Film / Alien vs. Predator (2004)

(aka: Alien Vs Predator)

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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 2004 combination of Fox's two hit alien monster movies, and the stories of the innocent humans caught in the middle. It was directed by Paul W. S. Anderson and is the first film in either franchise to be rated PG-13.

When a mysterious heat signature is detected in Antarctica, billionaire Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henriksen) assembles a crack team of explorers led by Lex Woods (Sanaa Lathan) to investigate. They discover an underground pyramid containing human remains, but the team accidentally trap themselves when they activate the structure. The team soon find themselves caught in the middle of a centurial Rite of Passage held for young Predators, who hunt the Xenomorphs who lie dormant within the pyramid. With their number dwindling, the team must find a way out before they are hunted down by either side.

The concept was first hinted at in the second Predator movie, which featured a Xenomorph skull amongst the Predator's trophies. The film was followed by Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem in 2007. The movies abandoned the futuristic setting of the comics and had the conflict take place on contemporary Earth.

To see the tropes for the games and comics, see here. See more tropes from the franchise at Alien vs. Predator Central.

Tropes in AVP: Alien vs. Predator:

• Abusive Precursors: The ancient humans were basically used as incubation units for the xenomorphs, so the Predators could hunt the ultimate prey. Ironically, the humans of the time saw this as an honor, and the sacrifices willingly did this for them.
• Adaptational Badass: Prior Alien vs. Predator media (video games and comic books) have depicted the xenomorphs as Glass Cannons compared to the Predators, relying on speed and Zerg Rush tactics to match the Predators' advanced tech and brute strength. Here in the film, a single drone ("Grid") is shown as being an even match for a Predator in close combat (though supplementary material clarifies that Grid is an "alpha" drone and the Predators are inexperienced youngbloods).
• Aerosol Flamethrower: Charles Bishop Weyland does this as a Heroic Sacrifice with a flare and a medicine inhaler. He gets butchered by a Predator hunter because he had a weapon, trumping the fact that he's a sick old man the hunter had been willing to let live.
• Ancient Astronauts
  [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.
• Anyone Can Die: The movie has only one survivor, who was left in the middle of Antarctica. The novelization clears up Lex's fate — the ship everyone arrived on had a crew which stayed behind while everyone else went exploring. Presumably Lex was able to contact them once she got back to base camp.
• Apocalypse How: Lex believes that if the Xenomorphs get out from the underground cavern and become loose on the Earth, they could overwhelm the planet's biosphere with a Class 4-5.
• Artistic License – Geography: The film is rather loose about its depiction of the Antarctic, mainly Bouvet Island being located much further South within the Ross Ice Shelf, which in real life isn't just an area of icy water the Piper Maru pushes through but a glacier hundreds of meters thick and virtually impenetrable to any kind of ship.
• Artistic License – History:
  • While it is true that the Antarctic used to be a warmer place in the past, that was way, way before the humans used by the Predators for their rituals evolved.
  • Why the Pyramid 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; the Mayans did use 52 lunar cycles, and 2004 is exactly 2 cycles afterwards. A dead 1952 crew by the pyramid would have made sense. Not to mention that the Hunter's Moon joke would have been even more ironic.
  • Once activated, the pyramid shifts every 10 minutes. The problem is, Mayans did not have a unit of time which corresponds to a minute. In case you are curious, it originates from Babylonia.
• Avengers Assemble: The film starts off like this when showing Charles Wayland bringing together the members for his expedition.
• Baby Factory/Big Bad: The Xenomorph Queen chained and entombed in the Antarctic pyramid is used as this when it's awakened in the present day, and has implicitly been used this way by the Yautjas for millennia. The pyramid's mechanisms take the Queen's eggs to the sacrificial chamber, and the Queen's children that are born in a relatively controlled environment are hunted by the Yautjas as a rite of passage.
• Bait-and-Switch: In the opening what appears to be the silhouette of a Xenomorph Queen coming at us is revealed to be an orbiting Weyland satellite.
• BFS: The Predators' iconic wrist-blades are much larger in this movie than in previous iterations. It Makes Sense in Context as the Predators in prior films were hunting humans, whereas Xenomorphs are a far tougher game, and using larger weapons makes just as much sense as a human hunter using a larger caliber rifle to kill a lion than a deer.
• Black Dude Dies First: Actually averted where Lex, one of the few examples of a black female lead in a Sci-fi horror movie, was the only person to survive.
• Bottomless Magazines: Miller fires a dozen times at the facehuggers in the hive using Verheiden's .44 Magnum Desert Eagle, which can only hold 9 bullets. Then Lex fires one more time before it's finally out of ammo.
• Brave Scot: The Scottish Dr. Miller can be seen as an unconventionally nerdy manifestation of this, as despite initially exhibiting the nervousness that one would expect from the archetypal mild mannered geek, he remained relatively calm in the face of all the horrible monsters and deadly traps that the crew encountered, did his best to help those around him survive, and is the only member of the crew aside from Lex who managed to kill any of the Xenomorphs when he was cocooned and managed to pick up a nearby pistol and shot at least one face hugger (if not more of them off screen, if the gunshot noises are any indication) before eventually getting overwhelmed by them.
• Casting Gag: Lance Henriksen's role serves as a major nod to Bishop. (Or maybe more that just a nod, since the Bishop androids seem to have been based physically on Charles Bishop Weyland.)
• Cat Scare: Though it's actually a Penguin Scare.
• Chekhov's Gun: While cocooned, Dr. Miller draws a Hand Cannon from a mercenary next to him, which he uses on a facehugger. When Lex finds his corpse later, she retrieves the gun and uses it to give a Mercy Kill to Sebastian.
• Clean Cut: A Xenomorph sneaking up to Scar falls victim to this.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: The initial presence of many different humans, Yautjas, and Xenomorphs within the pyramid easily results in countless deaths on all three sides especially since the former two sides are both fully armed and therefore dangerous towards one another for this installment.
• Crossover: Self-explanatory.
• Curse Cut Short: Two, both references/nods to the "ugly motherfucker" one-liner from the original Predator film, that get cut off just as the curse-portion is being uttered.
• Decapitation Presentation: In a flashback to previous hunts, a Youngblood warrior is shown with a Xenomorph head on a spear, roaring with victory as a ship flies overhead.
• Defiant to the End: "Don't you turn your back on me!"
• Degraded Boss: Again, the Xenomorph Drones seen throughout the film still intensely suffer from this trope since both their human enemies and their Yautja enemies all carry weapons around with them during this installment, but this trope is also averted with the Antarctic Queen as she soon proves to be just as great of a threat to the surviving protagonists near the end of the film as the First Acheron Queen from Aliens.
• Developing Doomed Characters: Widely considered a badly done example.
• Doesn't Like Guns: Lexi Woods (debatably). Whilst it's not clear whether or not she truly hates guns or has objections to firearms ownership, she is definitely the least enthusiastic about bringing guns to the exhibition compared to the rest of the crew, saying to Rousseau upon witnessing her loading her personal pistol on board the ship, that she's never seen a gun save a life on any of her trips, and to Stafford that his gun is not going to change anything when he revealed his hidden rifle inside the Pyramid. So whilst she may or may not anti gun outright, it's safe to say that she's certainly at the very least not a gun person (ironically, since she is American, unlike a significant part of the crew who come from Europe seem to have no objections to bringing guns at all) .
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Charles Bishop Weyland, a wealthy elderly industrialist, who funds the mission to a newly-discovered pyramid under tons of ice. He later reveals to the protagonist that he's dying of lung cancer and wants to leave his mark on the world. Later, as the survivors are running from a Predator, Weyland tries to have a You Shall Not Pass! moment. The Predator scans him, sees his damaged lungs, and just walks right past the old man. The pissed off Weyland attacks the Predator with a makeshift flamethrower. Now, the Predator won't ignore him and takes him out.
  • A popular fan theory is that the predator knew that Weyland presented no actual threat to him, but he so respected Weyland's courage that he granted him a warrior's death.
• The Dragon: The "Grid" Xenomorph Drone to the Antarctic Queen as he's by far the most dangerous of the Xenomorphs, second only to the Queen, killing two of the Predators by himself, and he even manages to evade Scar's Plasma Caster shots when they're aimed right at him while the rest of the Drones were simply mowed down, and he's also the one who leads his siblings in freeing the Queen, and the novelization even refers to him as "the Alpha Xenomorph Drone", implying his higher rank than the other Drones.
• Enemy Civil War: What the humans find themselves in, although they end up allying with the Predators.
• Enemy Mine: Lex and Scar forge an uneasy alliance in the second half of the film.
• Enemy Rising Behind: The Xenomorph who tries to attack the sole Predator left in the pyramid.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Predators do not kill certain targets such as children and pregnant women. There's even a scene where a Predator refrains from killing a man because it sees that he is dying of terminal cancer. Of course, he changes his mind when the human attacks him with a makeshift flamethrower, but even then, he makes the kill quick and clean and didn't take a trophy.
• Everybody Was Kung-Fu Fighting: Did that Yautja just uppercut that Xenomorph?
• Exposed to the Elements: Alexa in the ending. While she's fully dressed and has gloves, she takes off her jacket when the Queen's acid blood gets on it and is perfectly fine afterwards, when being exposed to the Antarctic temperature with no jackets or adequate gear like that should be making her collapse into a shivering mess, if not kill her from extreme cold hypothermia.
• Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: Being a film that includes Xenomorphs, 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 this movie.
• Fatal Family Photo: During an early scene in the 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 a Xenomorph Drone.
• Final Girl: Everyone but Alexa Woods is killed off, leaving her alone with the last remaining Xenomorphs and the last predator; ultimately she is left to fight the Antarctic Queen alongside Scar.
• Gory Discretion Shot: The film uses a few of these of these to get around what a PG-13 rating would allow in terms of violence while attempting to maintain the brutality that the Alien and Predator franchises are known for. For example, the exact moment one particular man is killed by a Predator's wrist blade early in the film is taken offscreen and replaced with a cutaway shot of his blood spattering in the snow.
• Guns Are Worthless: Lex certainly seems to think so, and the movie contrives itself to make this so. Miller is the only one out of the entire team to make efficient use of a gun by shooting a facehugger, not that this ends up doing him any good since there's a small army of them that hatch to infect him. For everyone else they might as well be oversized toys, as despite shooting liberally no one scores as much as a single hit on either of the titular creatures. This is especially egregious in one scene where a mercenary has a xenomorph at gunpoint, and then wastes time shouting at it instead of shooting it. He gets killed seconds later when two other Xenomorphs flank him.
• Hanging Around: Stone, a Weyland Red Shirt, walks right into a noose held out by Scar who then hoists him up and away.
• Harmless Freezing: The Xenomorph Queen was preserved frozen in the depths of the pyramid, and as soon as she's thawed out due to the actions of the humans, she immediately begins to pump out eggs.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Weyland chooses to challenge Scar in order to let the others run.
• Hollywood Darkness: Everything inside the pyramid located 2,000 feet under the ice is darkly lit but still perfectly visible even if it should be pitch black because of the lack of light sources. It gets more blatant later when Lex walks around alone without torches or anything else to provide light.
• Homage: The film was criticized for being too derivative and relying too much on cheap Call Backs and Mythology Gags to the early Alien films, those being the drinking birds and Charles referencing Bishop's knife game just to name a couple of them.
• Human Hammer-Throw: Grid was subjected to a Xeno Hammer-Throw when fighting the second Predator, who managed to grab it by the tail and swing the Xeno in circles smashing into several pillars. It recovers in a few seconds.
• Human Sacrifice: The ancient pyramid's hieroglyphs reveal that thousands of years ago, the civilization whom resided in it offered willing sacrifices to the facehuggers, breeding Xenomorphs for the Yautjas' youngbloods to ceremonially hunt.
• Infrared X-Ray Camera: This is how WY finds the pyramid in the film. Also, the Predators can see their plasma casters through people's bags in infrared.
• Ironic Echo: Lex gives one to an alien from the entire Predator franchise before she blows a hole in the aliens' head: "You're one ugly motherf..."
• Legacy Seeker: Weyland's motivation. Learning he was dying, he started to reflect on his legacy and was depressed to realize that when he died, the most that would happen is his company's stock price would fall by maybe 10-12%... temporarily. Hence his determination to uncover the pyramid and make a gift of his discovery to mankind.
• Lesser of Two Evils: The surviving humans ultimately decide that giving Scar back the plasma caster they'd taken so he can more effectively combat the aliens is their best chance to survive.
• Lighter and Softer: Being the first PG-13 film from two franchises with installments that were previously all R-rated, nobody is shown getting their dorsal spine ripped out or skinned, the chestburster births happen offscreen or are otherwise way less bloody than tradition, and as stated above, the "ugly motherfucker" one-liner gets a Curse Cut Short.
• Lock-and-Load Montage: The Predators get one, checking their weaponry and blades just before they beam down.
• Lovecraft Lite: You've got a team of explorers in Mysterious Antarctica finding an ancient structure built by advanced Ancient Astronauts (Yautjas) where their fiddling around sets off a Sealed Evil in a Can in the form of the captive Xenomorph Queen, whose spawn can potentially wipe out humanity if they reach the mainland, and on the other side the Predators deem us as nothing more than prey, or livestock to incubate Xenomorphs. However, both species definitively can be killed, and their motives aren't so much unknowable as bestial/barbaric.
• Misplaced Wildlife: The movie, set in Antarctica, has a Cat Scare with a penguin, but the problem is that the penguin is an African Penguin, which obviously doesn't live down within Antarctica like the Emperor Penguin for example.
• Monster Delay: Downplayed once again in this film where the Yautja starships and tech appear immediately with the Yautjas themselves, the Antarctic Queen, and her Drones including "Grid" showing up on-screen not too much later than that.
• Mysterious Antarctica: The film is set there as stated directly above.
• Mythology Gag: The sub-plot of a human female displaying enough courage and prowess (namely by killing a couple of Xenomorphs) for a Predator to fight alongside her and blood her as a warrior, with her then killing a Queen Xenomorph before the predator dies from his wounds, is all taken from the first Alien vs. Predator comic (and the Alien vs Predator: Prey novelization), in which exactly this happens between Machiko Noguchi and "Broken Tusk". Unlike Alexa, however, Machiko would go on to live with the Predators and eventually become fully accepted into their ranks (albeit while still facing some bigotry).
• Neck Snap: Scar kills the chestburster that comes from Sebastian by breaking its neck with his thumb.
• Never Trust a Title: Played with. The Xenomorphs seen in the film hatched on Earth, so are arguably not technically aliens, while the Yautja, as pointed out in a later film, have never technically been predators. But the title still works if you interpret it the other way around - the Yautja are Aliens and the Xenomorphs are Predators.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero!: The exploration team makes a terrible mistake in taking the Yautja guns inside the pyramid, but this is the very action that awakens the Antarctic Queen there and allows her to breed a batch of Drones without any readily armed Yautjas to oppose them, giving them a chance to overpower them, derail their hunting games and possibly get to the surface of Earth to kill more humans, and the theft of such weapons also enrages the Yautjas into killing off a fraction of the exploration team while the unchecked Xenomorphs slaughter even more team members, and as Alexa Woods puts it:
  Alexa: This pyramid is like a prison. We took the guards' guns, and now the prisoners are running free.
• No-Sell: In at least one instance a human punches an oncoming Yautja, the latter seems at best, mildly annoyed.
• No One Gets Left Behind: This is part of Lex's code that leads to her agreeing to lead Weyland's team in spite of not being given enough time to properly train them all for the conditions they are facing. Midway through the movie, Weyland tells her and Sebastian to leave him and run from the Predator:
  Lex: Weyland, I'm not gonna let you die down here!
  Weyland: (smiles) You didn't.
• Not the Illness That Killed Them: Charles has cancer but ends up getting killed by a Yautja. The Predator was going to let Charles live after scanning his weak bio-signs, but Charles using a makeshift flamethrower against it made it change its mind.
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The Xenomorphs are never referred to as "Aliens", instead the characters call them "things", "creatures" and "great serpents" when interpreting the hieroglyphs.
• Nothing but Skulls: Grid finishes Celtic off on a pile of human remains, mostly skulls, within a chamber.
• Offended by an Enemy's Indifference: Weyland tries to pull a You Shall Not Pass! on the Predator stalking Lex and Sebastian, only for it to scan Weyland, see he is terminally ill, and walk past him in dismissal. Furious, Weyland makes an Aerosol Flamethrower from his oxygen tank, getting its attention in a fatal way, which may have been what he was hoping for:
  Weyland: Don't you dare turn your back on me!
• Oh, Crap!: Even the Yautjas with all of their technology start getting jumpy once the Xenomorphs are creeping about just to show that they do know how freaking dangerous those things are much unlike the moronic corporations of the future who someway somehow believe that they can still handle it anyway.
  • Notably, when they realize the humans have taken their guns and therefore have awoken the queen early, they quickly reactivate their cloaks and proceed to double time it into the pyramid to stop them before it's too late.
  • The team in the "Sacrificial Chamber" have one when the Face Hugger eggs aka Ovomorphs rise from the floor, and they realize something very bad is about to happen.
  • Scar the Predator does this when he sees the Antarctic Queen emerging from the ice.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: The trailer for the film ends with this.
• One Bullet Left: Dr. Miller conveniently leaves a single round in a gun for Lex, which is used to Mercy Kill Sebastian.
• Outrun the Fireball: Scar and Lex do this from his detached wrist-device nuke. Their survival was aided by a mile of ice containing the blast, and the shockwave caught up to them regardless.
• Penguin Scare: As explained above, this film features one of these instead of a traditional Cat Scare.
• Phrase Catcher: Subverted. The line "you are one ugly motherfucker" is said twice throughout the film (once a more PG-13 "ugly son of a bitch!" and once with the F-word cut), but both times it is not addressed to the Predator but to the Xenomorphs.
• Point of No Return: Called the "Point of SAFE Return" in the film, which is really just the same point when viewed from the OTHER side.
  Helicopter pilot: Just passed the P.S.R.
  Graeme: Oh, damn! I wish I got a picture.
  Lex: Of what?
  Graeme: Uh, th-the P.S.R. I wish he'd call it out before we passed it.
  Lex: [laughing] The P.S.R. is the "Point of Safe Return". It means we've used up half our fuel so we can't turn back.
  Graeme: Right, but if something went wrong, we could uh... land presumably.
  Lex: We could ditch.
  Graeme: Yeah, ditch.
  Lex: But the temperature of the water would kill us in three minutes.
• Post-Climax Confrontation: Much unlike in the preceding original Alien Quadrilogy films, this installment's example's actually a subversion in that while the whole deal with the Antarctic Queen herself's resolved at the end of this film, a "Predalien" Chest Burster soon emerges from Scar's already dead body shortly thereafter, effectively dragging the conflict out long enough for a whole 'nother movie to be made about it.
• Puzzle Boss: Much like the First Acheron Queen from Aliens, the Antarctic Queen from this film also becomes an example of this trope since her final defeat involves her getting chained up together with a water tower and subsequently pulled down to the bottom of the ocean by its very weight.
• Ragnarök-Proofing: The pyramid's Schizo Tech-ish devices with electrical cables that defrost the Antarctic Queen work fine despite being there for hundreds or thousands of years.
• Recycled IN SPACE!: In an inversion, the movie sees the Xenomorphs on Earth as opposed to them being IN SPACE! as usual with this franchise.
• Red Shirt: A literal example as after being facehugged, Adele is killed by a chestburster emerging from her chest and ripping through her red shirt. Nearly all of the other humans qualify, as many are well-armed yet most die without getting off a shot, and those that do are not saved by it either.
• Required Secondary Powers: For understandable reasons, the exoskeleton of the Xenomorphs is immune to their acid. Scar uses this property to fashion an improvised spear and shield for Lex, using the tail attached to a ceremonial spear and its hollowed-out skull strapped to her arm.
• Ribcage Ridge: The abandoned whaling station have one of these made of whale bones. Alexa flees through it in the final battle, with the Alien Queen in pursuit and smashing every bone in the way.
• Scream Discretion Shot: In another concession to the PG-13 rating, the film uses this trope while depicting Adele's death by a Chestburster, ensuring that we only see it for a split second shortly after it pops out of her torso.
• See No Evil, Hear No Evil: Lex is climbing up a sheer ice cliff when she receives a call on her cell phone and answers it. If that wasn't illogical enough, she continues climbing during the conversation, and when she arrives at the top, she discovers that the person she's talking with was standing in front of a helicopter (!) at the top of that very ice cliff.
• Sequel Hook: At the end of the movie, a Chestburster emerged from Scar's body, setting up the stage for the next movie.
• Shout-Out:
  • The camera of the satellite in the opening scene resembles the eye of HAL 9000.
  • Earlier at the Wayland Industries station there's a TV showing Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man.
  • In what could be some Self-Plagiarism from Paul W. S. Anderson, this bay◊ of the Predator Mothership bares a resemblance to the corridor◊ from Event Horizon.
  • The setting of duking it out with extraterrestrials in the Antarctic calls to mind The Thing (1982).
• Sole Survivor: Alexa. The rest of her team mates are all killed.
• Space Is Noisy: Averted. The opening shot in space is completely silent apart from the soundtrack. The only noise heard comes from the scenes inside of the Predator ship.
• Stat-O-Vision: A predator decides not to kill Weyland because it can see that he's already dying of cancer. Then Weyland improvises a flamethrower to buy the others more time...
• Stereotype Flip: Adele Rousseau although she is from France, is much more comfortable around firearms than the American protagonist Lexi Woods. Upon Woods voicing concern of Adele bringing her pistol to the exhibition, she replies with "I'd rather have one and not need it than need it and not have it".
• Too Dumb to Live: Pretty much everybody, but a few stand out. Adele takes a little too long to put "sacrificial chamber" and "mysterious eggs emerging besides ancient skeletons" together, and doesn't act fast enough to save herself from the facehugger. Miller manages to kill an attacking facehugger but wastes bullets on the corpse (not that his already limited ammunition would have been much help against an entire room of facehuggers).
  • Not to mention what sets off the action of the movie: Stafford and his goons have removed two of the plasma casters, when Sebastian tells them not to touch the casters. Cue Stafford looking Sebastian straight in the eyes as he REMOVES THE LAST ONE ANYWAY out of spite. Cue the room sealing off as the mechanisms of the pyramid kick into overdrive, which also activates the sacrificial chamber to fill with Facehugger eggs.
  • The statement "I've never seen a gun help anyone out on the ice" would probably be an indicator of someone being too dumb to live if the movie wasn't conspiring to prove the speaker right (because no human gun winds up being of any use, and the Predators focus mostly on melee weapons in this series).
  • One of the Predators has caught Grid in a constricting net and his blood is clearly melting it. The Predator, instead of rushing in and finishing him off, takes a slow walk towards him, which results in Grid jumping him and impaling him when he gets too close.
  • All of the Predators really. They were there to hunt Xenomorphs, not humans. Yet they stop to kill the drill-team on the surface (even going so far as stringing them up for skinning) even though they should realize that time is of the essence with curious humans poking around the temple. Had they not taken this senseless detour in their priorities, they could have gotten to the plasma casters before they were taken by the expedition; and the hunt would have likely gone very differently. Justified in that if Predators weren't that fanatic about hunting they wouldn't be in that mess to begin with. Possibly justified, as it's hinted this is the first hunt for these particular Predators, so it's likely a rookie mistake.
• Took a Level in Badass: Lex.
• Tragic Keepsake: Sebastian made a necklace with a Pepsi bottle cap he found during an archeological excavation, and after he's snatched Lex clutches his Pepsi cap mournfully.
• Two Girls to a Team: The only two female members of an eleven-person expedition are Alexa (the protagonist) and Adele Rousseau.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: As the human enter the pyramid, one of them taps a loose tile with his foot, bringing the Xenomorph Queen out of cryofreeze.
• Vasquez Always Dies: Adele Rousseau, the tough woman who makes a point of bringing a gun "just in case", is one of the first human casualties, getting the dubious honor of being the obligatory Chestburster victim.
• Versus Title: Easily one of the most instantly recognizable examples in all of fiction in general.
• Villainous Rescue: As a Predator is about to kill Lex, a Xenomorph appears out of the shadows and impales the hunter with its tail, inadvertently saving Lex.
• Worf Had the Flu: As with the Predator movies, the hunters are shown to be unstoppable with their superior technology against humans, killing several of them in the first half of the movie. Then, a single Drone killed two of them, reminding the audience that the Xenomorphs are just as dangerous (if not more) as the Yautjas. However, these particular Predators are specifically stated to be unblooded youths, and because the humans unwittingly steal their plasma casters, they're metaphorically fighting with one hand tied behind their back.
• Worthy Opponent:
  • Having seen Lex killing two Xenomorphs, Scar sees her as a warrior and branded her with the same marking as him. After the rest of the clan arrives, the Ancient Predator rewards her with his spear as a sign of respect.
  • The Predators in general are said to breed the Xenomorphs because they consider them the ultimate, most dangerous prey and thus a worthy challenge (not that they created the Xenomorphs, they found them and decided to breed more of them).
• Wouldn't Harm the Disabled: A Predator scans Weyland, detecting his terminal cancer, and for that reason spares him because he's unworthy prey. Weyland then turns his inhaler into an Aerosol Flamethrower and sets the Predator's back on fire, earning him a quick death.
• Wrecked Weapon: Sebastian attempts to cut the net which trapped Stafford, only for the blade to snap.
• Writers Cannot Do Math: The number of Xenomorphs is inconsistent to the amount of human hosts. At least six characters get infected in the Sacrificial Chamber and three more give birth bringing a total of 9 Xenomorphs. Scar kills four and Lex two which should leave us with just 3 Xenomorphs, and yet after her last kill she's faced by a group of five (Grid among these). It gets more baffling in the novelization in which suddenly there's hundreds of Xenomorphs that must be blown up before they can get out and infest the Earth, when Weyland's team is nowhere near that large to allow such number.
• Zombie Infectee:
  • Scar is impregnated by a facehugger after his marking ritual, but the next time we seen him, he is shown putting on his mask as if nothing happened, and he spends the rest of the film acting as if he didn't know about the Alien inside him. Justified, as Kane from the original film only remembers "some horrible dream about smothering," hinting that being facehugged messes with short-term memory, leaving the event itself a blank. A useful trait for a species that breeds by parasitic reproduction with often sapient hosts.
  • An alternate interpretation is that Scar likely knew exactly what happened to him (as he would have no doubt done his homework on the prey he was there to hunt, whereas Kane and the rest of the USCSS Nostromo crew had no idea what the facehugger did); and was simply gambling that he would be able to have the Xenomorph removed when his people picked him up. Apparently, the original ending would've seen Lex helping the mortally wounded Scar stab himself with his dagger to kill the Xenomorph gestating inside. In an early draft he attempts to stab himself after the Queen's defeat, but passes away from his injury before he could.