Alien vs. Predator goofs

Template:AlienvsPredator This article covers all the known goofs in the 2004 film Alien vs. Predator.

Continuity

• In the new opening of the Unrated Edition, the man running through the whaling camp has the top two buttons undone on his shirt. When he falls to the ground as the Predator approaches him, his shirt is now completely buttoned up.

• When we first meet Alexa climbing the ice fall, she is some distance from the top, yet when Stafford phones her, she reaches the summit within mere moments. The first wide shot of the ice fall also makes it clear there is nothing at the top of the plateau, but when Alexa gets there Stafford has suddenly arrived by helicopter, even though we never heard a helicopter land. What's more, the chopper's rotors are totally stationary, when in reality it takes some time for rotors to come to a complete halt after a helicopter is powered down, and certainly longer than the intervening time shown in the film.

• Alexa uses her ice axe to stop Weyland from sliding down the ice tunnel, stabbing it into the ice ahead of him so that his coat catches on it as he slides past. However, in the subsequent shot, it is stabbed through the hood of his jacket.

• According to the earlier films in the franchise, Chestburster implantation is supposed to take around 24 hours once a Facehugger attaches to its victim. Yet Adele, Miller and Sebastian are all impregnated seemingly within minutes. Scar is also impregnated within 10 minutes; he is up and moving around again before the pyramid next realigns itself.

• When Grid impales Chopper with its tail, there is glowing Predator blood all over it. However, when it flings Chopper's corpse away, the blood is gone.

• Grid kills Celtic by headbiting him through the forehead of his mask and it clearly makes a hole. However, when next seen, Celtic's mask has no puncture hole at all.

• When Scar kills a Xenomorph by slicing off the front of its head, no blood spills from the wound. At every other point in this film (and the rest of the series), Xenomorphs are seen to bleed profusely, even violently, when wounded.

• When Alexa and Scar are first running through the tunnel after Scar sets his Self-Destruct Device in the Hive, neither of them has the spear that Scar built for Alexa. Following this, Alexa has it. Then, when Alexa and Scar are running from the collapsing ice, it disappears again. Alexa has it once more after Scar gives her her initiation mark.

• The initiation mark given to Alexa appears and disappears between shots as she is running around the whaling camp at the end of the film. Her Xenomorph shield also switches between her left and right hands.

• The Queen impales Scar through the chest with her tail, yet the Chestburster inside him somehow survives unharmed.

Factual Errors

• Satellite images in the film show Bouvet Island as being far further south and west than it is in real life.

• Weyland claims that Bouvet Island is not under any national control thanks to the Antarctic Treaty. However, because of its remoteness from the continent of Antarctica, Bouvet Island is actually not included in this treaty and in reality Norway has full ownership of the island.

• Numerous characters, if not the majority of them, carry guns in the movie. Under numerous international treaties, it is illegal to bring firearms and other weapons to Antarctica. Most movies set on the continent tend to overlook this.

• There is a full moon when the team arrives in Antarctica on 10/10/2004, yet there was no full moon there on that date. The closest full moon was actually on 10/28/2004.

• The movie states the whaling station on Bouvet Island was abandoned in October 1904, when in fact it wasn't until November 1904 that the first Antarctic whaling station, Grytviken (Cauldron Bay), was established, and not on Bouvet Island, but in South Georgia. Modern whalers didn't reach Bouvet until the 1928-29 season, and they only operated with factory ships offshore. There has in fact never been a whaling station established on the island.

• When the Weyland Industries team is searching the whaling camp, a penguin startles Miller. The penguin is a Humboldt Penguin (Spheniscus humboldti), which is native to the far warmer region of coastal Peru and Chile, and would never be found in Antarctica.

• Sebastian states numerous factual errors regarding the Aztec calendar. He refers to "the Long Count" while describing the Aztec calendar, when the Long Count was actually a feature of the Mayan calendar system; the Aztec calendar, although based on that of the Mayans, didn't use the Long Count. He also erroneously says that the Aztec calendar was metric (based on 10). In fact, the Aztecs had two calenders and neither was metric; one was vigesimal (based on 20) with twenty days in 13 "months", while the other was a 365-day year count.

• To open the sarcophagus, Sebastian sets the time lock to October 10, 2004 — 10/10/2004. However, this makes no sense, as the ancient Aztec calendar (on which the sarcophagus is supposedly based) would never align with the Julian calendar (which is what our modern calendar is based on and wasn't developed until centuries later by the Romans). Consequently, the Aztecs would not recognize what we call "October" as the 10th month.

• The movie makes it clear that the pyramid reconfigures itself every ten minutes, which Sebastian surmises is because the calendar on the sarcophagus is metric. However, minutes are part of a sexagesimal (based on sixty) system, not metric, and therefore the rearrangement occurring in a matter of minutes is nonsensical. A truly metric time measurement for the rearrangement of the structure would be every one-hundredth of a day (actually 14.4 minutes).

Revealing Mistakes

• During the wide shot of the Piper Maru with equipment and people moving around alongside it on the ice, the ship itself and the equipment cast shadows, but not the moving people, indicating they were added in later.

• When the team opens the casket with the three Plasma Casters, the flat ends of the "barrels" can be seen in the shot that passes over the Casters. This is pointed out during Tom Woodruff, Jr. and Alec Gillis' commentary of the film.

The hand holding Celtic's mask.

• In the shot of Grid headbiting Celtic, a hand can be seen holding the Predator's mask.