I'm honestly thinking of doing another draft now. It'd be fun to develop the story and get some practice in.
This script keeps popping up in discussions in other threads -- particularly between MadassAlex and Fuzion Predator -- and something that keeps coming up is the Predators' apparent downgrading.
This really was never the intention of the story. What was intended was this;
One thing I wanted to do was visualise the dynamic between the three species. Predators are superhumans, and at the beginning of the story attack exclusively from high vantages points; first trees, then rooftops. Humans are in the middle of the intergalactic sandwich, and stay on the ground pretty much the whole time. Aliens are the most basic and primal, the Freudian Id to the human Ego and the Predator Superego, and start by attacking from below.
But then the Aliens go and screw everything up. The Aliens are subversive and insidious, and when they realise their usual method of attack -- the access tunnels -- is blocked off, they're forced to spill up and out into everyone else's territory. The Id, suppressed first by the Ego (tunnels sealing) then the Superego (First hunt), reaches a point where its only option is to violently tear the other two structures down by assuming their positions. At this point the Aliens melt through the roof, and everything goes to hell. There is no order any more, and everything is replaced by the primal drive of the Aliens.
And so it goes. The humans offer no real resistance. The Predators are, at points literally, displaced by the Aliens and dragged down to their level, outside their comfort zone. Weapons break, technology fails, the superman is stripped bare -- exactly like how Arnie was stripped of all his technology and equipment by the original Predator. Except where Arnie could outwit an arrogant foe by using increasingly primitive methods to subvert the Predator's technology, here the Predator has nothing he can subvert. The Alien is simple, single-minded, unrelenting, devoid of arrogance and ego, of debatable intelligence but unquestionable sheer animalistic power.
For all the Predator's own undeniable strength and toughness, he's in the Alien's domain now. Before, during the hunt, he was in control, able to carefully select exactly the prey he wanted. He was pretty much able to play God -- the Aliens lived or died by his whim. He only killed one because he wanted a sure death; like the Warrior Predator he could have just shot as many Aliens as possible, but that wasn't his style.
TL;DR
The Predators were, sure, downgraded in the sense that they were stripped almost naked, but the intention was never that they would seem or actually weaker. I was always fascinated by the idea that if you threw these two creatures you could get such an interesting relationship going on, something more than Monster A tackles Monster B, and that's what I tried to do. The Aliens, either though intention or by virtue of their nature, exploited every potential weakness they could. The Aliens live past the first hunt because the Predators see this as a sport; the Aliens sneak and hide and ambush; they break weapons and destroy advantages, dragging everything down to their level.
The Predators don't die because they were made weaker, but because of the limitations written into the characters from the very beginning. Pretty much everything the Predators do is informed by something the Predators in the original movies did, in the same way everything the Aliens do is informed by actions in the Alien movies. I had no interest in rewriting the characters; I thought they were well diverse enough as it was to create a unique relationship without either getting f**ked over by plot convenience.
