I wish this movie not even on my worst of enemies or foullest of talkbackers

Rating: 1/10 (13 August 2004)

Usually when you have to wait twelve years to get something, a gift per se, you should expect something good. Let's say you are seventeen and you've been asking your parents to get you a pony since you were five, and then they finally do. A month after you get the pretty pony that you've been wishing to have all your life, the old thing croaks. Your parents did something cheap. They bought an inexpensive pony at the end of its life from a farmer that was about to put it down but found capitalistic refuge by selling the horse to your parents. That my friends, is what has happened with 'Alien vs. Predator', one of the most anticipated films over the last few years, and an existential version of one of the greatest science fiction movies never made.
My grandiose disappoint in this film can not be explained without telling the history of the project and what it means to me and how much better it could have been. At the end of Predator 2, you can see an alien skull in the ship deck. In 1990, Dark Horse Comics published a limited series of Aliens vs. Predator. The premise was simple: in a constant search for new species of big game to hunt, a pack of predators have taken to seeding distant worlds with batches of alien eggs, returning to hunt them when the creatures have hatched and matured. On the desert world Ryushi, however, their sport is complicated by a colony of humans, caught in the middle of the bloody battle between two of the deadliest species in the galaxy. As the battle rages, an uneasy alliance develops between a Japanese female named Noguchi and the predator leader, Broken Tusk, as they both face the alien onslaught.
Given, a sort of version happens like this in the movie. The predators used to rule Earth as Gods and taught the Aztecs, Egyptians, Mayans, Cambodians, and everybody else how to build pyramids. They would return every 100 years to have a game hunt against aliens that I suppose they bring down to Earth, incubate inside sacrificing humans, burst out of the chest of the humans and are hunted by the predators. But one time, the predators couldn't take the aliens, and blew up their entire Antarctic kingdom.
The raging battle disposes of every single human in the temple in violent but quick-cutting and gore-free fashions. Of the human characters, not one possesses an ounce of charisma or a line of memorable dialogue. The characters don't have any conversation or arc; they just spew exposition as we tediously wait for the aliens or predators to get to them. Also, there is a non-WASP female who forms an alliance with a predator (no names mentioned) as they take on more aliens in some really ridiculous looking images.
The instant success of the comic thrilled fans of the movies everywhere, and inspired Peter Briggs to write a screenplay based on the comic book series called 'The Hunt: Alien Vs. Predator'. He wrote a gripping 107-page spec script and was able to sell it to 20th Century Fox and was later commissioned for a second draft. He incorporated ideas that the predators were of a samurai-like code and an alien-predator hybrid, which is ineptly placed at the end without any imagination. There is a wild scene in Brigg's script where the predators pick up a bunch of alien eggs and then something nasty happens. The ship is de-powered and the predators drift around weightlessly  and then the aliens attack. One predator shoots at an alien and blows him up, but the acid blood splatters throughout the ship and chews through the hulls and decks. But Paul W.S. Anderson script has none of these enticing and inspired scenes. Seeing how bad the present movie is makes you wonder why they hadn't gone with the fan script.
But that comic book and script adaptation is not all that went on. There were also these awesome toys, which involved some reinvented aliens of different genus, like the dog concoction in 'Alien3'. Despite the earth-bound nature of the film, Anderson doesn't explore these possibilities. There has also been a decade of video games ranging from three generations of game play involving the aliens and predators, but nothing interesting but overdone visual effects have been inspired from that region. And the film is so half-assed in its violence it is sickening. An 'Alien vs. Predator' film should not be rated PG-13. The film has a lot of on-screen death but none of which is scary in the least bit.
Then there is the use of special effects in the film. 'Alien' was scary because you barely ever see the creeping beast for more than a few frames until the end. We are scared of what we don't see, and sometime what we do see. But Anderson seems uninterested in scary his audience, nor really exciting them either. He just wants lots of shots of the predators and aliens doing things.
There is one interesting visual effect in the movie, however. And it is used in a montage exposition of the predators' time on Earth: A great image of hundreds of aliens leaping to the top of a temple with only several predators defending it. That's about it.
Anyway, maybe I should get to the top of the movie. A dozen science experts plus a few faceless cronies are summoned to check out a heat spot in Antarctica, and will be paid for by Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen from 'Aliens'). Involved in this idiotic adventure are Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan), an ice climbing expert who stays on board for the safety of everyone else. Sebastian de Rosa (Raoul Bova), an Italian archeologist who while reading what he thinks is Egyptian, discovers that the rotation of the thousands-year old temple is in metric time. Could such an educated scientist not know that metric system was invented by Napoleon?
All of the other characters fail to even achieve 'cardboard cut-out', and are relegate to a level below the splendor of effects-driven death and an excuse to showcase the weapons of the predators and aliens. I thought as the movie progressed there were be a connection made between Lance Henriksen's Bishop character, and how he becomes an android in the 'Alien' movies. But nope, he's just another disposable character in this film.
To have to wait twelve years for something that should be spectacular and fun and receive a boring monster mash such as this outdoes disappointment. It is a headache, panache of mishmash and an incumbency of in competencies; it's the worst film of its kind. But if there is anything good that has come out of it, it has inspired me to make a better 'Alien vs. Predator' movie. I shall use only existing material, footage from all six other movies, three generations of video games, hundreds of comic books, Peter Briggs script which will be acted out by alien and predator toys, I shall make a movie that I can at least call better than Paul W.S. Anderson's monstrous assault on the eyes, ears, and taste.
Sources: Description of Peter Brigg's script from David Hughes book The Greatest Sci-Fi Movies Never Made.