AVP

I went to a friend's house last night and watched Alien vs Predator. I had high hopes for this, as I'm a fan of both sci-fi franchises. Bad reviews and general laziness kept me from seeing it in the theater, so given the opportunity, I couldn't pass it up.

The idea of pitting Aliens against the Predators has been around for a while. It may have all started with some short stories in Dark Horse Presents (comics). That later evolved into it's own limited comic book series. Though I didn't read all of those comics, I am pretty sure that they didn't revolve around a plot of the Predators being ancient gods on Earth.

The backstory for AVP is that the Predators, intergalactic big-game hunters, have decided to use the "backwater" planet of Earth as a place to build a labaryinth-like pyramid, fill it full of Aliens, and then hunt them for sport. Once every thousand years, the Predators would do this (in flashback they showed Predator's watching ancient humans build these giant structures for them), and if the hunt went awry (like in the end of the original Predator movie), the Predator would detonate the bomb on his guantlet and destroy the whole mess.

So, in present day, the last remaining Predator pyramid is 2,000 feet below the ice in Antarctica. The Predator's remotely turn the "power" back on, and this of course attracts global satelites and that of a billionaire inustrialist, who decides to assemble a team of guides, archiologists, diggers and scholars to investigate this ancient ruin. This all works to the Predator's advantage, because they need the humans as host bodies for the Alien "face-huggers" to incubate baby Aliens in.

Once all this is set up, the good fun of AVP begins. Chopping through some subplots that don't matter and some corny dialogue, once the humans are in the pyramid and the Aliens have hatched, you've got a pretty decent movie on your hands. This lasts for about 25 minutes. Then, the last remaining human and the last remaining Predator become friends.

This was just unacceptable. Even in Predator, when the Predator realizes the last remaining human is a worthy opponent, he doesn't just befriend him, but he drops all his weapons to fight him man to alien. So, back to AVP, we're given scenes of human and Predator fighting along side each other, running in slow-motion and having a good old time together.

I was laughing through the end of the movie, and I don't think that was the intended response. Something was going for this film, and it could have been good (not great, but good). As is, being a huge fan of the Aliens movies and the first Predator film, I will NOT be adding this to my DVD library.

THUMBS DOWN