You know, it's quite possible to draw comparisons between AVP: Alien Vs Predator and that other fan-fantasy crossover, Freddy Vs Jason. Both films were born from a brief shot originally meant as an in-joke; both took a decade or more to actually reach the screen, and both turned out to be disappointments for the fans who'd been waiting and playing out the smackdown in their heads for all those years. We should have stuck with all the comics and books that were released while AVP was languishing in development hell.
A satellite owned by the Weyland Corporation detects a "heat bloom" emanating from an uninhabited island in Antarctica, Bouvet Island. Charles Bishop Weyland (yeah, they went there) organises a team to go investigate the site, discovering that there is a strange pyramid buried 2,000 feet under the ice, and he wants to be the first to claim it. His team includes archaeologists, language experts and Alexa Woods, a survival expert and guide. The pyramid turns out to predate all other known pyramids and civilisations - unbeknownst to the humans though, it is also a "rite of passage" test for young Predators (let's start calling them Yautja), who come to the pyramid every 100 years to face off against and kill Xenomorphs. To this end, there is a Xenomorph Queen kept chained up at the base of the pyramid and thawed out whenever the hunt is on, and humans are lured to the pyramid to act as hosts for the Xenomorphs. In the past, it was all done via a ritual sacrifice aspect of early Aztec/Mayan religions; this time, of course, there's the team investigating the site. Three young Yautja are sent in to prove themselves against the Xenomorphs; things turn pear-shaped however when the humans discover the Yautja's plasma weapons and take them, leaving the warriors without their most important weapons against the Xenomorphs and trying to get them back. The humans find their numbers rapidly dwindling as they're caught between the two alien races, as both sides have no problem killing anything in their way. The human survivors realise that their only hope of survival is to somehow team up with the Yautja - but will that even be possible?
An early warning sign that AVP: Alien Vs Predator was not going to be up to the standards of the films that preceded it was the fact that it was released as a PG-13 film. Looking back at the previous six films from both franchises before this one, the one thing they all had in common was a refusal to shy away from showing gore. Even the much weaker Alien films, 3 and Resurrection, at least still had heads being crushed into a pulp, chestbursters messily emerging from hosts, and people being sliced to ribbons by Xenomorphs. AVP doesn't show any of that. It occasionally shows the aftermath of Xenomorph "birth", and there are one or two shots of humans being impaled on Yautja weapons, but for the most part the film decides to cut away whenever something messy is going to happen on-screen, so all we see is a trickle of blood, maybe, or someone's eyes widening and then closing as they die. And this wasn't even a case of executive meddling because someone thought that making a sci-fi horror film that combines two franchises known for their violent and rather splattery content would make more money if they made it teenager-friendly - director Paul W. S. Anderson (also responsible for Mortal Kombat, the Resident Evil movie franchise and, somehow, the ultra-gory and horrifying Event Horizon) set out to release the film as PG-13. It makes no sense, and I'm not saying that horror films just can't be good if they're not throwing buckets of blood everywhere like modern-day Grand Guignol. It's just that neutering a film like this is just going to alienate fans.
Another early warning sign was the fact that AVP was not screened in advance for critics. For films that aren't independent or underground but instead released by one of the big studios, this is generally seen as the studio and/or director not having any faith in the film getting positive reviews, so they just release it and hope they can make enough back on the box office before the negative reviews come rolling it. And oh, did they come rolling in - AVP currently holds a 20% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and 29 out of 100 on Metacritic - although its worldwide gross did end up being $172 million, so the trick of not screening it for critics did work out for them.
In the end, though, AVP is just a weak film. It's virtually bloodless, has a weak plot (that was cribbed from an Aliens Vs Predator novel I read back in the 1990s), and there are plot holes and glaring errors in it that give the audience the distinct impression that the filmmakers didn't really care about the film they were making. The timeframe from being impregnated by a Facehugger to expiring via Chestburster in this film can't be more than an hour, tops, which flies in the face of every other Alien film we've seen, and has clearly just been fudged for expediency rather than actually having to think for a moment about the plot. In another scene, a Xenomorph is killed by one of the Yautja (the one known as "Scar", for reference) and it doesn't bleed. They didn't even bother to put in a digital acid blood effect. And if the filmmakers seem to care so little for their product, why should we? the working relationship that develops between Scar and Alexa is pretty much the only good thing about this film, and even then I can find flaws with it - there's not enough screen time devoted to it; it suffers from the same problem that the new Transformers movies did in that we're not here for the fleshlings, we're here for alien-on-alien action, and there's just not enough of that in the film.
And of course, the movie's final shot sets us up for a sequel, which people may have thought they wanted with the anticipation of seeing the "PredAlien" in action, but as we were to discover, things didn't go as we hoped they would...
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