Alien vs. Predator (film)

"Alexa 'Lex' Woods: We're in the middle of a war. It's time to pick a side. Sebastian de Rosa: We are on our side!"

This page is for the Alien Versus Predator films. Games and comics can be found here: Alien vs. Predator.

What would happen if the Predator, interstellar alien hunter extraordinaire, took it upon himself to go after the face-raping Aliens? Oddly enough, lots of humans dying.

Alien vs. Predator is the combination of Fox's two hit alien monster movies, and the stories of the innocent humans caught in the middle. The concept was even hinted at in the second Predator movie, which featured a Xenomorph skull amongst the Predator's trophies. It was finally made into a movie in 2004, with a sequel in 2007. The movies abandoned the previous setting and had the conflict take place on contemporary Earth. That the movies weren't exactly embraced, even by the fanbase, owes more to the fact that the movies Human protagonists were the weakest element and simply weren't credible enough while the Aliens and Predators remained both on form.

The games, along with a series of comics and novels, are completely unrelated to the story or setting of the movies. They are instead set in the same timeline and setting as the second Alien movie.

Tropes in both films (specific films each follow this section):

 * Corrupt Corporate Executive: Anyone high up in WY is guaranteed to be doing something dangerous, unethical and in all likelihood stupid involving the nearest Hive and / or ancient ruins. It's apparently true for the whole corporation: Weyland-Yutani's contract has a clause that allows them to feed you to a Xenomorph just to see what happens when they feed you to a Xenomorph.
 * Crossover
 * Developing Doomed Characters: Both are widely considered badly done examples.
 * DVD Commentary: Both AVP movies have them.
 * Even Evil Has Standards: Predators do not kill certain targets such as children and pregnant women. In the first movie there's even a scene where a predator refrains from killing a man because it sees that he is dying of terminal cancer.
 * Face Full of Alien Wingwong: Being a film that includes Aliens, people getting facehugged is inevitable, unlike the four alien films, in which one person is visibly facehugged, the AVP films have the highest count of it with five people facehugged in the first film and four in the second.
 * Immediate Sequel: The two films could be spliced together into one pretty easily.
 * Not Screened for Critics: Not particularly surprising.
 * Too Dumb to Live: Pretty much everybody but a few stand out, Adele in the first film failed to kill the emerging facehuggers when first seen despite Thomas telling her about what room they were in, her hesitation results in her getting facehugged. Miller after being cocooned manages to get a gun but wastes many bullets on a dead facehugger. Sam and Buddy from the sequel, Buddy shoots an alien point blank and gets acid on his arm and rather than quickly take off his jacket off he just stands there letting the acid burn his arm off. His son is not much brighter as he also just stands there watching his father on the ground and his inaction costs him. The sheriff in the sequel goes to the middle of the town instead of escaping with the others.
 * Vasquez Always Dies: Despite the source movie being the Trope Namer, it's somewhat averted in both films. In AvP the lead is equally as badass as the "Vasquez" clone (who dies first), and in Requiem she's the lead herself.
 * Versus Title



Tropes in the original Alien Versus Predator:
"[the team finds the Predators' shoulder cannons] Miller: Any idea what these are? Rosa: No, you? Miller: No. Stafford: It's a good thing we brought the experts. Miller: Well, yeah, it is a good thing, cos' this is like finding Moses' DVD collection."
 * A-Team Firing: One of the mercenaries gives us a crowning example of the trope when he empties two full SMG magazines (firing Guns Akimbo at that!) at a Xenomorph crawling towards him down a narrow air vent that it can just barely squeeze itself into -- and doesn't so much as scratch it even once. He missed a target stuffed so tightly into a narrow tube that it was scraping the walls on every side with sixty out of sixty shots. It's so ludicrous that it borders on reverse Improbable Aiming Skills.
 * Ancient Astronauts


 * Artistic License History: Why the Pyramid in the first movie operates on 100 year cycles according to their archaeologist. None of the cultures that are supposedly the influenced by the builders, used anything close to that in their counting systems at the time-period given. In fact, given the high Mayan influence, it'd been more accurate to say the Whaling station was lost in 1900 instead of 1904, due to the fact that the Mayans did use 52 lunar cycles and that 2004 is exactly 2 cycles afterwards, meaning that a dead 1952 crew by the pyramid would have made sense. Not to mention that the Hunters Moon joke would have been even more as as ironic.
 * Avengers Assemble: The 2004 film starts off like this.
 * Badass: The "Grid" Alien from the first movie: he stealth kills a predator as an entry and faces another in one of the franchise's most badass fight scenes. and wins!
 * Charles Weyland also qualifies. He stands up to a predator and, when it tries to leave him after detecting his illness, provokes it into killing him to give the others time to escape.
 * Black Dude Dies First: Averted in the first movie where Lex, one of the few examples of a black female lead in a Sci-fi horror movie, was the only person to survive.
 * Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Did that Predator just uppercut that alien?
 * Fatal Family Photo: During an early scene in the first film, Graeme shows Alexa a picture of his kids. Things do not work out for him. In a variation of this trope, Red Shirt Verheiden mentions to Graeme that he has a son...about five minutes before he's snagged by an Alien.
 * Honor Before Reason: A Predator in the first movie after the former chooses to stay behind so the others can get away;
 * Infrared X-Ray Camera: This is how they find the pyramid in the first film. Also, the Predators can see their plasmacasters through people's bags in infrared.
 * Misplaced Wildlife: The first movie, set in Antarctica, has a Cat Scare with a penguin. The problem is, the penguin is an African Penguin, which don't live in Antarctica.
 * Mysterious Antarctica: The first movie is set there.
 * Oh Crap: Scar the Predator does this when he sees the Alien queen emerge from the ice.
 * Plot Hole: Scar gets impaled through the chest by the Alien Queen's tail, the tip of which is about half a foot in diameter. Exactly how did the Alien embryo survive considering it incubates in that exact spot?
 * It incubates in that spot in humans. Maybe it moves somewhere else to do so inside a Yautja.
 * Space Is Noisy: Averted surprisingly in the first movie, its completely silent in space apart from the soundtrack. The only noise heard comes from the inside of the Predator ship, where the camera is.



Tropes in Alien Versus Predator: Requiem:

 * Abandoned Hospital: The climax of Requiem.
 * Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Requiem
 * Badass:
 * Wolf Predator from the second movie: Highly experienced, with a lot of so badass weapons to hunt, and yeah, he curb stomped a lot of xenos without taking a sweat, and makes a very badass fight with the Predalien where all other predators were cannon fodder!
 * The Predalien too: pack leader, Curb stomps an entire predator ship's crew and is so badass to fight an ancient, high-experienced predator as Wolf and get a final tie!
 * Bloodier and Gorier: The first film isn't exactly blood-free, but Requiem really cranks up the Gorn.
 * Burger Fool: The lead in Requiem works as a pizza delivery boy. All the other characters go out of their way to tell him how humiliating this is.
 * Call Back: "Get to the chopper!"
 * Canon Immigrant: The PredAlien goes from a enemy in the PC game to an official sub-species in the second movie. There's also the different vision modes the Predator uses to spot aliens instead of humans in the first movie.
 * That in turn was an explanation of the vision modes used in Predator 2, where it found the heat-cloaked humans by switching settings.
 * Christmas Rushed: See the tagline under the picture.
 * Death by Sex: Probably the reason the girl in Requiem dies. She strips down to almost nothing in the pool scene.
 * Hybrid Monster: The Predalien.
 * Infant Immortality: Gleefully averted in the second film, which has the aliens killing kids and even eating babies.
 * Market-Based Title: Requiem is known in some countries as Aliens VS Predator 2, conveniently combining the names of the second Alien movie and second Predator movie into the second AvP movie.
 * The Mountains of Illinois: In Requiem, the shot of "Gunnison" clearly is not. The mountains are far too small and the town is far too big.
 * No OSHA Compliance: The power goes out in AVP Requiem, and it seems that not a single building in the town has emergency lighting, and the hospital's emergency generator mostly just makes the fluorescent lights flicker.
 * Production Nickname: The "cleaner" Predator was nicknamed "Wolf" - a reference to Harvey Keitel's similarly employed character in Pulp Fiction. The crew also called the Predalien "Chet" after Bill Paxton's character in Weird Science.
 * Slasher Movie: some fans complained that AVP-R turned both franchises into mere Teen Slasher monsters, screaming blond and all.