If you are going to make a movie that is essentially a fanboy's dream—the villains from two classic sci-fi films fight to the death—it is imperative that you follow one simple rule: don't make it boring. Writer/director Paul W.S. Anderson, the mind behind such films as Resident Evil, Event Horizon, and Mortal Kombat, did not follow this rule. He never follows it. Alien Vs. Predator was boring, which is the greatest crime a filmmaker can commit when making a movie like this. Shame on you, Paul W.S. Anderson, and shame on you for having a name that is easily confused with Paul Thomas Anderson.

This film is basically a video game where you don't get to control any of the characters. Like a lot of video games, there's extraneous backstory. What we, the audience, really want is for the titular action (you know, Alien vs. Predator) to get going. Instead, we are treated to what felt like hours of preparation. We see Charles Bishop Weyland (Lance Henricksen, appearing in his third Alien movie), the founder of a multinational corporation that will someday send a woman named Ripley into space, prepare a team of "experts" to investigate a mysterious pyramid that is discovered thousands of feet below the ice of Antarctica.

I put "experts" in quotation marks because of the way the film follows texbook team-preparation scenes without really caring about them. It's like fiction I wrote in junior high, when I knew that I wanted to write about astronauts, for example, but since I didn't know the first thing about them and I was too lazy to look it up, I just called them all "experts" or "scientists." Henricksen refers to his "experts" on several occasions in the course of the movie, because rich guys like him have experts around to tell him things.

The experts with speaking roles consist of the following: ice-climber and guide Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan), archaeologist Sebastian de Rosa (Raoul Bova), and paleontologist Graeme Miller (Ewen Bremner). Because the characters are basically cardboard targets, each was carefully selected to have some kind of easily identifiable marking: Alexa is the black woman, Sebastian is the Italian guy, Graeme is the Scottish guy; there's also the guy with the scar on his face and the tough butch chick, whose names I missed. These identifying characteristics are important, so we know who exactly that is who's screaming.

Much of the early portion of the film consists of lazy filmmaking. For example, Alexa almost refuses to lead the crew to the location of the pyramid because she doesn't have ample time to train them and it would be dangerous to go unprepared; later, she sternly warns them of the difficult journey that's ahead of them; still later, they all hop in bulldozers and arrive at the location in seconds. Whoa! I realize that much was left out, but why play up the danger of the trip and then cheat us of it? Why, it's because the scene where one person must be convinced to participate is mandatory!

There's also the question of whether or not Weyland knows what he's getting into. He insists all along that he has no idea what he might find in the pyramid; later, his henchmen sprout guns, and one of them mutters something about the charade being over, but we are never treated to the obligatory "I knew all along" speech where Weyland should have explained to the characters, and to us, what the heck was going on. Maybe that ended up on the cutting room floor. There are lots of other fun errors detailed on the Internet Movie Database's "goofs" page for this film.

You're sitting in your desk chair, wondering when I'm going to get around to talking about the titular Alien Vs. Predator action. Dear reader, I felt the same way sitting in the theater. I came to see Aliens fight Predators, not to watch these ridiculous people talk. Once the action started, I felt cheated yet again. The anticipated fights between aliens and predators are disappointingly brief. Most of the fighting action that happens in the film occurs between humans and predators or humans and aliens. Since there are only three predators taking part in the fighting, and two of them are quickly dispatched, the alien vs. predator action is limited to a handful of encounters, only two of which are presented in any detail.

Again, we asked for detail, and the detail we get is disappointing. I still like the Predator, whom I think is one of the best film monsters ever created. But the Aliens here look far too mechanical. Their interlocking facial parts slide around looking embarrassingly like the muppets they are; the CGI aliens don't fare much better, especially not the gigantic one at the end that gallops around like a reject from Jurassic Park.

There's a whole lot of Bad Science and Bad Archaeology that I won't bother getting into. The film makes a somewhat creative attempt to explain the history of civilization as founded by the Predators, but I couldn't help chuckling when it came time to put the Aztec calendar to work (you'll see). It doesn't pay to think too much about the film's rewriting of World Civ, because it all falls apart if you try. But I wouldn't have cared about any of this, had the film been entertaining. I didn't walk in expecting Citizen Kane; I didn't even walk in expecting Alien or Predator. I just wanted an action-packed, dumb, fun popcorn movie. This one failed on two of three fronts.