5. I agree with you about the non-flashy part, but making it filled with explosions is again like what most of the cliched action movies are doing. If we want to set this movie apart from the rest, we need to make the action more suspenseful. My idea is to make them stalk each other in the beggining and use every tricks they could with the surrounding to ambush their enemy. Then finally they could have an all out fight, but tone down the explosion.
6. That goes true with the character developements. If we have characters who are well developed and that we genuinely care for, we would feel alot of suspense to see which one of them survives (which was sucessfully done by Alien). Like you said, gore doesn't make something scary, like Alien Res (gore to the max, but no scare).
7. An R-rating would help, as it would connect the movie with the fans more, but it wouldn't have helped it much. I really don't like it when people say that AVP would have been good with an R-rating. Violence (resulting in the rating) doesn't make a movie good, it never does. It's the sotyr and characters that makes a movie good. More gore and violence will just make it instead of a mess of a film, we'll have a gory mess of a film (not much better)
8. Haha, yeah that's totally agreed. I have no more comments to make on it.
9. Fox might not care for the fans, but then again, what production company actually does care for the fan? The movie companies are all about the money (you could see that by the amount of mediocre movies released every year). And plus, Fox gave us the originals in the first place, so they get some credit for making us fans in the first place.
10. In my opinion, the budget of the movie had never been a problem. The movie had a good budget (good enough to make flashy explosion effects etc). If they could've taken out all that flashy effects and put all the money in making a good story, then we would've been more satisfied, showing that flashy effects does not make a good movie. They have the money for the effect, showing that they're not low on budget. They should have used the budget on something better (like a good story).
"There are five possible operations for any army. If you can fight, fight; if you cannot fight, defend; if you cannot defend, flee; if you cannot flee, surrender; if you cannot surrender, die."