I wrote a fan fiction that I thought represented the best way to bring about human/predator interaction. You can read it on my website on my signature. Basically, though, to sum it up, the Yautja are there for their own intentions and the humans are out to survive, and just feel "safer" in the shadow of the Yautja. The Yautja are tolerant of having the humans follow them, and for months, they keep their distance, and there is a very thick line between human & Yautja, after time, and with the help of one human reaching out, and several situations where they are all thrust together, one human & one predator find a subtle association with each other that can almost be called a friendship but yet it stills stays very distant and still represents that the Yautja will never truly become friends with the humans.
I also personally do not feel that the Yautja are "bad guys". I think they are simply hunters and while we might not agree with their choice of prey, I do think they are any more evil than the men who go out on Dec. 1 with their rifles and start killing deer for trophies & meat.
As far as the scenes that made me feel that Paul Anderson did not take the massive undertaking of making AVP serious, there were quite a few. Apart from the overall badly scripted and mostly poorly acted movie in general, the two biggest scenes that really stand out are the one of Lex & the Yautja running away from the explosion with the flames all around them and the focus got soft and fuzzy, almost "romantic" in that the two were running off together in a blaze of glory, literally, or perhaps into a burning sunset. The next scene, and possibly the single most worst one in the whole movie happens only seconds later where Lex & the Yautja exchange this soft "I love you" stare and there is a short, but yet still entirely too long, moment of silence while the two stare at each other in peace, love, and harmony. It is ridiculous, and I do believe Anderson put those shots in the movie because by the time he shot them, he probably figured the whole movie was corny enough why not tap into the fan girls and boys and give the rest of the audience a laugh. When I saw AVP for the first time at a midnight showing on pre-opening that is exactly what the audience did- they laughed.
I have got to say I am a fan girl when it comes to human/preds in a situation like that, and nothing would make me more happy then to see a genuine relationship, but Anderson took a bad movie and dropped it off the edge that cliff into the icy water right along with the Queen when he put in those two scenes. They were the worst ones in the film and made the rest of the movie lose any and all credit for a noble effort.
The problem is is that plotting Aliens and Predators together into a movie could have been an epic thing, and it could have been a great movie if it was set up correctly and handled correctly right from the drawing boards. Unfortunately Fox chose to put a bunch of poorly credited and uncreative people into a room and hash out a workable script, so we ended up with unbelievable football player hulking build Predators with messed up faces put into a situation that was unrealistic combined with some decent human acting but characters that were so poorly scripted no audience attachment to any of them could have been created, thus separating the audience from the movie, and then add in a couple of poorly done jokingly created scenes into an already bad mess, and you end up with AVP.
I will say at least that AVP R had more potential, but again, it had characters that no one had time to really decide if they liked or disliked, there was no time to get to know any of them... nothing. You just see some people and then you see them again running from Aliens and meeting Predators. Oooh kay.
Both AVP & AVP R were very limited in time, too, and I personally think that have done this type of movie correctly, they should have been at least 2 hours long. AVP was only 91 minutes and AVP R was 94. They could have added in that extra 1/2 hour to use the time for actual character introduction and give the audience a chance to get to know the characters and decide who they are going to sympathize with. Instead, they just shove these people at you and throw them into a situation you have a hard time believing because you are only watching the movie, you are not "in" the movie with the characters, feeling what they are feeling.
I just watched a movie last night starring Kevin Bacon called Death Sentence. See it if you get a chance. The opening scenes where the credits are rolling lasts maybe 2 minutes, but it is all home video of Kevin Bacon's character, Nick, and his family. It introduces you to the people, gives you a chance to see what a loving family they are, sets you up to laugh and enjoy what you are seeing and come to like that family all inside of 2 minutes you are immediately seeing that these are great people and a very loving family, so when the son gets killed and Nick seeks revenge, you sympathize, you feel his anger, and you want to see him win. They took the time in 2 minutes of credit rolling to get the audience drawn into what was going on, not just to watch it, and immediately the movie becomes something a bit more powerful. All in all, the movie was good. It wasn't great. It wasn't epic, some of the things weren't even plausible, but it was good enough to make you enjoy it because you are drawn into the character and are feeling what he's feeling.
If Death Sentence could do that in 2 minutes, why could AVP or AVP R not spend a moment of time doing that? Instead you just see these characters digging up artificats and running out of money, climbing mountains, or delivering pizza, and then comes the Predators and Aliens. There was just no set up, there was really no emotions in the acting, there was really no time to get to know anyone.
Sorry this turned into a huge rant, but I really feel that if AVP & AVP R were handled correctly they could have been really good, not Oscar winning, but still great movies. For this reason, I am terrified to see AVP 3 or even a Predator 3 because the stage is set already to have another badly done movie because now no one takes it seriously.