Aliens VS Predator: Requiem (2007) review
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Can’t really see what’s going on here…[/caption]
Alien VS Predator: Requiem picks up shortly after the events of the first film, where we were presented with a Predalien combo. This should come as no surprise to anybody who knows how Paul WS Anderson’s films work — that is, he is apparently incapable of writing a solid ending, instead providing cliffhanger after cliffhanger — I expect as much from his supposedly final Resident Evil movie due in 2017. Anyway, I digress. Back to this train wreck of a movie. The amalgamated creature causes havoc and the ship to crash land near a small town in the United States, leaving a trail of death and destruction in its wake.
There’s probably a good film in Requiem somewhere. The problem is, everything is so ridiculously dark — literally — that it’s pretty much impossible to watch without the urge to turn up all of the brightness and contrast settings on your television. Odds are this won’t do you any good in the slightest, it’s a film that has a needlessly muddy quality that completely ruins any possible enjoyment to be had. If you wanted to know how to kill off a franchise, this is precisely the way to go about it.
Dotted in and around the human casualties is one Predator who is almost the equivalent to Harvey Keitel’s The Wolf from Pulp Fiction. This Predator’s job is to tidy up any evidence of the Alien incursion on Earth. He’s mostly effective in this task, dissolving bodies and killing the newly bred aliens en masse, but due to the muddy visual quality and lack of decent characterisation, he’s a poor second place to the Predator we were given in the first film.
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Still can’t see what’s going on. Never mind.[/caption]
Even more ridiculous is the Predalien, a “terrifying” combination of the two species who is working towards his own agenda. It’s a daft idea and something that really didn’t need to be included, either here or indeed anywhere else. Where’s the good old fashioned fun of watching an Alien going head to head with a Predator? That said, the Aliens here are neutered, a far cry from their terrifying representation in the first two Alien movies before things went a little wrong in that particular franchise too.
Amongst the generally quite boring townsfolk is Michelle from 24 (Reiko Aylesworth), a returning military woman who has to try and reconnect with her young daughter after quite some time away in the military. Apart from her we have a couple of brothers and the local sheriff, amongst others, all trying to escape from the combined Alien/Predator threat.
If you were of the opinion that the first AvP film was not very good, then you’ll be blown away by how bad Requiem is. It’s genuinely poor from almost every perspective. You’d be better served by pretending this film doesn’t exist and lament the fact that Hollywood just can’t seem to get these two mega franchises right. Or, indeed, any other combination of two otherwise successful concepts. We can but hope that one day they find the right formula, but for now we will have to sit and wait.
