Okay action, nonsensical script (spoilers)

Rating: Null/10 (7 September 2004)

I'm not as familiar with the franchises as some other reviewers, so the complaints about consistency didn't bother me too much. Thanks maybe to my ignorance, I enjoyed the film. The action was fun. The CGI was pretty good. The story was familiar, but let's face it, all the story has to do is provide an excuse for the action, and this premise, though dull and derivative, fits the bill.
My problem with the film is that every time a human opened his/her mouth, complete and utter dreck poured forth.
For instance? The team's archaeologist(!) speculates that a prehistoric (never mind pre-Christian) civilization used the Gregorian calendar. Fortunately for the team, apparently it did.
For instance? The team discovers an inscription that gives a thumbnail history of this ancient civilization. The inscription also describes the civilization's downfall, which almost certainly happened sometime after the inscription was created.
But the nadir of the dialogue, the execrable line I can't get out of my head, was the archaeologist's hypothesis: "The Aztec calendar was metric, based on multiples of ten. So I'm guessing that the pyramid changes every ten minutes."
Now let's pretend for a moment that "metric" means "based on multiples of ten" (it doesn't); and let's pretend for a moment that the Aztec calendar was "decimal," which is the word Anderson was looking for (it wasn't); and let's pretend for a moment that Aztec calendrics and Aztec horology were somehow entwined (I can't think of a reason to suppose that they were); why would the Aztecs use sexagesimal units like "minutes"?
Nonsensical as the hypothesis is, it is also correct, which tells you everything you need to know about the amount of thought that went into this script. For this kind of drivel you usually need a mismanaged team of a dozen scriptwriters or so. The fact that Paul Anderson can do it all by himself is quite an achievement of incompetence.
With any luck, AVP2 will be a silent film.