AvPR was a painfully mediocre film, but NECA did a great job with the figures. Ultimately they proved that if they could make lemonade from Twentieth Century-Fox's lemons, then they deserved to do characters from the earlier Predator and Alien films as well.
The Alien Warrior from Aliens is a solid example of just how true that is.

This figure started turning up months ago, but for whatever reason, I never saw it at retail until my local Toys"R"Us put a bunch of them out recently. Geoffrey the Giraffe's current focus on collectors is just fine as far as I'm concerned.

Another thing that's great, is that I also had a chance to pick through a few of these--which is cool, seeing as how there are some paint "variations." To be honest, I'm not sure if there really are variations, or if the factory was a bit loose when it came to consistency, but at any rate, there seems to be a range of both blue and brown Alien Warriors out there. In my case, I've found one that is somewhat in the middle, with blue undertones and brown highlights.
I should admit that I got this on my second pass, as the first Alien Warrior purchased had a broken leg (below the left knee) right out of package, and needed to be returned. I've bought all kinds of NECA figures over the years, and as far as I can remember, I've never had one break. Seeing as how I don't own the McFarlane Alien Warrior because it fell apart on me twice, I was worried about NECA's version.

The build quality is good once you've managed to get it out of the package and carefully work the joints loose. I'd say that the glossy paint has caused parts to stick a little more than they ordinarily would, but that shiny outer coating makes the figure look great, so it's worth it.
The overall sculpt is very nice, if not the best of its kind out there. It's possible to nitpick over a few details, like the size of the skull being small in the front, or how the whole head doesn't curve as much as it should. It's probably possible to work the entire figure over when compared to stills from the movie, but that's never been the most important thing to me when it comes to Alien toys.
I'm looking for a good, artistic, and fun representation of what the film designers intended. In this case the figure has the right look and poseability, which means that I'm constantly inspired to pick the thing up and place it around my desk in menacing poses.

On the whole I'm very happy with NECA's efforts this time around. I can't help but hope that in addition to more creature figures, eventually they'll dive into making figures of human (or android!) characters that have never been done before.
2 comments:
i got this one as well.my toys r us has this weird like 1/2 aisle with no ryme or reason it has heroes,mcfarlane,godzilla,new kamen riders?!.anyway.thats where i found this alien.still looking for the elusive she-preadator and spawns isis.
Yeah, that 1/2 aisle is the new(ish) "collector" section. It's largely filled with leftover Heroes figures at this point, but a few other NECA and Mezco things have been turning up.
I'd really like to see TRU just put a new section--like the video game section--in their stores, that's stocked with this sort of thing.
Perhaps now that they've swallowed up FAO Schwarz, they can use a little of their magic to rethink the whole idea.
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