The Plot
Picking up where 2004's Alien vs. Predator left off, Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem opens with a Predator ship leaving Antarctica with the body of the first film's Predator "hero" on board. Once in space, though, an Alien-Predator hybrid bursts through the hero's chest and wreaks havoc on the ship, causing it to crash in rural Colorado. The last surviving Predator manages to send a distress signal to his stony home planet before he's killed by the "Predalien." A lone Predator picks up the signal and sets off to eradicate the Alien threat and save Earth (Earth apparently not being worth an entire rescue party).
By the time the new hero arrives, however, the Predalien and his Alien cohorts have procreated throughout the small town of Gunnison. The Predator thus sets about the arduous task of killing the invaders and using a corrosive liquid to destroy any evidence that they were ever there. (Although oddly, when he feels compelled to kill a policeman who spots him in the woods, he takes the time to skin the cop and hang him from a tree -- a less-than-covert spectacle.)
There are some humans running around, too. It's pointless to try to differentiate them, but suffice it to say they don't fare too well. The Predator comes to realize the futility of trying to remain undercover, so, like the Doobie Brothers, he takes it to the streets. The town soon falls into chaos, with the Aliens attacking the humans and the Predator attacking the Aliens, and a select few people trying to find their way out of harm's way with all of their ribcages intact.
The End Product
No one expects Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem to be the next Schindler's List, but this film's so shallow, how it wasn't based on a video game I'll never know. Of course, shallowness isn't inherently bad. There's a lot of great shallow entertainment -- take the entire Fox network, for example -- but a great shallow action movie needs great shallow action and characters you can root for. AVP:R has neither. Despite some potentially nice set pieces, there's a sterility to the action; it lacks the rawness of war that one would expect from any film with "Versus" in its title.
The characters, meanwhile, are interchangeable and uninteresting. Granted, there's little room for development when your titular characters are both non-speaking extraterrestrials, but these aliens are still more engaging than the wafer-thin humans. The actors don't help any, either. The cast is made up of little-knowns with all the screen presence of plywood.
The movie's title itself reflects its hollow content. Why bother changing it from Alien vs. Predator to the plural Aliens vs. Predator? There were multiple Aliens in the first film, too. And how the heck does a "requiem" fit in? Were there some cut scenes of the extraterrestrials attending Catholic mass? In truth, it's just a pompous, hollow word that somebody thought sounded cool -- sort of like this movie as a whole.
Directors Colin and Greg Strause are special effects gurus who make their feature film debut here, and while the effects are nicely done (the Predalien design works much better than the human-alien hybrid from Alien: Resurrection), the movie as a whole fails to resonate. It's one of those films that contains a lot of action but still manages to be boring. This movie should've been 80 minutes of the scene from Aliens where the Marines realize that the critters are sneaking up on them through the air ducts in the ceiling. Instead, we get a bunch of scenes that could've been left on the cutting room floor of Alien vs. Predator.
The Skinny
- Acting: D (Cardboard cutouts would've had the same impact and would've been cheaper.)
- Direction: C- (Looks pretty enough, but fails to instill a genuine sense of terror or excitement.)
- Script: C- (The overall plot is fine, but it needs to establish more of a sense of the ebbs and flows of battle and less of the clichéd teen hijinks of a WB soap opera.)
- Gore/Effects: B- (At least it's rated R, so there's more freedom for the graphic spirit of both franchises.)
- Overall: C- (Fails to live up to the standards of not only the two storied franchises, but also the first AVP.)
Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem is directed by the Brothers Strause and is rated R for violence, gore and language.
