Alien vs. Predator (film)

"[to an Alien] You are one ugly mother..."

"[while exploring the abandoned whaling station, Miller is startled by a penguin] Careful. They bite."

"[Scar shows Alexa that he is activating the bomb in his wrist panel] It's a bomb. Well, I hope it kills every fucking one of them!"

"[to Charles Bishop Weyland] Alexa Woods: When I lead my team, I don't leave my team."

"This whole thing was a trap."

"[to the Predator] Don't turn your back on me!"

"[shows a 3D image of the pyramid] My experts tell me this is a pyramid."

"[First lines] Technician: Hey. Hey, hey, come here, take a look at this."

"Mark Verheiden: [to the Alien] You want a piece of me, you ugly son of a bitch!"

"Whoever wins... We lose"

"It's our planet... It's their war"

"The Enemy of My Enemy is my Friend"

"Sanaa Lathan - Alexa Woods"

"Raoul Bova - Sebastian de Rosa"

"Lance Henriksen - Charles Bishop Weyland"

"Ewen Bremner - Graeme Miller"

"Colin Salmon - Maxwell Stafford"

"Tommy Flanagan - Mark Verheiden"

"Sam Troughton - Thomas Parks"

"Being such a self-confessed sci-fi geek, was there ever a moment when you had to pinch yourself that you were really in charge of this movie?"

"I don’t even know if Sigourney Weaver has read the “Alien vs Predator” draft I wrote. She’s never said she has. But, I was a fan obsessive of the “Alien” franchise, Sigourney. Big time. Particularly Ridley’s original, which is still unmatched. And “Alien vs Predator” — as a concept — is still killer, full of potential. Even its critically maligned first cinematic outing made $172,544,654 worldwide, compared to $159,814,498 for “Alien 3” and $161,376,068 for “Resurrection”. Hardly a financial “fail” there, Sigourney."

"Yeah. Ridley and I talked about doing another Alien film and I said to 20th Century Fox that I would develop a 5th Alien film. I started working on a story, I was working with another writer and Fox came back to me and said, "We've got this really good script for Alien vs Predator and I got pretty upset. I said, "You do that you're going to kill the validity of the franchise in my mind." Because to me, that was Frankenstein meets Werewolf. It was Universal just taking their assets and starting to play them off against each other."

"Its set-up is mundane: billionaire industrialist Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen, a.k.a. Bishop) hires himself a motley crew to go to Antarctica, where they find a perplexing, heat-generating Cambodian-Egyptian-Aztec temple 2000 feet under the ice. Luckily, they've brought along someone who can read the hieroglyphics, Italian archaeologist Sebastian De Rosa (Raoul Bova), who essentially explains the plot, if only his fellow adventurers would listen."

"The heat Weyland's researchers noted results from preparations for the Predators' with each stage allotted its own room, for instance, "sacrificial chamber" (the structure is remarkably elaborate and mobile, with ceilings and walls shifting every 10 minutes, rather like the scary place in Cube [1997])."

"While the film's tagline holds true -- "No matter who wins, we lose" -- the underlying notion here, as it has been in both previous entries in the Predator franchise, is that the hunters are comprehensible. Like gamers, they measure their own prowess and keep track of their kills."

"Scar, so named in the movie's credits for a mark on his face and a ritual he performs with Alexa, recalls Cicatrix, the "Scar" of The Searchers (1956), one of the more complex Native American villains in U.S. movies. In Alien vs. Predator, villains and heroes become simultaneously concrete and abstract: they're functions of the game, the franchise, and the broader commercial and moral marketplace, yes, but they're also vaguely resistant, less transparent than they seem."

"The Predator society builds sophisticated spaceships, yet they should not look as sleek and hi-tech as a Star Wars stormtrooper. They are a tribal culture, yet their look should not be as primitive as the orcs from Lord of the Rings. They are also a warrior culture, so the ornate cannot conflict with the practical."

"Q: Which character is worse: Predator or Alien?"

"Alien vs. Predator is a monster mash between two of 20th Century Fox’s franchise creatures. When H.R. Giger’s sleek and slimy killing machines face off against the Rastafarian headhunter, there’s a giddy childish thrill not unlike when King Kong faced Godzilla, or when Frankenstein met the Wolf Man. Their confrontations play out in the exaggerated manner of professional wrestling and take place in an ancient pyramid buried under the Antarctic ice where you half expect John Carpenter’s monster from The Thing to pop up and waste them both. These beasties frequently strut their extraterrestrial stuff and are geared toward audience cheers and jeers. While you can’t argue for Alien vs. Predator as a movie to be taken seriously, it certainly delivers as a loving homage to two of our favorite monsters and their respective super-duper powers."

"Anderson shows such a lack of interest in character or mood that the first 45 minutes, pre-Alien and Predator battles, feels unnecessarily lugubrious. His film lacks the obsessive haunted house setting of Ridley Scott’s Alien, the virtuoso gung-ho action of James Cameron’s Aliens or John McTiernan’s Predator, the bleak doom of David Fincher Alien³, and the cartoon splashes of Jien-Pierre Jeunet’s Alien: Resurrection. Those movies were of varying levels of quality, but the filmmakers were committed to a singular vision. Alien vs. Predator is a technically proficient fan-boy’s wet dream, made for people who want to see the Alien bleed acid on the Predator’s body armor, or the Predator using his nifty laser to blow apart alien hoards. It’s not much of a movie, but it’s a geek’s paradise."

"When it comes to monster films, horror films, and basically the sci-fi genre, African Americans aren't usually featured in a positive way. For years, we were always the first to die or weren't even featured in the film at all, but lately the trend is changing. In the last few years, the unexpected is happening. In "28 Days Later...", Naomie Harris made it through alive and so did Kelly Rowland in "Freddy Vs. Jason". We don't know what fate holds for Sanaa Lathan in the upcoming "Alien Vs. Predator", but she's considered to be the first black actress to lead a sci-fi film. That itself is a history making achievement. Having received a Tony nomination for her role in "A Raisin in the Sun" and co-starring with Denzel Washington in last year's "Out of Time", one would say that Sanaa has chosen some good projects as of late. In speaking with blackfilm.com, Sanaa talks about her role in "Alien Vs. Predator" and compares the physical work needed for this film to the one needed for her recent work on stage."

"Do you realize that with the exception of Pam Grier, who starred with Ice Cube in "John Carpenter's Ghost of Mars", you are probably the first black female lead in a sci-fi film?"

"When we do get to the Predators and Aliens, the film starts to look pretty promising. The Aliens look great, the Predators look great and, at first, their battles are fun to watch. Unfortunately, over-stylized herky jerky camerawork makes the action very hard to follow. It gives one the feeling of watching a fight with a crowd of large people in front of you. It's like you're always trying to jump up to see over someone's head or look around someone, but you keep missing the action."

"I suppose going into this film, everyone has their favorites. For me, the Alien world has always been a very rich and exciting one. The Predator character is pretty cool, but I mean, really, the first Predator was good, but what do we really know about these dreadlocked ugly mothers? Well, I suppose Paul Anderson either disagreed with me or simply decided this was his chance to expand the Predator world, but the Aliens get the serious shaft here."

"Like last year's Freddy Vs. Jason, Alien Vs. Predator never suggests a reason for existing other than the fact that it can. The logical curlicues used to bring the title beasts together defy description; the plot involves ancient civilizations, an abandoned Antarctic whaling station, and an underground pyramid that changes shape every 10 minutes. Into this lair of subterranean mystery and dimly lit sets marches a ragtag group of scientists and explorers led by overqualified Love & Basketball star Sanaa Lathan and funded by Alienseries vet Lance Henriksen. Soon, they discover they've walked into a death trap, an elaborate human-sacrifice machine designed to create Aliens for a ritualistic Predator hunt. Or something like that."

"Was the film shot entirely in Prague?"

"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. 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. And there ends the almost-birth of a new movie genre, the inter-species romcom."

"AvP owes its genesis more to the video games than to the movies that preceded them, but this actually weighs in its favour in that it is not tied down by the conventions of the originals. (Although, that didn't stop the wonderfully loopy Jean-Pierre Juenet from making the spectacularly bonkers Alien Resurrection, a movie that, having Winona Ryder as a vengeful synthetic lifeform, is responsible for one of the most ill-judged casting decisions of all time.) And so, while I am still plagued by the question of how the aliens, without so much as gulping down a bottle of powdered milk, go from eight inches long to seven feet tall in the space of five minutes, in this context I no longer need to care."

"And then there are two: one woman, one predator, and they do what they have to do. She proves her mettle doing what heavily armed eight-foot invisible predators clearly can't. She kicks alien arse, destroys the queen's eggs, and then they both race hand-in-claw into the night toward the almost-romantic denouement. Then, with her beau-that-will-never-be gone, it's down to the feisty Ripley-replacement to take out the alien queen and source some anti-scarring cream for her permanently disfigured face. He should have just given her a ring."