Face-Off: Alien vs. Predator vs. AVP: Requiem

Director/co-writer Paul W.S. Anderson defied all expectations with his approach to setting up the titular battle, drawing inspiration from the “alien astronauts” theory to tell us that Predators have been visiting Earth since the dawn of time, helping mankind make scientific advancements and using pyramids for “rite of passage” hunts of the Xenomorphs. You might have thought people didn’t encounter Xenomorphs until the future events seen in ALIEN, but that’s far from the case. Although Predators have been established to hunt in the heat, this movie is set in a newly discovered underground pyramid on a snowy island 1000 miles off the coast of Antarctica. A group of scientists, archaeologists, and mercenaries venture out to that island when a satellite spots a heat signature from the pyramid, putting them in the middle of the action when the alien fight begins. While the set-up is unexpected but serviceable, the build-up is a bit too long – nearly two-thirds of the movie have gone by before a Predator is really seen fighting a Xenomorph.

This was far from the AVP I expected, but there is still something cool about getting to see Predators and Xenomorphs share the screen and tear into each other… with both of them taking down some human victims along the way as well. Xenomorphs clawing Predators and impaling them with their tails, Predators blasting away at and chopping up their alien opponents, one snapping the neck of a chestburster, that’s all fun stuff. Anderson does embrace the cheesiness of the concept a bit too much with things like a Predator spinning and tossing a Xenomorph in slow motion, but fans had been waiting more than a decade to see this sort of stuff. It was disappointing that two of the three Predators are killed off so quickly, though.

You have to have humans in the middle of a battle like this, and the humans here are some of the most dull and useless characters possible. Most fans would have preferred to have seen Colonial Marines like in ALIENS, instead we get an underwhelming ensemble of mercenaries, an archaeologist, a chemical engineer, and a guide, none of them particularly memorable. Heroine Lex Woods only stands out because a Predator takes her under its wing so they can fight Xenomorphs together; quite an honor for a bland person. The best character is Charles Bishop Weyland, the businessman who leads the expedition because he’s suffering from a terminal disease and wants to leave behind a better legacy. He’s played by Lance Henriksen, a nice tie-in to the ALIEN franchise.

The Xenomorphs have lost the terrifying edge they had in earlier films, but they still look good and cause plenty of trouble while crawling around in the underground pyramid. In the end, a Queen even gets to battle survivors on the snowy surface. The Predators were a bigger draw for me here – this was their return to the screen after a 13 year wait, and the late Predator performer Kevin Peter Hall had to be replaced by former basketball player Ian Whyte. Whyte actually plays three Predators in the film, all of them inexperienced teenagers going through a rite of passage. Two of them don’t last long, but the third proves to be something of a badass, racking up the Xenomorph kills left and right. Whyte played the creature well.

I was disappointed when Anderson got the AVP gig because he was following in the footsteps of directors who put their own stylistic stamp on all of the previous ALIEN and PREDATOR movies, and I didn’t think he could live up to what came before. The style he brought to the crossover was simply a generic, glossy blockbuster look with MATRIX-inspired moments of slo-mo. This works fine for the most part, but the film could have aimed higher, could have been better, and could have done without some of the more cringeworthy visuals and dialogue exchanges.