Alien vs. Predator: Requiem

2004's Alien vs. Predator disappointed a lot of fans of the two sci-fi horror franchises because it had been watered down from the expected R-rating to a bloodless PG-13. I personally was disappointed because it wasn't a very good movie, but my cries were drowned out by the legion of fans who apparently thought the movie would have been better with a couple more gore shots. Alien vs. Predator: Requiem is the studio's attempt to apologize to those let-down people. It's R-rated, and it has plenty of carnage, although it is often hard to see thanks to the murky and dark look of the film. Just like the first one, it's not a very good movie. Hopefully now that the lust for blood has been appeased, people who see this movie will tell the studio to make the next one good, and the studio will listen.

Set shortly after the events of the first film, a Predator spaceship becomes overrun with the deadly acid-spewing Aliens, and crashes on Earth in a forest near a cliched small town filled with cliched residents. On the Predators' home planet, a lone warrior witnesses what has happened, and decides to go to Earth himself to hunt down the alien menace. But before we get to what we paid to see, we have to sit through a much too-long sequence where the movie introduces way too many characters and plots that we could hardly care about. There's troubled rebel Dallas (Steven Pasquale) who has just come home around the time the invasion is about to begin. There's Dallas' younger brother, Ricky (Johnny Lewis), a pizza delivery boy who is forced to hide his feelings for a cute local girl (Kristen Hager) because she's dating the town bully. There's a police officer named Morales (John Ortiz), who finds it hard to keep the peace in town when a series of bizarre and gruesome murders start popping up all over town. And finally there's a military woman (Reiko Aylesworth) who has just returned home from a tour of duty, and finds that her young daughter (Ariel Gade) doesn't know how to react to her, since her mother's been gone for so long.

Obviously, no one cares about these half-baked human subplots, and they're only here to pad out the running time. If you want more evidence that the human characters don't matter, all the publicity photos on line feature the monsters, but none of the humans. It's quite clear that screenwriter Shane Salerno (2000's Shaft) doesn't care about them, as he paints these characters in such broad strokes, they literally come across as walking-talking stereotypes instead of flesh and blood people. They might as well all be wearing signs around their necks that read "Insert generic character type here", because they're not developed in the slightest beyond the information given in the synopsis above. Of course, this is to be expected, as the monsters are the real stars here. As the Aliens begin to breed and multiply rapidly, they eventually make their way from the forest to the town itself, immediately throwing it into chaos. Here, the human characters become even more generic, as they pretty much exist to run around and scream, or get killed by the monsters in some nasty way. That's when the Predator shows up, and starts taking out the Aliens, as well as any human unfortunate enough to get in his path. The Aliens, meanwhile, take over a nearby hospital, and use the building for their evil plan to turn it into a massive breeding ground for their species.

This action probably would be pretty cool if done the right way. After all, the Aliens and Predators are some of the coolest movie monsters to come along in the past 20 years, and an all-out battle royale between the two creatures has long been a fanboy dream. The film's directors, Colin and Greg Strause (a pair of special effects artists who cut their teeth directing music videos), claim to be big fans of the individual franchises, and wanted to do them both justice with this film. If they wanted to do justice, they should have given us the opportunity to actually see what is going on during some of the film's more action-heavy moments. The action is dark, but not in an artistic or stylish way. It's murky, it's muddied, and it's edited so rapidly I sometimes didn't tell who was being killed, or who was killing who. The much-hyped increased gore and violence also disappoints, as the movie usually cuts away right before the kill shot, or its filmed at such a tight angle we sometimes can't tell what we're supposed to be looking at. You'd think a movie trying to tell such a simple story of some generic humans caught in the middle of a deadly galactic war would have the decency to at least give us a good look at the action. But the dimly-lit scenes and the sloppy editing make it hard to get excited about anything in particular.
There's nothing exactly memorable about Alien vs. Predator: Requiem, and at the same time, it's not so terrible as to invoke feelings of anger. It's just there, killing time and sucking up the money of the studio and anyone who pays to see it. It takes up valuable theater space that could have gone to a more deserving movie, and doesn't even feel the need to impress its audience or make them feel anything. If you're doing a movie with these two creatures pitted against each other, and you can't even bring about excitement or tension in your audience, you're not trying hard enough. That's exactly what happened when the Strause Brothers set out with Requiem.

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