Cephyran Review of Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem

Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem (2007)

Respects the material better, but still a flimsy flick...

[7/10 · 27 December 2007]

Being a fan of the original mutual franchises, I had been anticipating this film as a worthy successor to the first, believing from the r-rated trailer online that it would do the canon the deserved honesty. And while it doesn't make as many blatant mistakes as the first, this film has its share of problems. The human characters are almost entirely superficial. The male lead seems to juggle back and forth between a pair of brothers, basically inconsistent enough between scenes of one lonely predator faring a thousand times better against the aliens than those inexperienced student predators from the first film. The entirety of the human cast serves as an anchor for some emotional attachment, failing because none are fleshed out thoroughly enough for you to really care about before they're killed in some gratuitous fashion. Where canon honesty is concerned, there were certainly less, if any, of the seemingly deliberate mistakes presented in the first. Amongst a handful of plot holes, I found myself responding better to this film than the first thanks to the score. The music borrows themes from both Horner's Alien scores and Silvestri's Predator scores, utilizing them to satisfactory effect. I did find the alien themes few and far between, while the telltale jungle drums of the Predator seemed a tad over-used. The special effects were fine, basically the same as the first film, with some minor differences. The volume of CG aliens, when not seen through the perspective of the predator, is drastically reduced, helping preserve the sense of realism. And now to the gore. My impression is that the filmmakers decided that since the first film had been wimped down to a PG-13, they would respect the fans who grew up with the originals, and inject some blood splatter. The big problem is that it plays too much like Starship Troopers - gore for the sake of gore. In the original Alien films, people are grabbed and vanish, with no dramatic splash of blood. Here, there's always focus on the blood, clearly an effort to redeem the franchise after the first AVP. There is certainly no lack of homages either. It's pretty clear that the army tank-top clad Reiko Aylesworth drenched in rain is intended to resemble a sweaty, grimy Ripley; one of the male supporting cast is named Dallas, and towards the end one of the two male lead switchers says "get to the chopper!" All I can say to this end is that they were far more subtle than the slap-you-with-it homages of the first - Bishops pen trick and so on. Overall, I'd rate this one a little better than the first, which was no hard task. It's still basically a popcorn movie, a typical shut-off-your-brain flick that will keep the fans of this crossover sated until a really effective one comes along.