Soon everyone is running and screaming through a maze of randomly shifting tunnels, and dying in a variety of painful and ingenious ways. Before you can say "sacrificial chamber", baby aliens are sprouting through ribcages like blood-splattered daffodils during a particularly fecund spring. Needless to say it all goes horribly wrong, proving that no matter how technologically advanced you are, anything that involves Tory-inspired transport initiatives will end in disaster.
And it soon becomes obvious that the humans have been lured there to act as host bodies to baby aliens that, once fully grown into the now familiar HR Giger-inspired killing machines, will be hunted by the predators as part of a rite-of-passage. At the bottom of the tunnel they discover a 1,000-year-old pyramid that has clearly been built by a race of space-travelling warriors, the predators. A bit like Crossrail then.Īt this point, and for the 100th time in 10 minutes, they ignore the advice of the expedition guide (a game Sanaa Latham), and Weyland leads his team down into the unknown. When Weyland and his team arrive, ready to start digging into the ice, they find that a perfectly round tunnel has already been cut using technology not of this world. A dying businessman, Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen), and a "crack" team of experts are investigating the source of an unidentifiable signal emanating from beneath the Antarctic ice sheet, which also happens to be the site of an old whaling station, mysteriously abandoned exactly 100 years before. So, to the plot of AvP, for what it's worth. Heavy weaponry … the casting of Lance Henriksen lends some gravitas and legitimacy to AvP. Again it was a commercial and critical flop, perhaps because of the fact that it co-starred Jason Scott Lee, previously Mowgli in the live-action version of The Jungle Book, as a psychotic, genetically modified super-soldier. Which would explain why Neill appears to be channelling Clive Barker's Pinhead in the final scenes.) Even less well known, despite starring the incomparable Kurt Russell, was Soldier. (This due largely to the fact that someone apparently replaced the original ending with "Hellraiser in space" and didn't tell any of the cast except Sam Neill.
And there ends the almost-birth of a new movie genre, the inter-species romcom.Īlien vs Predator was directed by Paul WS Anderson, whose other movies include the flawed but decent Event Horizon, one of his few non-video game tie-ins – which despite a strong cast, including a slimline Laurence Fishburne, was a critical and financial failure.
She grimaces as her skin burns, and then their eyes meet across the great expanse of space and time that separates both cultures, and then they kiss … or they would have if the queen alien hadn't eviscerated the woman's new friend with the pointy end of her tail.
There's a touching scene near the end of Alien vs Predator when an eight-foot, fang-faced predator, using the acidic blood from the severed finger of an alien face-hugger, tenderly scorches a mark of courage and respect onto the cheek of the last human survivor.