Alien vs. Predator

Title: Alien vs. Predator
Director: Paul W. S. Anderson
Cast: Sanaa Lathan, Raoul Bova, Lance Henriksen
Year: 2004
MPAA: Rated PG-13 for violence, language, horror images, slime and gore
Date of Review: January 29, 2005


While it is not the worst movie I have ever seen - in fact, not even in that realm of bad movies
- Alien vs. Predator manages to bastardize everything about the two franchises involved, creating an overly formulaic and cliche action/adventure movie, where there was potential to be a thrilling and terrifying sci-fi/horror.

The plot basically tries to show the origins of both species (and strangely enough, it seems human civilization has a lot to owe to the Predators). It begins with Weyland (Lance Henrikson) gathering up a team of scientists to go to Antarctica, where his satellite has picked up enormous heat levels that seem to form the shape of an underground pyramid. They arrive to find that someone - or something - got there before them, drilling a perfectly cylindrical hole 2000 feet down to the pyramid. If that wasn't the first clue that they should get out of there, I don't know what was.

As it turns out, Predators came to Earth thousands and thousands of years ago and encountered primitive humans. They taught them how to build structures, and the humans treated them like Gods (does this remind anyone else of 2001: A Space Odyssey?). The Predators then begin breeding Aliens, using willing human sacrifices as hosts to the deadly Aliens. Flash back to the present. These scientists are now stuck in this underground pyramid, and are being slaughtered one-by-one by both Aliens and Predators, and there you have your plot.

The movie is filled with paper-thin characters. Of course, neither franchise was particularly renowned for their use of deep characters, but at least we cared somewhat for them, and in the first Alien film in particular, they acted like real people. The people in AvP are the typical Hollywood good-looking bunch of barely-legal adults, saying big words like "marine biologist" and "temple", when you know the actors probably had no clue what they were talking about. Neither did the writers, for that matter.

Instead of caring for the characters, I genuinely loathed a few of them. The babe-magnet Italian guy for example, who looks like a surfer and is supposed to be an expert on everything there is to know about anything, it seems. At one point I actually laughed out loud when he randomly makes the prediction "I bet the pyramid moves at exactly every 10 minutes", which just happens to be exactly correct.

Getting passed the horrible acting and script work, what really bothered me was the complete butchering of both the Alien and Predator franchises. All the stealthy, sleek movements and traits of the Aliens are gone, replaced with the gracefulness of a bulldog in heat. No longer can they sneak up right beside you or maneuver through tight corridors and cracks to get to their prey - instead they jump and run, knocking over boulders and making tons of noise, with their best stealth capability being the ability to hide in dark tunnels. They're loud, obnoxious creatures that prove to be little threat to anyone, since a single woman with no combat training at all manages to kill one by herself in the open. The Predators, who we all used to know as advanced tribal hunters from a distant galaxy, have been replaced with overweight, clunky wrestlers. Everything they do in this movie goes against everything they were based on - honor, the hunt, etc. One of the biggest rules established through the Predator universe has been that they cannot kill something that is unarmed - a rule that is broken in AvP several times over.

The fights look like wrestling matches. At times there are some interesting shots, and there are obvious tributes to fight scenes from previous films in both franchises, but it just doesn't feel like Alien or Predator. The Aliens have the intelligence and strength of medium-sized dogs, and the Predators seem to be incredibly uneven with regards to what type of damage they can and cannot take.

All that being said, there are some beautifully done sets. The temple has quite a neat look to it, and some of the work done on the look of the Alien costumes is impressive when it is not CGI. But this just cannot make the movie good when there is just so much to dislike about it.

Overall this was a tiring, mediocre movie that could have been so much more. If they had taken out the hundreds of times that we see facehuggers flying through the air in bullet time and replaced them with decent tension, story, and a little gore to keep things up to snuff, we might have had a somewhat respectable popcorn flick here.

3/10