This page is for the films. The games and comics can be found here.What would happen if the Predator, interstellar alien hunter extraordinaire, took it upon himself to go after the face-rapingAliens? 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 made into a movie in 2004, and a sequel, Requiem, was made 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 Aliens.
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.
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. Of course, it changes his mind when he attacks it with a makeshift flamethrower ...
Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong: 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.
Homage: Both films were criticized for being too derivative — homage taken too far.
Immediate Sequel: The two films could be spliced together into one pretty easily.
Kill 'em All: The first movie has only one survivor, who was left in the middle of Antarctica. The second movie has only four survivors, which is actually worse given that the movie takes place in a large town and not in the middle of a frozen wasteland.
Recycled In Space: In an inversion, the Alien Vs. Predator movies sees the Aliens on Earth as opposed to IN SPACE!
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.
Abusive Precursors: The ancient humans were basically used as incubation units for the xenomorphs, just so they could practice combat skills.
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 who the hunter would ignore otherwise.
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.
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.
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.
Bad Ass: 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.
The Dragon: The "Grid" alien to the Alien Queen. He's by far the most dangerous of the Xenomorphs. Where the rest are killed off by the dozens by a single Predator, Grid kills two of them by himself and manages to evade Scar's Plasma Caster shots when they're aimed right at him while the rest of the drones simply get mowed down. He's also the one who leads his siblings in freeing the Queen. The novelization even refers to him as "the Alpha-alien", implying he's higher ranked than the other drones.
Enemy Rising Behind: The Xenomorph who tries to attack the sole Predator left in the pyramid.
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.
Infrared X-Ray Camera: This is how they find the pyramid in the first film. Also, the Predators can see their plasma casters through people's bags in infrared.
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.
Oh Crap: Scar the Predator does this when he sees the Alien queen emerge from the ice.
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.
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.
Shout Out: The sub-plot of a human female displaying enough courage and prowess (namely by killing a couple of Xenos) for a Predator to fight alongside her and blood her as a warrior, with her then killing a Queen alien before the predator dies from his wounds, is all taken from the Alien vs Predator: Prey novel, 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).
Sole Survivor: Alexa. The rest of her team mates are all killed.
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.
Anachronism Stew: The AVP wiki stated that AVP-R took place a few days after the original; the U.S. National Guard troops wear ACU uniforms, which weren't issued until 2006.
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!
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.
Fate Worse Than Death: It's implied that the mother impregnated (in the hospital) by the predalien can feel the multiple bursters breaking into her womb and eating her children.
Gory Discretion Shot: Averted. All the gorn is put on full display, such as when we see an Alien impregnate a pregnant woman and the "babies" eat their way out later.
Hybrid Monster: The Predalien, though it's not truly a hybrid since aliens always take traits from their host.
Instant Sedation: Facehuggers seem to be able to knock someone out within six or seven seconds in this film, people have thought that they use their tails to knock someone out but that would require a precise chokehold (a blood choke specifically) but the speed of the knock out suggests they sedate their host though some unknown means, the best examples are the two homeless men as one is unconscious within seven seconds and the other even less.
Just Following Orders: A pretty pathetic example, as the soldiers attempt to justify destroying the town with a nuclear bomb.
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.
Television Geography: Virtually every shot of "Gunnison, Colorado" is wrong. Basically the city is too big and the mountains are too small.
Walking Armory: Wolf, especially after taking up the fallen Predators' weapons.
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