Of course, as they always do, the studios got involved, and they fuckered everything all up good and proper. The biggest problem here? The movie is rated PG-13. Jack ValentiÍs ever-increasing lunacy notwithstanding, the PG-13 rating was birthed for a reason: to add a little gray area between the PG and R ratings. Seemed like a good idea at the time. However, over the years, the movie studios discovered that releasing a movie with an R rating could seriously cut into their profits, so that once the box office receipts are tallied up, the studio heads might only be able to afford either the ten new solid-gold Ferraris, or the island of Borneo, not both. So, the studios take a movie that needs to be violent and gory, and that needs to be filled with profanity and off-color humor, and remove enough of this stuff to get a PG-13 release, thereby neutering it completely, and probably killing even more box office than they would have lost to the R rating. There are painfully obvious signs of the concerted attempt to keep the PG-13 rating in AVP. All the fight scenes between Predator and Alien are either very short – such as one in which in a Predator nonchalantly slices an Alien in half – or they are shot in such a manner as to make unclear that there's even a fight going on. To illustrate the cinematography problem, let's talk about my cat. He has a toy that consists of a furry plastic mouse at the end of an elastic string. It hangs from a door jamb in one of the bedrooms. When he attacks it, it bounces around frantically, off of the sides of the door, off the walls, flying high into the air only to come back down to get pinned to the ground and released again. That's what the camera action is like during several of the fight scenes. Perhaps the most egregious is the utter lack of profanity. Any fan of the Predator movies will be expecting some variation on the classic Predator one-liner – uttered by Gov. Schwarzenegger in the original, and Danny "I'm gettin' too old for this shit" Glover in the sequel) – loudly proclaiming that the Predator is "one ugly motherfucker." AVP has to go back to the well, obviously, except they have the PG-13 rating to be concerned with. So, the two occasions the line is used, it comes out as "You are only ugly (SHOTGUN BLAST)" and "You are one ugly (JUMP-CUT TO UNRELATED SCENE)." Great. The story is ridiculous, but if you've suspended disbelief enough to allow the existence of Aliens and Predators in the first place, it's not that big a deal. A pyramid is located underneath the polar ice in Antarctica, and a party of people is recruited by a wealthy benefactor to explore it. Eventually, before they all die, it's discovered that the pyramid was built thousands of years ago by the Predators when they came to earth. The pyramid was a factory that would use the local humans to breed Aliens for the Predators to fight in a test of strength. So, the Predators just want to come back to prove their worth against the Aliens, and conveniently the humans are waiting for them. Lots of humans die, several Aliens die, and a couple Predators die, in slightly gruesome fashion. Eventually, the last remaining human and one of the Predators end up joining forces to kill all the Aliens and the Alien Queen that had been frozen there for thousands of years. Oh, yeah. The twist ending. Early in the movie, youÍre treated to a scene during which it's hinted that an Alien facehugger manages to lay its eggs inside one of the Predators. You never know for sure, until the last scene of the film, on board the Predator mothership when the now-dead Predator is carried on board the ship, and once inside, the Alien chestburster shows up right on cue, hinting that there's a sequel coming. Straight to DVD, no doubt.
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