Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

• Directed by the Brothers Strause (Directorial Debut)
• November 4, 2007 (Los Angeles) / December 25, 2007 (US)

When an infested Predator ship crashes on Earth, the war between the Aliens and Predators comes to lovely rural Colorado.

Immediately following the events of AVP, the Predator ship crashes when no one on board it seems to notice that there was a chest burster inside of the one Predator they brought on board from the whaling station and let it roam about until it grew into a big threat. Seriously! Does this advanced species have no internal sensors for their ships? Did nobody bother to take a look at the body that they brought on? Did they just figure on letting it sit there?

And that’s one of several things wrong with this film. The other is that the film appears as if it was shot with the lens cap on. That’s an exaggeration that has been made by others before but the lighting is so poor it is hard to see what is going on. Dark in a movie like this is good but it cannot be so dark you don’t fully understand the action and that’s what we got going here. Alien and Aliens kept it dark but there was enough light on the actors and when appropriate the Alien that you knew what was happening.

Another issue is that the story is essentially Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem vs. Generic Teen Drama On The CW. All the characters are way too young and have way too much emotional baggage which never really gets explored for people of their age. Add to that the characters are rather disposable.

And speaking of generic teen drama on the CW, the daytime shots are very well illuminated and directed much like you would generic teen drama. Seriously. I have had to sit through a few of those types of shows from time to time and that’s what I felt like I was watching in those daytime shots.

Our central character of Dallas (Steven Pasquale) did something that got him sent away for three years. What exectly? I have no idea. They never flesh it out, but it could not have been anything too serious because the sheriff is still friends with him and his brother, while pissed that he went away, still loves him. He is dark and brooding and for someone that did something looks about as dangerous as vanilla ice cream.

Without a cheat sheet (thank you Internet) you would have trouble naming a single character in this movie. Everybody is disturbingly bland. There’s no difference and no standout characteristics among any of them. The plot elements introduced about the characters go absolutely nowhere. There’s a lot of extraneous stuff tossed into this movie but none of it is used to advance the story.

The coolest part of Requiem is the Alien/Predator hybrid. Apparently it’s not only an alien but some kind of queen as well and is impregnating just about everyone it comes across. This would imply there was a good reason that the Predators feared it or at least used it for their hunt. Unfortunately this cool hybrid hard to see in the dark. Give me one good shot of it!

The story is so so but this is a movie designed to save costs and not to tell a good story. The dialogue is bad. I mean really bad. And again the dialogue is uttered by the people who would be from a generic CW teen drama and I don’t think anybody calls that writing sharp.

I will not call Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem terrible but I won’t call it great either. It’s mildly watchable. General film fans should skip this and it is not really necessary for fans of either series to watch.