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AVP:R must be the shiniest movie ever made. On Blu Ray, every sci-fi element from the Predator armor to the spaceships and weapons shone so crisply, that is certainly the impression it gives. There's no grain, so this must be a digital print. Until it gets up in the mountains, where of course the sky is still grainy.

The opening in deep space is a pure black, with glowing highlights on the fallen predator's body. Onboard the ship, all the black set dressings reflect shining lights. Back on earth, the shadowy forest is highlighted by the green foliage. Even moss looks awesome. Hell, even the fast food place looks awesome with it's deep reds.

The orange predator planet may be the most colorful the movie gets. The bulk of it deals in all the cracks and scales of the predator's armor. You'll see it in the sewer walls and pipes too, but you'll be looking at the predator mainly.

The film has really good lighting with shadows and light shading the humans' faces. It's the least they could do for their monster fodder. AVP:R has the best dark scenes I have yet to analyze on Blu Ray. You can see everything no matter how little light is illuminating it.

This is how one hopes the Alien quadrilogy will look when it comes to Blu Ray. Their scales have the same amount of detail and shine that the predators do, and much darker sets than the solo Predator films. The predator's thermal vision is the only thing not in high definition.

The unrated cut of the film is six minutes longer, but the new footage marker is little help. It appears during scenes which are merely extended, so you still can't really tell where they added stuff.

Maybe there are gorier head splatters and acid dissolves, but the theatrical cut certainly didn't lack in that. You will see a quadruple chest burst, so that might be something worthwhile. Some are outright dialogue scenes, as if we care about the humans. One scene is just extra running, for "pacing" purposes. It actually hurts the pace of the film. It felt slower with the extras reinstated.

The extra features also include several EPK features which I completely missed in the menu system. So that's how important they probably are, but I usually don't watch those anyway. I don't need to hear actors talking about how great everyone was, and I kind of know how they make movies like this.

There is a rather in depth archive of both the predator and alien species. Some intern spent a lot of time researching that. Featuring high definition animation, the archive utilizes movie clips from all the Alien, Predator and AVP films.

A second disc includes a digital copy of the film, but if you have this movie on Blu Ray, are you really going to watch it on your iPod? If your set has a comparable display to mine, you'll wait until you get home to watch all the shiny, gory action on the big screen.