Alien vs Predator (2004) | Sci-Fi Saturdays

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Whoever wins, we lose!

The early 21st Century brought together two of the acclaimed monsters of the modern age, the Alien and the Predator. Their fight spills over borders and endangers humans, naturally. What’s the beef between these monsters and why are these titans battling each other? If it’s not mother issues, it can only be because audiences demanded it. The title bout of Alien vs Predator is about to begin!

First Impressions

Just the title of this film alone promises so much! A group of humans, led by a man that looks surprisingly like the android Bishop, investigate a tunnel in Antarctica and discover an ancient temple or ship belonging to a group of Predators–plural. Two people get trapped in a room where an alien egg erupts, and the action begins. An alien is hunted by Predators while the humans just try to survive and escape. It’s Alien vs. Predator, and we’re just in their way!

Presented below is the trailer for the film.

The Fiction of The Film

At an Antarctic whaling station, on October 10, 1904, a man runs from an invisible predator and a xenomorph leaps out of nowhere. One hundred years later a satellite from the Weyland Corporation discovers a heat bloom in the same location. Mr. Weyland’s assistant, Maxwell (Colin Salmon), recruits Arctic guide Alexa “Lex” Woods (Sanaa Latham) from an ice waterfall in Nepal, and Professor Sebastian de Rosa (Raoul Bova) and his assistant Thomas Parks (Sam Troughton) from an archeological dig in Mexico. They join Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) and others on the icebreaker Piper Maru en route to the Razorback Point whaling station.

Weyland has assembled a group that also includes Dr. Graeme Miller (Ewen Bremner), a chemical engineer, Rusten Quinn (Carsten Norgaard) an experienced driller and his team, plus Mark Verheiden (Tommy Flanagan) and Adele Rousseau (Agathe de La Boulaye) along with their team of mercenaries. Weyland’s satellites have discovered an ancient pyramid buried below the ice that appears to be made from features reminiscent of the Aztecs, Cambodians, and Egyptians–possibly the first pyramid ever built. He has assembled a team of experts in science and protection to get into the temple first and claim it for his own.

Lex agrees to lead the team into the buried pyramid even though there is not enough time to properly train anyone in the best way to stay alive in the harsh environment. They discover dead bodies at the station dating back to 1904, as well as a perfectly round hole already bored through the ice to the pyramid. Lex leads the main team down the sloping shaft while Quinn and a number of security and drilling experts stay up top. Unfortunately, they are quickly killed by three Predators who have come to Earth to hunt. Inside the pyramid, the team finds a sacrificial chamber and accidentally steps on a pressure plate which activates machinery deep within the pyramid.

Rousseau and Parks stay behind while Lex, Sebastian, Miller, Maxwell, Verheiden, and Weyland all investigate a lower chamber. The temple machinery has released a Xenomorph queen from suspended animation, which begins laying eggs that are transported into the sacrificial chamber and hatch–killing all inside. Lex’s group finds a sarcophagus with three futuristic guns inside. The Predators take notice and begin stalking the group. Every ten minutes the pyramid structure shifts and reconfigures, making getting out like exiting a maze. The group is separated and Verheiden is killed by a Xenomorph, of which a dozen are now running around.

Maxwell is netted by a Predator–who wants its weapons back–but that Predator is killed by a Xenomorph, which also kills a second Predator after a protracted fight. Lex, Sebastian, and Weyland try to escape to the surface but Weyland’s lung ailment slows him down and he sacrifices himself against the final Predator to buy the others time. The final Predator fights and kills a Facehugger and Xenomorph, branding its forehead with a symbol as its rite of passage. Sebastian translates some hieroglyphics and realizes these alien Predators have been coming to Earth every hundred years to fight Xenomorphs. The Predators use humans as sacrifices to breed the creatures and use a self-destruct mechanism to destroy the Xenomorphs if they fail.

After Sebastian is taken by a Xenomorph and impregnated by a Facehugger, Lex teams up with the remaining Predator–returning its weapon. She helps it defeat a Xenomorph, and it gives her a shield and spear made from the fallen alien and brands her cheek with the same symbol it has. The Predator tosses a bomb into the heart of the pyramid as it and Lex jump on a transport back to the surface. Unfortunately, the Queen survives the explosion and attacks the two survivors. While it fights the Predator, Lex manages to attach its chain to a water tank and sink it to the bottom of the ocean. The Predator dies from its wounds and is returned to its ship by more of its kind. The film ends with a small Pred/Alien chestburster emerging from the dead body.

“Want my advice? Stay on the boat.” – Alexa ‘Lex’ Woods

History in the Making

The film Alien vs Predator is only partially influenced by events from the popular 20th Century Fox franchises and owes much of its development to the folks at Dark Horse Comics. In February 2009–nine months before Predator 2 would be released and showcase a xenomorph skull in the background of one of the Predator ships–the anthology comic series Dark Horse Presents released issue #36 which showcased a team-up between the two alien creatures. Dark Horse Comics had the licensing rights to both Aliens and Predator in the late 1980s and had been publishing various stories with them. The preceding two issues each focused on one of the characters, finally teaming them up in early 1990. Over the next decade, more than a dozen mini-series teaming the creatures would be produced by the publisher, influencing fans and filmmakers alike.

Up until this time, there had been four films in the Alien franchise (1979, 1986, 1992, & 1997) and two films in the Predator franchise (1987 & 1990). These films were mostly directed by new or up-and-coming directors, many of whom went on to greater heights. Ridley Scott and John McTiernan had only directed one film prior to Alien and Predator. James Cameron, Jean-Pierre Jeunet, and Stephen Hopkins had only directed two films prior to Aliens, Alien: Resurrection, and Predator 2. And Alien3 was David Fincher’s first feature film. But when it came time to entrust the future of these franchises, the producers of Alien vs Predator chose Paul WS Anderson–who had a whopping five films under his belt including Mortal Kombat and the first Resident Evil film. Not that this indicates anything about the creativity or vision of the director, but it may certainly help the on-set experience or restrain meddlesome executives who may feel they can dictate to a less seasoned director. In fact, this film did well enough that a second film, Alien vs Predator: Requiem, was released in 2007. That would be the last crossover to date for these franchises, with another Predator film, Predators, in 2010, and another Alien film, Alien: Covenant, in 2017 (if you don’t count Prometheus in 2012).

Genre-fication

Team-up movies with fan-favorite monsters are nothing new and Alien vs Predator was following a long line of predecessors. Going back to 1943 when Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man (which has a brief cameo on a television screen in this film), Universal Studios showed that two popular creatures could both top the bill. The studio went even harder over the next two years with House of Frankenstein and House of Dracula which added the vampire Dracula to the fight. The early 60s brought together King Kong vs. Godzilla for an even bigger spectacle, with Godzilla taking on everyone by the end of the decade in Destroy All Monsters. The 80s had The Monster Squad which reunited a number of classic horror characters and in 2003, just a year before this film was released there was Freddy vs Jason.

Alien vs Predator includes a lot of nods to the Alien and Predator films before it, much to fans’ delight. Some of the elements and Easter Eggs feel a little like fan service, but the film has so much more going on that a lot of the nods fly by the first time through. Viewers can see nods to Alien with the logo of the film being built from individual lines as with the original film’s title sequence and the sacrificial chamber mirroring the seven pods in the Nostromo. The opening shot of the film shows a Weyland Corporation satellite backlit to look like the Queen alien in Aliens. An additional nod to the second Alien film includes (primarily) the use of Lance Henrikson as a Weyland who appears to have been the template for the Bishop android, as well as his quirk of twirling his pen and tapping it between his fingers–much like Bishop’s display with the knife. The third film in the Alien series is even referenced by a number of glyphs around the temple, including the floor of the sacrificial chamber, looking like the embryonic Queen from the film’s promotional art. The Predator franchise receives its share of nods as well including the various weapons and ships introduced in Predator 2, plus Lex’s line, “you are one ugly Motherf**”–which is garbled at the end since this film was PG-13 and they used their one F-bomb minutes earlier. Astute film fans may even see some references to John Carpenter’s The Thing in the abandoned Antarctic whaling station that survived an alien attack.

Societal Commentary

When it comes right down to it, these types of films–be they science-fiction or horror–don’t present a lot of thematic elements. It’s a film about human survival as the two (or more) creatures duke it out. As the tagline says, “Whoever wins, we lose.” It’s an existential crisis presented as two horrible options that are looking to kill humanity. But slightly beyond that, Alien vs Predator is a coming-of-age story for the Predator characters. Would it help to think of them as teenagers being sent to a foreign planet to hunt the Xenomorphs in the passage to adulthood? The main Predator (who is referred to as Scar in the credits) has nothing personal against any of the humans. They’re just the conduit to create the Xenomorphs he’s been tasked to hunt. However, he also recognizes Lex’s instincts and her survival skills, honoring her as a fellow warrior. This was touched on slightly in Predator 2 as well.

The film also has things to say about the wealth and privilege of characters like Weyland. He has a multi-billion dollar global corporation, along with satellites, private fleets, and enough money to buy anything and anyone that he wants. He’s a slightly more despicable version of John Hammond from Jurassic Park. Like many people of privilege, he doesn’t take no for an answer, and that cavalier attitude costs him his life and the lives of dozens of others on the voyage. His sacrifice to allow Lex and Sebastian additional time to escape may only seem noble due to Lance Henriksen playing the character. He makes even the worst characters have a bit more humanity to them.

The Science in The Fiction

Alien vs Predator creates an entirely new backstory for both franchises, intertwining the history of the Predators with ancient Earthly civilizations, equating them with the tales of ancient alien astronauts. As with Stargate, the backstory for the Predators has them visiting Earth centuries ago to direct humanity in creating the pyramidal structures of the Egyptians, Cambodians, and Aztecs. In turn for this knowledge, these alien visitors used humans as the incubation chambers for their hunting ritual, coming back every one hundred years to repeat the process. This story also seems inspired by Erich von Däniken’s Chariots of the Gods book from the late 60s, which postulates that primitive man would have been unable to build such architecture without assistance of some extraterrestrial kind. This origin has since been made apocryphal due to later films in the series (which show ancient alien engineers seeding the planet with life) but was a good extrapolation from some of the elements from the second Predator film.

The Predators receive a lot of updated weaponry for this film. Their uncuttable net and a throwing disc were introduced in Predator 2, but Scar has an upgrade with a glaive-like, shuriken-inspired weapon in this film, along with a net that constricts on the victim. Also on display is the beam weapon on board their spaceship which can bore a hole through the ice, directly to the temple. The humans don’t seem to puzzle over this for too long, seeing it as a completely natural occurrence that a tunnel miraculously has appeared for them to access the archeological find. But viewers may be wondering, why is the tunnel ribbed instead of smooth? If it was a laser or energy weapon that made the cut, how did that happen?

The Final Frontier

Team-up films come and go, whether they’re monster vs monster, or superheroes battling it out over simple misunderstandings. Alien vs Predator was a no-brainer for the studio to put two of the biggest franchises together in this film. It includes some amazing stunt and special effect sequences, showing fans images that they may have only dreamed about–or read in a comic book from Dark Horse Comics. Three years later, Alien vs Predator: Requiem was released and immediately follows the events of this film, with the Predator ship crashing back to Earth, and the Predalien creature escaping into the woods of Colorado. It was not well received as this first film. And while Alien vs Predator may not please everyone, it certainly showcases two extremely popular characters that the audience can root for.

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