After a fourteen year hiatus following what seemed like an obvious crossover setup, the galaxy’s greatest hunters returned to battle the galaxy’s most terrifying living weapon in a crossover which had already been happening in comics, videogames and novels for a decade and a half. With Paul W S Anderson – a director with a string of videogame-to-film adaptations to his name – in the driving seat, it seemed a fair bet which vein of source material this big screen version would most closely follow. But, wonders Greg D. Smith after so long without a Predator movie, and with the last two Alien franchise entries having provided lacklustre critical and box office reception, could this movie reinvigorate both?

Ever since that Xenomorph skull had appeared in the Predator’s trophy cabinet at the end of Predator 2, Alien vs. Predator on the big screen seemed like an inevitability. Indeed, the two characters seem tailor made for such a crossover – the Predators being seekers of the ultimate big game to hunt, and the Xenomorph being an acid-blooded, rapacious killing machine with no fear. It should be a match made in heaven, and indeed that had been the case for over a decade of comic books, novels and several videogames. The idea of crossover moves – itself not new – had been revived the previous year with Freddy vs. Jason, but unlike so many that had gone before, this was no awkward mushing together of two vaguely similar but utterly unrelated IPs. This idea worked. It’s a shame that the same can’t be said for the end product here.

Critics of the movie often start with the rating, and indeed this is an immediate area of concern for a film in a franchise like this. Released as a PG-13 in America and a 15 certificate in the UK, the movie necessarily had to contain far less gore than the first two Predator movies because of this. It’s arguable that Anderson and the studio were simply playing the numbers, going for a bigger audience with a concept which should on paper appeal to teens, presumably because they would be (in the minds of the decision-makers) more likely to have played the games and read the comics. It’s a sound theory, but one that ignores previous similar attempts – witness the toothless Robocop 3, which not only lacks the blood and guts of Verhoeven’s original but also its biting satirical edge and sense of intelligent self-awareness. The result was a product that nobody had asked for and which satisfied no-one. AvP (as it swiftly came to be marketed) had a similar issue – without the freedom that aiming for an adult audience gave, not only was the opportunity for the spectacular gore and the associated fear it produced (key aspects of the Predator franchise to date) lost, but so too the opportunity for self-awareness, social commentary or any kind of subtlety in its narrative. AvP is all show, and it suffers for it because of how much that show is hobbled by an ill-judged attempt at targeting a demographic it misunderstands.

I’m always suspicious of any movie which begins with multiple jumps to various locations. In the right hands, it’s a way of illustrating the different backgrounds of a team that will be drawn together. In many cases, unfortunately, it’s a device used clumsily to substitute for actual character development. Here, we have Colin Salmon’s Maxwell Stafford wandering the globe grabbing a few of our intended protagonists so that we know into which stereotype they will fall – Sanaa Lathan’s Alexa Woods is our badass adventurer because she’s climbing a mountain. Raoul Bova is Sebastian De Rosa our dedicated nerd with a heart because he’s digging up bottle caps somewhere while looking for actual archaeological stuff. So far, so mundane. As the film progresses, we meet Ewen Bremner’s Graeme Miller, chemical engineer and serial photographer who takes every opportunity to talk about his children, therefore cementing in the minds of any audience members paying attention that he will definitely be dying. There are other members of the intended expedition but largely they don’t matter enough for the film to tell us anything about them. They’re there, and they’re mainly there so that they can line up and die. By the time Lance Henriksen appears as Charles Bishop Weyland, owner of Weyland industries and walking talking reference to the Alien movies for the purposes of the movie, it becomes clear exactly what the tone of the movie will be.

Silly.

Being a Paul W S Anderson vehicle, AvP declines to actually make any narrative sense whatsoever, opting instead for flashy visuals and exciting set-pieces which it hopes will distract the audience from the tissue-thinness of its plot and the contradictory nature of its protagonists. Let’s take Sebastian as an example. He’s been teed up by the movie as a smart man, an expert in his field which is clearly archaeological science. When the team arrive at what Alexis tells them all is an abandoned whaling station in the Antarctic, Sebastian wanders through the stacks of giant bones and asks – apparently without any sense of irony – ‘What are these?’ Alexis then responds ‘Whale bones.’ You could argue I’m nitpicking but this is just a single example which typifies how little attention the film pays to stuff that it has set up. Sebastian is only an expert when the script requires him to be, and then he becomes a super-expert, able to decipher a language he’s never seen before because it consists of characters which are familiar to him from three ancient, glyphic languages. Again, one can argue that movies must necessarily simplify certain elements in order to ensure brevity and not require hours of boring scenes, but how likely is it that one archaeologist is an expert in deciphering three completely different ancient languages (given that Stargate told us years previously that experts on ancient Egypt could not even agree on the meaning of Egyptian hieroglyphics) let alone that he’d be able to piece together meaning from a language composed of elements of all three rapidly enough to fluently read and translate all the inscriptions in the pyramid perfectly? There’s suspension of disbelief and then there’s just ignoring bad or lazy narrative choices because shiny distractions are happening.

And this lack of sense is hardly the only crime against storytelling which AvP commits. Anderson has always struggled with the basic storytelling tenet of ‘Show, don’t tell’ and this movie is no exception. Info dump dialogues are spattered throughout, giving us tranches of background about the Predators which nobody asked for as the film spins this narrative about them having come to Earth in ancient times and shown humans how to build pyramids which are these intricate mechanical moving puzzle boxes in which the Predators will hunt Xenomorphs, created from willing human sacrifices, as some sort of Predator rite-of-passage, and if they lose then they simply activate their handy wrist-mounted bomb and thus you have an explanation for the disappearance of the ancient human civilisations and their ruins which might have left clues/explanations about all of this. Of course, we know from Predator and Predator 2 that those devices are nuclear, and you might think archaeologists studying civilisations which just disappear from the record might pick up on things like evidence of a nuclear detonation or the background radiation which would presumably still exist there, but then that would require thinking and AvP is keen to avoid that.

It doesn’t even manage consistency in terms of the titular creatures. Scar, the Predator who outlives his two comrades and makes it (almost) to the end of the film, seems to be preternaturally rapid and unable to be snuck up upon one moment, then is easily surprised by a Facehugger the next. And that’s leaving aside the fact that until he meets Alexis, he and his mates have been happily murdering every human they come across, yet because she offers him his gun back, not only does he let her live, but he ends up befriending her. The film attempts to gloss over Alexis’ acceptance of this devil’s pact by having her keep quoting ‘The enemy of my enemy is my friend’ as she recognises the Xenomorphs as the greater threat, but that doesn’t quite expunge the fact that according to the conclusions she herself had drawn with Sebastian, the Predators had not only created this nightmare factory in which she finds herself, but also had deliberately lured her and the rest of the team there to be the fodder that produced the Aliens for their hunt. Additionally, the previous two movies had established that the wrist bomb was a suicide device, to be used by a Predator who had lost. Why does Scar then so casually throw his into a Xenomorph nest so that he and a human can run away?

Between the lack of gore and the series of odd narrative choices, the movie does not feel like it belongs to either of the source franchises in anything past the vaguest cosmetic sense, and that’s an issue precisely because those source franchises provide its entire reason to exist. The score continues the issue, Harald Kloser producing music which carries not even the hint of an homage to either Horner’s or Silvestri’s previous work. Both those composers worked in recognisable signature themes which recurred throughout their works, but none such exists here, leaving a string of pieces which feel unrelated not just to the other movies but to each other as well.

As far as the Predator goes, with Kevin Peter Hall’s tragic death in 1991, the baton was picked up here by Ian Whyte, who has the stature but not necessarily the presence or physicality of Hall. This, combined with the completely different aesthetic chosen for the costume (nimbler fingers, a chunkier build, armour, oddly ornamented masks) means that this doesn’t feel in any way like the same creature we had seen before. Even when the mask inevitably comes off, the distinctive face of the Predator looks very different – more like a mask, with an almost rubbery quality, compared to the very realistic, organic feeling of the original.

It’s a shame, because in other ways the production actually makes good decisions on the action front, with Anderson’s commitment to practical effects where possible meaning that this hasn’t aged as badly visually speaking as other films of the time. Unfortunately, that commitment is undermined as much by Anderson’s jumpy editing style and the decision to shoot most of the film in near darkness, meaning that there’s often more the suggestion that cool things may be happening that any actual satisfying confirmation of the same.

When it comes down to it, AvP disappoints on multiple levels. The touted confrontation implicit in the name never really occurs in any satisfying fashion, the film itself doesn’t really feel all that connected to either of the source franchises on any level other than the aesthetic, and the aesthetic itself feels badly comparatively stunted by the reduced age certificate and the concomitant lack of the gore and pure terror both the Alien and Predator movies before it were built around. Perhaps the most telling thing of all is that the tagline for the poster is the best possible critical evaluation of the movie – ‘Whoever wins, we lose’. Indeed so.