A crossover is a beautiful thing. You see, when two franchises love each other, and want to express that love, they get together and…How does the rest of that talk go? Seriously, I’ve only heard it on TV, and the punch line usually comes in before they finish it.
Anyway, a crossover is a magical new story that happens when copyright holders and lawyers decide it is worth telling. Understandably in films, there is usually very little narrative point to this, and a franchise will not resort to a crossover until all other narrative options are satisfied. This can be traced back to the original Universal monster mashes, which pitted Frankenstein’s monster against the Wolf Man and Dracula as a desperate plea to extend the life of those characters. This is bailing out, keeping franchises afloat for a little while before they descend into autosarcophagus self-parody. Still, for fans of one or more character being crossed over, this can be a fun, geeky opportunity to see schoolyard debates about formerly autonomous characters play out on an “official” stage.
Crossovers are far, far more common in comic books than film (in fact, all other popular mediums see them more often). When a company holds the rights to many independent characters, and the story doesn’t cost beaucoup to tell, crossing over, say, Batman and Superman can be as simple as telling their own individual tales. And as it’s common practice for them to do such massive multi-player crossovers, so it is sensible that comic books would see the original crossovers for certain movie properties.
And so “Aliens versus Predator” became a Dark Horse comic book in early 1990, even before Predator 2 was completed. The notion to cross the aliens and Predators together is a natural one, as they share certain common authors (mostly Stan Winston) and belong to the same genres (and soulless company – Fox). And comics are cheap, unlike movies, so it’s easy to tell an epic futuristic tale about races of Predators, xenomorphs and humans duking it out on the bizarre alien planet of Ryushi. The relationships and backgrounds of these species can be explored, and the question of cannon continuity is less pressing than with the original film medium. In short, “Aliens versus Predator” proposes the undying story of Predators forever seeding, stocking and battling xenomorphs (because they’re such good hunting), with hapless humans caught in the middle. Hell, the mere notion to show the Predators as an overall civilization originates in the comics; they are truly responsible for that character’s success.
Many more “Aliens versus Predator” comics would be created, a semi-regular series. In true free-spirited comic book form, there would even be entries such as “Aliens vs. Predator vs. Terminator” and “Superman & Batman vs. Aliens & Predator” (and countless smaller permutations on this notion).
With toys, video games and novels getting thrown into the mix, this “Aliens vs. Predators” thing was morphing into a true, autonomous multi-media franchise, even without any movies to officially call its own. The first “Alien vs. Predator” game debuted on the SNES in 1993, giving the idea more mainstream exposure (amongst the nerdy elites who’d care about such crossovers to begin with – cough). In a rare moment of doing actual research, I went and played the SNES game. I suffer for this blog, I do.
And what can I report? It’s a beat ‘em up!
It would seem natural to consider a movie crossover, considering both beasties originated in the cinema. But in the early 90s the Alien franchise, at least, was doing well enough to continue on its own – if you consider things like Alien3 and Alien: Resurrection “well enough.” Thus the only movie work done was a spec script by one Peter Briggs (professional writer of many screenplays, somehow none of them ever filmed). This script closely follows the original comic book (wise choice for narrative but not budget), and is available online.
Fox, in what may have been an uncommonly good move, made no effort at developing an Alien vs. Predator movie until 2002. By now, the Alien franchise was good and dead, while Predator had been dormant for over a decade. They’d be stepping on nobody’s toes! Besides, by then there was some actual, legitimate movement on the mythological Freddy vs. Jason (a lengthy, lengthy tale for another time), suggesting to Fox the waters were ripe for crazed crossover creation. (The mere challenge of obtaining rights from the six total producers of the two franchises was another cause of delay, despite the fact Fox owned rights to both from the get go.)
Still, Briggs’ script was rejected, as were some newer, lesser-known attempts. Apparently, evil executive producer John Davis disliked these futuristic, space-based scripts. (In an Alien film? No!) His thinking was that a movie set on Earth would be more “original.” Sure…
Enter horrible director Paul W. S. Anderson, who is lamentably oft confused with legitimately good directors Paul T. Anderson and Wes Anderson. How good is the Anderson known as Paul W. S.? Well, his filmography includes Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, the Death Race remake and every single damn Resident Evil movie (eh, only producer of the sequels). Da-dum-dum! Still, the ass-headed Davis would redundantly praise Anderson’s proposed script, saying it “just drew you in, it drew you in.”
Despite a premise that would necessarily have to be an either/or (present or future setting), producers went about seeking the returns both Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sigourney Weaver. Schwarzenegger seemed O.K. with a cameo, if he wasn’t elected governor of California. That governor thing still sounds like random gibberish, some eight years later. Weaver, however, wanted no part in AVP: Alien vs. Predator, and essentially told the producers to commit blasphemous acts upon themselves. Good for her! Hell, the whole of Alien3 was an aborted attempt on Weaver’s part to forestall this cinematic atrocity.
(James Cameron was also against the idea, making the same Universal monsters reference I made above…Apparently his opinion’s changed since the film’s release, citing it as his third favorite Alien film – discounting his own Aliens, because surely James Cameron isn’t an egomaniac, that means Alien vs. Predator is ahead of only Alien: Resurrection in his mind. That’s damning with faint praise!)
(Ridley Scott: [crickets])
The challenge in creating a crossover is how to preserve the at-times contradictory continuities. As noted, Predator is contemporary and Alien is futuristic. Toss the Predators into the future and…that would make sense, actually. But dumbass Davis wanted it on Earth, in the present, no matter no human has ever seen a xenomorph before Alien much later. Thus Alien vs. Predator is that fugliest of all franchise words, the interquel: sequel to one, prequel to the other, and masterpiece to none.
So Alien vs. Predator takes place on Earth, in the present day. But where? The first several scenes play coy, leaping from Nebraska to Nepal to Teotihuacan. We are filled in on too much location information through on screen titles, something neither franchise ever really needed before. These are mostly character building scenes, because people going to see something called Alien vs. Predator really want to meet an entirely new bunch of disposable, cookie cutter human stand ins. This is the problem with an AVP movie (and yes, some would have you think that stupid abbreviation alone is the proper title) – comic books and video games can wallow in the glory of monster rampage trash, but a big-budget studio movie has to pretend to serve some dramatic purpose, even if it’s counterproductive. Oh yeah, and apart from characters, we also learn of a mysterious heat blast in the Antarctic regions.
Ignoring this time wasting stuff (far less acceptable when the movie’s this short), may I direct your attention to the Ice Breaker Piper Maru (Current Heading: Classified, even from us, apparently). This scene first shows us the entire cast, which is overly-large and stuffed mostly with decent chest cavities for the aliens. There’s only one person here I really care about: Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen, inexplicably returning). To Alien fans this is obvious, but it’s never made clear for the rest: Weyland represents one half of the Evil Company throughout the Alien franchise. Without that knowledge, he just comes across here as a typical, post-Jaws capitalist straw man. I understand the desire to bring back at least one actor from the previous six movies, but making it Henriksen raises some questions. As per his middle name, indeed old Weyland shall serve as the model for a second generation series of androids far in the future (after they’ve already given up on the untrustworthy Ian Holm model) – that’s like making a Napoleon robot nowadays, and just as stupidly ill-advised. At least it answers the question about Henriksen’s company rep in Alien3: that guy was a robot too – a lying, murderous robot completely in opposition to the rules its Bishop counterpart states in Aliens. I’m nitpicking, but it’s a sci-fi fan’s right and duty to destroy a franchise’s house of cards at every possible opportunity.
Weyland has assembled a team of “experts,” but we learn what few of them are specifically there for. The rest are merely walking death. Of at least partial importance is Weyland’s right hand man Maxwell (Colin Salmon), who is black. There is Sebastian (Raoul Bova), an archeologist, and Thomas (Sam Troughton), a far less useful archeologist. There is Miller (Ewen Bremner), a…team member. They can’t even devise distinguishing traits for their more essential characters, leaving it to Bremner to set himself apart with the filthiest cockney accent seen outside of a Guy Ritchie film.
Finally there is Lex (Sanaa Lathan), who is black and an experienced wilderness guide. Horror fans in the audience peg her instantly as the “Final Girl,” by virtue of being the lone female, as well as possessing two distinguishing traits. She also reveals her Past Family Tragedy™ to Weyland (writers can leave these speeches blank, then insert non sequiturs later for all it matters). Thus we are ostensibly “invested” in her survival.
I don’t know how it works, but though Alien’s leads were no better developed, they seemed real instead of like flat human automatons. I could care about those people, which propelled me through the lengthy delay before the xenomorph’s arrival. It takes Alien vs. Predator damn near as long to get to any monstery goodness, except the seventh time out there is no mystery (to the audience) worth delaying.
So Weyland has assembled this team of walking porcelain ducks for a trek to Bouvet Island, the most remote island in the world. Eat that, Easter Island! Yeah, in devising an entirely new, Antarctic setting for this monster mash up, they just stole from The Thing. Anyway, that heat burst I mentioned glancingly is why these victims are here, Weyland having discovered a pyramid buried under the ice. It shows features of the Aztec, Egyptian and Cambodian civilizations, making it therefore the oldest pyramid in the whole wide world – I cannot vouch for the archeological freedoms taken here, but it is a change of pace from messing up biology or chemistry. Weyland’s team must hurry to reach this pyramid, to claim it before some other psychotic, billionaire future-android does (I’m thinking Bill Gates). Weyland says it is worth the risk, though no effort is made to explain what immediate value this Norwegian/Aztec pyramid could have to an evil capitalist.
Lex makes a huge deal about leading an inexperienced team into the center of Bouvet Island, even threatening to desert the operation, but the next thing you know they’ve already reaches the site of the pyramid. Whew, don’t skimp on that drama, Alien vs. Predator! The pyramid turns out to be located directly beneath a ghostly old whaling station, abandoned 100 years ago (to the day – Oogity-boogity!). And there’s this great big, obviously unearthly hole leading down through the ice into the pyramid, so our team of hyper-professional experts doesn’t question it. They just go right in! That’s a great way to catch a virus, guys.
One minor disaster later (Weyland nearly gets his multinational corporation primary shareholder ass killed), the over-large team finds itself in a foreboding ice cave. Ah, Aliens with spelunking, that could make for an incredible movie (it’s called The Descent). But that movie resolved its light source issue, using only what the characters brought with them. Alien vs. Predator just sort of gives up on internally justifying its light sources from here on out, and the cinematography thus comes across as nearly as dark and flat as the characters themselves. As such, there’s enough light in this tiny, remote cave to illuminate the entirety of the pyramid ahead of them, dominated by a glyph of an alien battling a Predator.
That’s right, there’s supposed to be ALIENS and PREDATORS in Alien vs. Predator! First we see the alien queen (let’s not peak early or anything), moved by the suddenly tripped Indiana Jones tech in the pyramid. See, she’s bound and frozen, now awaken to lay eggs on an assembly line – these mass-produced monster eggs lack that handcrafted love.
Right away, the Predators get their introduction. Three of them (only three, and juveniles, ‘cause we really wanna see tween Predators) converge on the whaling station on the surface, with the standard Predator variety of heat vision and invisibility and whatnot. The creatures in this movie are presented well enough (when not CGI, which never jibes with my long-held conception of either beast), as they’ve been created by second or third generation special effects artists. Yeah, even at its best, Alien vs. Predator is a copy of the original films many times removed.
Now, I thought the Predators hated the cold – a desert pyramid could have worked just as well, and not inspired this stupid little discontinuity. Anyway, this trio of Predators jumpstarts the violence, long before even any facehuggers have shown, by killing off the four jerks left on the surface for just such an event. This is where the biggest single issue with Alien vs. Predator arises – it’s rated PG-13. Both franchises it derives from are strongly R; their monsters’ moduses operandi (chest-bursting, skull-cleaning) demand it. Minus this…strength, AVP joins the vanilla ranks of Anaconda and Bats. It’s actually confusing, not being able to tell when a xenomorph kills someone or merely captures them, and the chestburstings are reduced to the level of avant garde. Anyway, each time a Predator produces a weapon, a guy screams, and we cut elsewhere, I have to assume that dude is dead.
…And how can you maintain an R-rated body count but earn a PG-13 by eliminating the gore? That seems hypocritical on the part of the MPAA, when most hints as sexual maturity mean an automatic R. But this is a rant that doesn’t belong here.
Weyland’s team discovers the pyramid’s sacrificial chamber, a neat little bit of production design. Awful lighting aside, I do like the pyramid setting – but archeology always wins me over. This is one of those movies that portions out its scant plot revelations endlessly, but it’s easiest to address them all at once when it’s most pertinent. That’s now. You see, Alien vs. Predator ascribes to that distasteful “Chariot of the Gods” theory (Anderson chalks it up to Erich von Daniken), suggesting the only reason humans ever evolved in the first place is because the freaking Predators chose to come and help us! This is a big middle finger to all ancient societies, as well as to the spirit of human evolution. It’s amazing; this suggestion can anger both evolutionists and creationists! Hindley smash!
And the whole reason Predators favored humans is because we make good vessels for the xenomorphs, something Predators like to hunt. Yeah, we’re only around to fund their favorite hobby. That heat blast was just the Predators’ way of luring some humans into the pyramid for their traditional 100 year alien hunt – I’m not quite sure how Predators lured people to this isolated spot in the interim between Mesoamerica and satellite technology. This is the sort of thing viewers think about when they don’t have stage blood to distract them.
Half of the team continues into the pyramid, while the other half stays in the sacrificial chamber, “just in case.” I read that as “be facehugger lunch.” Indeed, the facehuggers make their decidedly non-graphic entrance the very instant these victims’ compatriots stupidly set off a series of devices by stealing the Predators’ guns from a shrine. This is just the sort of coincidental series of events the Predators rely upon happening regularly every 100 years. The gun stealing thing is a mistake, though.
Well, we’re about halfway through, and we’re at like stage two of the xenomorphs’ four-stage lifecycle. Alien, that slow-paced mood piece, was more efficient than this! In order to squeeze in some monster mayhem before the final credits, they’re gonna hafta take some major liberties with the aliens’ biology. And indeed, over the course of seemingly five minutes, the facehuggers have emerged (non-graphically) as chestbursters, which have then fully matured into warrior aliens. And one major character is now bye-bye – Thomas. Who? I agree.
Anderson feels he’s wasted the audience’s time long enough, so let the mayhem begin! First up, the Predators opt to go and murder every non-named character remaining, in another totally unclear attack (only the first Predator could adequately depict the beast’s methods). The pyramid is now shifting around wildly at the screenwriter’s convenience, separating characters as the “plot” demands and rendering what little geography there was totally incomprehensible. (By archeologist Sebastian’s theory, the pyramid shifts every ten minutes because it’s metric – I ain’t even gonna touch that one! I guess it’s an anachronism modern audiences can follow.)
One of the guys separated from the rest, a guy who’s distinguishable only by his mustache, well, an alien kills him. Or runs towards him, at any rate. Rendering that attack totally redundant, another (or the same, who knows) alien does the exact same thing to named character Miller.
Okay, let the great Predator/xenomorph matchup finally commence! Now, in their own films, both beasts are the villain, but the standards of creatively bankrupt storytelling determine that one of them must be the hero here – we can’t have any conflicting allegiances or anything. Naturally, the Predator makes for the easier good guy, because his premeditated murders are honorable while the xenomorphs act on pure instinct, and are therefore to be abhorred…Okay then. So over the course of this mad, monstrous melee, the Predators shall repeatedly rescue the humans from the aliens – even if it isn’t their intention to do so.
So who’s your money on, the Predators or the aliens?
Actually, the aliens whoop the Predators’ tails, with their tails. There is a reasonably lengthy hand-to-hand dual, which is by far the best damn thing about this movie, but in the end two Predators are swiftly dispatched by one alien. One alien! The almighty Predators are useless without their guns, it seems – besides, you gotta make your good guys the underdogs, I guess. And note, the aliens’ acid blood renders many of the Predators’ tactics (claw hands, slicing nets) totally useless.
In directly comparing the two franchises’ monsters, I have to use an unusual criteria. See, I’m a fairly omnivorous person, and I must admit that movie monsters typically make me hungry. I want to eat them! This is especially problematic with Starship Troopers, whose creature are, essentially, gigantic lobsters; I honestly cannot watch that movie without snacking. So I’ll say this for the xenomorphs – they’re probably the least edible fictional animal ever. The Predator’s flesh might be gamey and tough, but you could at least eat him – so I vote for him. (A side note: The Blob probably tastes either delicious or terrible.)
The only remaining humans (Lex, Sebastian and Weyland – Max got his butt impaled in a very PG-13 way) race along into another chamber, and somehow this triumphant alien opts not to go after them (it must’ve read the script). Here they face the third and final Predator, which chooses to let Weyland live when it sees a pacemaker in Weyland’s torso. Then Weyland makes the foolish decision to attack said Predator with a flare, earning him a claw gutting anyway. Farewell, company executive who has totally not done anything to sow the future seeds for the Alien franchise, leaving that entirely in the hands of some completely unmentioned Yutani. And congratulations, Lance Henriksen, you’ve tied Bill Paxton for deaths by iconic monsters – the same ones too! (Reedit: the cenobites have also killed him…I can’t quite credit Pumpkinhead, though.)
Lex and Sebastian flee the Predator as the pyramid changes again, right on its ten minute schedule. Then the Predator goes and kills a xenomorph, as simple as that despite earlier evidence. By the way, it seems the MPAA could care less about monster-based gore, which is far gloopier than the human stuff here. Then a random facehugger attacks the Predator – this is supposed to set up a “surprise” half an hour from now, but we’re not fooled.
So that Miller guy I wrote off as dead wakes up in an alien cocoon. This is the problem with portraying non-gory deaths and non-deaths through the exact same technique, you don’t know now who’s alive and who isn’t. He breaks his hand free of the delicious resin, far more brittle than it’s ever been before, and defends himself from rampaging facehuggers with a pistol. He will later die off screen of a chestbursting, so this was pretty pointless.
Lex resolves to return the alien gun she has to the Predator, having understood the filmmakers’ lame hero/villain dichotomy, and deciding that the aliens pose a threat to the entire Earth simply because that’s what characters have decided in previous entries (she hasn’t enough evidence to be sure of this, really). Okay, whatever, the xenomorphs kill Sebastian (yawn), Lex gives the final Predator her gun, and it easily blasts away several xenomorphs. In this latest melee, Lex impales an alien on the Predator’s spear, somehow releasing none of the acid blood that would’ve killed a lesser character under the same circumstances. Apparently this is all the Predator needs to deem Lex a worthy companion, so it fashions her a spear and shield from the vanquished alien’s head and tail, respectively. Okay, that idea’s pretty cool. But, comic book references aside, I cannot accept Lex as the first human to warrant an honorary Predation badge, certainly when the omnipotent Schwarzenegger couldn’t qualify. That’s reverse discrimination!
Now the various remaining xenomorphs rush into the queen’s chamber and destroy her restraints with their acid (all this without that “Ripley intelligence” they needed to formulate the same basic plan in Alien: Resurrection). Man, every screw up possible has happened here! The Predators lost their guns because the humans they invited to the pyramid “surprisingly” took them. And for the first time in untold millennia, the aliens have freed the queen. My only question is why this never happened before – there were no security measures in place to prevent this. Maybe the current Predator is just really incompetent, considering it now decides to blow up the entire building with its arm nuke (now removed from the wrist).
Explosion imminent, Lex and Scar (for that’s what the film wants us to call this clumsy Predator) race from the pyramid’s deepest chamber straight for the escape hole outside. (Well, that was easy!) An alien attacks and wounds Scar, prompting Lex to utter (to the alien) an awfully censored, Live Free or Die Hard variation on Schwarzenegger’s great line from the first. Then Lex and Scar escape directly up the shaft to the surface using…um…some sort of rocket-powered winch thingy that was never there before.
On the surface, they run in terror as the pyramid explodes behind them into a mass of special effects so ridiculously exaggerated that I lose all suspense for their survival. Movie corollary: the bigger the explosion, the more likely the hero is of surviving it.
Chaos finally over forever (yeah right), Scar performs the traditional Predator unmasking for Lex – it turns out he’s Luke’s father! – Oh, wait, I mean, it turns out this Predator is a Predator. What a stupid reveal. Oh, and since the Predators are heroes now, Scar is made to look sympathetic, with his puppy dog eyes and human proportions. I think I just sharted a little. Scar takes a little alien acid that’s somehow there with them unmolested, and fashions a neat little tribal scar into Lex’s cheek, which she’s totally cool with.
The queen awakes! Betcha didn’t see that one coming. Lumbering in unimpressive CGI just like every other cinematic monster nowadays (Stan Winston, you left us too soon), the queen nears her quarry while doing her best Jurassic Park imitation. It’s true, at this stage in the series, she’s just a T-Rex, and the xenomorphs are merely uglier velociraptors. A movie corollary similar to the explosion one states that bigger monsters are really less dangerous (consider the itty bitty facehuggers), so Lex’s triumph over the queen isn’t too surprising. And since there are no airlocks to blast the queen out of, she rather just falls down a cliff like so many a Disney villain. She also freezes in the ocean, perfectly preserved (aliens oughtn’t to be on Earth by now), following closely in the footsteps of Godzilla right around the time he became ridiculous.
Ah, but Scar is dead now, because that’s the sort of safe tragedy that audiences can deal with. The CGI Predator mothership uncloaks right there to take Scar’s incompetent corpse home. Lex really should pull a Richard Dreyfuss and go with the beasts (it resolves some of the continuity problems re: Alien), but she stays on Earth to tell everyone stuff they shouldn’t know. And these Predators on the ship are morons, because they don’t see the alien incubating in Scar’s chest – even though we’ve seen already Predators can easily tell this. The only justification for this extreme lapse of Predator judgment is that we need a final shock scare…A Predator/alien hybrid bursts from Scar’s chest. Ta-da!
That chestbursting hybrid pisses me off, and not just as an obvious sequel tag. It’s obvious to any fans of the franchises going in that we have to see some aliens born of Predators, combining their traits. That’s the reason for this crossover. I often get the impression moviemakers have better ideas than they put into their final products, and this proves that. Why, why, why would you hold off your best notion in the possibility of a sequel, when people want to see it now?! Naturally, this Alien vs. Predator doesn’t live up to its potential, and this is a major example of why that is.
Critics and most reasoning fans of the series (James Cameron excluded) agreed as to this film’s crappiness. Still, Alien vs. Predator made around $170 million worldwide, making it the highest grossing movie of either franchise…People are idiots! I ascribe this to the PG-13, which opened Alien vs. Predator up to a younger and less demanding audience. The ratings switch was a purely mercenary move on the studio’s part, and I’m sad to say it worked. And sure, if this were Deep Rising or whatever other knockoff, I’d say it accomplishes its modest goals. But it ain’t! It’s a god damned Alien and Predator crossover! Those franchises are classics, with huge fan bases (far beyond what their box office would suggest), who demand better sequels than they often get. I could never get too mad at the mostly lame Fast and the Furious movies, because they never meant anything to me, but this!...
And that sequel tag? That hybrid? They went and followed through with that suggestion in the next film, so we could still get a proper AVP entry…But I doubt it.
Related posts:
• Alien No. 1 Alien (1979)
• Alien No. 2 Aliens (1986)
• Predator No. 1 Predator (1987)
• Predator No. 2 Predator 2 (1990)
• Alien No. 3 Alien3 (1992)
• Alien No. 4 Alien Resurrection (1997)
• Alien & Predator Nos. 6 & 4 Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)
• Predator No. 5 Predators (2010)
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