“The mountain labored and brought forth … a mouse.”

Those willing to go back to 1979 will find the Aliens incredibly nasty. Return to the mid-eighties and discover a Predator that is amorally evil. ⁽¹⁾ And in 2004 put them together in a movie that is just plain bad.

A privately-owned earth resources satellite discovers a heat signature indicating a huge pyramid buried under the ice on an island off the coast of Antarctica. The owner of the company in question, Charles Weyland, wants to go visit the island and find out what’s going on. For this purpose he recruits a team of around a dozen people, including an “ice guide” Alexa (Sanaa Latham) and Sebastian (Raoul Bova), an archaeologist whose greatest discovery to date has been an ancient Pepsi bottle cap buried deep in the ruins at Teotihuacan. I won’t name the others, because they all get killed very quickly anyway, so you don’t need to know anything about them.

You know this is going to be a stupid movie when we first meet Alexa, free climbing (by herself) up a vertical ice fall in the Himalayas. Alexa, being a modern girl, has carried her cell phone with her in her coat pocket. Being a very modern girl, she has left it turned on. Being a very modern, very stupid, girl, she answers it, while hanging onto her ice axe with one hand (the only thing keeping her from about ten thousand feet of very, very quick descent). She then engages in a discussion. Does anyone here find this unbelievable, or am I just an old fuddy-duddy?

One other piece of idiocy. Sebastian succeeds in predicting that the pyramid will reconfigure itself every ten minutes, because the Aztecs, one of three peoples whose pyramids this one resembles, used a base-ten arithmetic. He has now set his clock to beep every time the pyramid is about to reconfigure, and the fact that it does so right on schedule no doubt proves his brilliance. Except — let’s ignore the question of whether the Aztecs really used a base-ten arithmetic — how does it happen that the Aztec minute is so nearly identical with the Babylonian-European one (which comes from a numerical system based on the number sixty)?

In an uncharacteristic fit of brilliance, the makers of this film bring back our old friend, from Aliens, the horrific, giant alien “mother”. Their brilliance exhausted, they give her what is essentially a cameo role, making the fight between her, the predator, ⁽²⁾ and Alexa so short that if you close your eyes you’ll probably miss it. Don’t try comparing it with Sigourney Weaver’s epic battle in Aliens.

Fans of the aliens and the predators have been waiting for years for this epic struggle to be brought to the screen. Very, very enthusiastic fans will no doubt be enthusiastic about this move. Knowledgeable fans will probably shed tears.

There is a plot twist, which the writers no doubt thought would be compelling, at the end. If you wait for it, you’ll lose your place in line at the cineplex rest room. As far as priorities for this decision is concerned, you might as well toss a coin.

⁽¹⁾ Not too surprising, when you consider that it may be the only movie Hollywood ever made that starred not one but two future state governors …

⁽²⁾ Here, as in the two Predator films, the “predator” is not a predator, any more than Steven Spielberg’s Poltergeist was a poltergeist.