Movie Review: Aliens vs Predator - Requiem

Aliens vs Predator: Requiem [2007]

(Actual Alien: Covenant review coming soon.)

Now while I actually unironically enjoy Aliens vs Predator, which I reviewed a couple of weeks ago, its sequel, shit, where do I begin? It does everything that Aliens vs Predator does, but amplifies all the worst parts of that movie while not living up to any of the good parts. While AvP (and really, any horror movie) tries to build up its human characters while not really investing too much time to them before they start dropping like flies, AvP-R spends way, way too long building up, like, the soldier who comes home to her daughter, and the father-son pair that goes missing, and the teenage pizza delivery boy and the hot teenage girl and the police chief and I don't really care at all? All of these characters feel flat, even for horror movie standards, and when the chaos starts and the characters are screaming "Carrie's dead!" I don't really know, because who the fuck is Carrie, or Nick, which one of those soulless characters I'm introduced to that I don't care about just died?

I mean, like, I don't really care about the cast of AvP either, but at least a fair amount of them at least have a one-dimensional personality or two. Here, characters are introduced and killed off so fucking quickly that I just can't be bothered to care. And a huge problem, I think, is how indistinct Wolf the Predator and the Predalien look from each other. Like, yeah, the first time we see the Predalien he's cool, he's like this cross-breed between an Alien Queen and a Predator with the iconic Predator mouth and dreadlocks and shit, but when the two monsters actually fight the movie presents them almost always fighting in dark, dimly-lit locales that's almost all black, and cameras that shake around and really like to zoom in on one combatant. And when both combatants are primarily black, shadowed and dreadlocked, I find it really hard to follow the action scenes, and I'm someone who doesn't have any problems watching the live-action Transformers movies.

It's a really weird movie where it's aiming for a survival genre thing but man fuck the humans, they're unlikable. There's something refreshing, too, in seeing the Aliens and the Predator rampage in a town, but at the same time other than the novelty of them fighting in a sewer or on a construction site... I don't really care that much? And honestly, while my expectations for this movie is nonexistent, it's not even like Aliens vs Predator, where at least it's a generic horror/survival movie (with Aliens and Predators swapped in for your zombies or serial killers or what-have-you) but with the tropes played right. Here it's just a huge, shaky mess up to the end. Where I praised the action scenes of Aliens vs Predator and found it a highlight, in Requiem I just can't tell what the fuck's going on most of the time, until the final battle when, oh, they mutual killed each other. Oh, the government nukes the town because of course it does.

And while I know questioning the motives of movie monsters is an exercise in futility, Wolf, the Predator in this movie, feels absolutely far more flat than the other Predators we've had. I guess he just really wants to avenge his dead buddies? But why the obsession with getting rid of evidence (while stringing up people in forests) with blue goop, and why abandon the evidence-ridding thing halfway through the movie? Why just devolve into nothing but wanting to hunt?

The gore in this movie also feels a bit unnecessary. Like, I don't care about gore and am not sickened by it, but the usage here is just so stupidly gratuitous. It's one thing to brutally kill your supporting human characters, it's one thing to introduce the capabilities of your monster. It's another thing to randomly have the Predalien attack a hospital for no reason, have that really gross and long-winded scene with pregnant women, and none of it bears any real meaning to the plot, such as it is. Our human heroes or the Predator never encounter these newly-bursted aliens, so what's the point of all that?

Yeah, no wonder the franchises went into a huge hiatus after this movie. It's really a messy shit. Even what was promised to us -- fucking aliens fighting a Predator, killing humans while doing it -- isn't even executed properly. Blah.

Anyway, not sure whether I'll talk about the other Alien and Predator movies or if this'll be a one-off (well, two-off) thing after I first watch these two movies for the first time. We'll see how popular these reviews are, I guess.