What went wrong

Rating: 5/10 (27 July 2007)

Combining Fox's two great sci-fi movie monsters, Aliens and Predators, with a Stargate-esquire back story about alien gods and ancient pyramids in the Antarctic must have seemed like a great idea at the time. But somehow it falls flat. I'm usually a big fan of writer / director Paul WS Anderson (I loved Event Horizon, and the first Resident Evil is one of the few video game movie adaptations that stands on its own merits), but I'm afraid he really stumbles here.
The script could have used another pass to tighten it up before shooting began. The opening is rather clumsy and shows too much too early, missing out on the slow build up of tension which worked so well in Alien, Aliens and Predator. Most of the "characters" are faceless cannon fodder, even the central characters are woefully under-developed, and everyone dies too quickly for the viewer to really care about any of them.
There are also a host of glaring continuity errors, plot holes and contradictions of things we've already seen in previous Alien and Predator movies, like the way the Aliens in AvP apparently go from an egg being laid to hatching to implanting to chest bursting to being full grown adults in the space of a few hours.
All of which would be forgivable if the action lived up to expectations. But it doesn't. There aren't any memorable set pieces, the Predators look like chubby WWE wrestlers, the occasional slow motion shots don't really add anything, and there just isn't enough Alien on Predator action to keep you interested, while the humans are predictably pretty much wiped out within a few minutes of encountering the two alien species. Unlike the original Predator and all four Alien movies, there just aren't any fights, chases or reveals that really stick in the mind, and the whole film flashes by in a blur in just over an hour and a half.
All in all its a bit disappointing, and the prospect of Aliens vs Predator (see what they did there?) coming soon is enough to fill fans of either franchise with fear.