satellite owned by Weyland Industries has found something it shouldn't: a heat plume deep beneath the Antarctic ice. Wealthy but ailing industrialist Charles Bishop Weyland (Henriksen) assembles of team of experts to investigate. They include environmental adventurer Alexa "Lex" Woods (Lathan), archaeologist Sebastian de Rosa (Italian movie star Bova), chemical engineer Graeme Miller (Scottish actor Bremner) and a team of commandos led by Maxwell Stafford (Colin Salmon).
Overhead, a massive spaceship slows as three armored aliens survey the buried pyramid and prepare their descent.
Aboard the icebreaker Piper Maru, en route to the Ross Ice Shelf, Weyland reveals what they have discovered: what appears to be a massive pyramid 2,000 feet below the ice. The mission: to drill through the ice and explore the pyramid before anyone else can.
Upon arrival at the ice shelf, Woods has reservations about setting out without the proper training. But de Rosa and Miller persuade her that they have a better chance of surviving with her than without her.
When they arrive on station, they discover the remains of an abandoned whaling settlement, whose denizens apparently vanished without explanation exactly 100 years earlier. They also discover what appears to be a perfectly bored ice tunnel, leading down nearly half a mile to the pyramid itself. Who drilled it? And how?
Descending, the team discovers something else that shouldn't be there: a pyramid with curious markings from three ancient cultures, a lot of bodies and images of peculiar creatures. And what's that sound in the dark?
Hitting all the right notes
Like Freddy vs. Jason before it, Alien vs. Predator seems like more of a cool marketing idea than an actual movie premise, but in the hands of Resident Evil director Anderson it actually emerges as a passably entertaining genre actioner. Anderson shows that he's likely a fan of both franchises and lavishes a great deal of care in protecting them. The movie (which has nothing to do with the similarly themed comic-book or video-game franchises) hits all the right notes from both series and fits very snugly between them.
That said, the movie is unlikely to appeal to anyone who isn't familiar with the first two Predator movies or the first four Alien films. From the Alien series, AvP (as it is nicknamed) draws the requisite slimy, acid-blood, face-hugger, chest-burster motifs. From Predator, it gets the invisible-armor, badass, sharp-clawed, infrared-vision, shoulder-mounted-laser, upside-down-corpse tropes. And the promised monster-vs.-hunter smackdowns don't disappoint, though they are shot with such velocity that they are sometimes hard to track.
Anderson, with the credited help of Alien co-creators O'Bannon and Shusett, comes up with a premise that plausibly pits both monsters against each other in the present and on Earth. He shows a great sense of comic-book-influenced visual style, opening up what could have been a claustrophobic film and giving it some epic scale. And Anderson comes up with some unexpected pleasures, like the constantly morphing pyramid. He even throws in a few winks to hardcore SF fans, like naming the icebreaker the Piper Maru, from The X-Files.
But anyone looking for character development, subtext, thematic arcs, narrative logic, humor or actual metaphors is going to be gravely disappointed. Lathan offers up a serviceable variation on the Ripley-like heroine, and the redoubtable Henriksen gives the cliched role of Weyland enough gravitas to make him interesting. The other characters barely register an impression before they are variously skewered, smashed, exploded, fried or otherwise dispatched.
