Aliens Vs. Predator: Requiem -- 2007 -- R

A follow up to the rather poorly constructed Aliens vs Predator comes off a bit nicer than the first. It’s has more action, more no-holds-barred blood and guts, and pretty much everything else that its PG-13 predecessor lacked... Well, everything except a decent storyline. This film was made for the action audience to show a predator face off against a bunch of aliens and kick butt -- nothing more. And it delivers that magnificently -- and nothing more.

The plot can be summed up in a few short words -- Resident Evil with aliens. Resident Evil 2, actually, involves zombies overrunning a town and one zombie-stomping super-human savior running about wiping them all out. Aliens vs Predator: Requiem involves aliens overruning a town and one alien-stomping super-human predator running about wiping them all out. It’s a tour de force of alien smashing by the predator who is on no one’s side but his own, and so he wipes some humans out in the process of wiping the aliens out. No skin off his nose either way (though there was some skin off one poor soul in the process).

How does it fit with the franchises? Well, it didn’t really follow either one. The predators have a thin vein of knowledge to begin with, so there wasn’t much to follow there. The aliens have a few rules to follow with their species, but again, not much plot to keep track of since the Alien movies all occur in the future.

Ah, but there’s the problem. The Aliens have rules to follow. One such rule involves how they propogate. Let’s think back, shall we? Where do little aliens come from? A queen lays an egg that hatches into a bug-looking thing. Buggie thing finds a host and latches on for a few hours while it lays an egg in the hosts chest. The host thinks he’s cool until baby alien (aka chest-burster) busts out of the chest cavity leaving host for dead and running off making a mess of the kitchen. Those are the rules.

AVPR has no queen. It does have buggie things, but they only lay the initial eggs. Apparently, one of these monsters has a built in ovipositor that can drop multiple eggs in a host all at once allowing multiple chestbursters to burst forth at once. How interesting and new. I guess the aliens de-evolved in the next 200 years to their prior restrictions.

I have always been against spoilers, but here’s where I have to make an exception. The one question I’ve been asked when people find out I’ve seen this film is "who wins?" They love togo for some level ambiguousness in these sorts of things, but still create a clear winner. The first movie had a winner. Even Freddy vs Jason had a winner. In AVPR, however, they bowed out of the whole thing. It was probably the cheapest ending they could have possibly done. They didn’t even try. It effectively invalidated the majority of the movie, and the progress made by the characters. Maybe someone thought it was a good idea, but it truly and completely sucked, if you’ll pardon the expression.

Even the characters weren’t too bad; there was an effort made to make them somewhat more than just cardboard (though a fair amount of cutouts existed). Some lack of believability in some of the situations was there, such as attacking a pizza guy is a more serious offense than they made it out to be. Even if he had it coming, the pizza company can do you some legal damage for attacking their delivery guy. There was some teenage over-the-topness as well, but for the most part, the characters were fairly decently drawn. We’re not talking Godfather quality, here, but they are passable for their genre.

So it’s a movie with some great actions, some neat special effects, some solid one on one battles, lots of carnage, and everything else that the fans were dying for from the first film. But you always remember how a movie ended, and this one failed miserably on that account. Anything would have been better than what they came up with, and my prayer is that the DVD will include a different ending entirely that is far more satisfying than the schlock they stuck up in the theatres.