Looking Forward to Tylenol vs. Advil.

Rating: Null/10 (10 September 2004)

The enormous commercial success of "Freddy vs. Jason" (one of the worst mainstream films of recent memory) made "Alien vs. Predator" a cinematic reality. What can you say? The movie is not much when you put it on celluloid. It is a dark and bleak mesh of two ideas that wore their welcomes out long ago. A team of scientists led by Sanaa Lathan and corporate bigwig Lance Henriksen (playing a different role from earlier "Alien" pictures) go to Antarctica of all places to drill hundreds of feet beneath the frozen ground to explore a pyramid that time seemingly forgot. Naturally predators built the structure centuries earlier and we get a strange combination of Egyptology and other ancient civilizations. Also predators have been the universe's greatest warriors and they have proven their worth in their field by hunting---you guessed it, the aliens. How are humans involved? They have been used to breed the alien creatures for future hunts. Ridiculous territory does not get helped out by awful cinematography and art direction that is hard to even recognize. The performers are just window-dressing to present the two groups of entities in would-be-frightening form. This is officially the fifth time that an "Alien" film has been produced and the third time for the "Predator" series. Each series (particularly "Alien") started out very strong, but now we are left with a lack of storyline material and thus we have an uninteresting mixture that has no business combining. Probably the worst film for each series. Still a bit better than "Freddy vs. Jason", but really what film isn't? 2 stars out of 5.