Aliens VS Predator: Requiem (2007)

Aliens VS Predator: Requiem

Release date: December 25, 2007 (Yes, really. I’ve always wondered, does anyone actually go to the cinema on Christmas Day or Boxing Day? I assume they do, otherwise films wouldn’t be released on those days, but the idea seems so strange to me.)

It was announced earlier this week that four new characters would be joining the cast of Mortal Kombat X next year, and one of them would be a Xenomorph. It’s not just any old Xenomorph though, it’s a Xenomorph spawned from Baraka, and because Xenomorphs take elements from their hosts, this means a Xenomorph with blades in its arms.

How do ya like them apples?

To celebrate, I figured I’d cover an Alien film selected at random, and out of the hat came Aliens VS Predator: Requiem. Bugger.

During the first film, one of the Predators was impregnated by a Facehugger, and died fighting the Alien Queen alongside the human protagonist Ripley 2.0. A Predator ship then came to take the dead Predator’s body away, and the film ended with the dead Predator giving birth to a Chestburster that had a Predator’s mouth. The second film begins right here (It doesn’t explain what happened to Ripley 2.0, who was stranded in the frozen Antarctic wastes with no way of getting home as she was the sole survivor of the human expedition, but she must have managed offscreen somehow, as we know she moved to Virginia and married Cleveland, then they got cancelled and went back to Family Guy, but I digress.) The Predator ship is on its way back to the Predator home planet when the Predalien, having grown to full size in record time, kills the entire crew. The ruckus damages the ship and, with nobody capable of piloting it alive, the ship crash lands back on Earth, on the outskirts of the town of Gunnison, Colorado. A number of Facehuggers being kept in stasis on the ship also escape and infect a father and son hunting in the forest.

We’re now introduced to the human cast, which I must admit I remember very little about already, not even their names. Male Lead has a crush on Popular Girl, and delivers pizza to her party, where he gets bullied by Jock and his Crabbe and Goyle-esque henchmen for being a nerd, until Popular Girl tells them to cut it out and dumps Jock after he throws Male Lead’s Big Brother’s car keys into the sewers. The only thing missing is the Dawson’s Creek theme song…

 … Which I am kind enough to provide. Aren’t I thoughtful?

Elsewhere in town, Grieving Widow is putting up missing person posters for her husband and son, who we know are already dead, and Good Cop leads the search effort. Ripley 3.0 comes home from Iraq and gives her daughter Newt 2.0 a pair of binoculars as a gift. There are others too, but these are the ones who form the main group later, so I’ll just mention them.

The Predator home world finds out about the crashed ship and sends another Predator to destroy the Predalien, spawned Aliens and all evidence of the events. The Predator activates the self-destruct mechanism on the crashed ship and uses his cool phial of blue acid to destroy bodies, as well as finding time on the side to get the police manhunt called off by killing a policeman when he finds the Predator and pulls a gun on him.

Male Lead and his big brother go into the sewers to retrieve the car keys and are able to leave just in time before everything kicks off. The Predalien has found a community of homeless people living in the sewers and impregnated them all, and the Predator’s investigation leads it there, leading to a fight. The Predator uses a bomb during the fight, blowing a big hole which allows the Aliens to enter the town, after Male Lead and Big Brother had gone to the effort of closing the manhole behind them too, unlike most other horror characters escaping monsters. Not to be outdone, the Predator Shoryukens through the sewer roof to reach the road above him.

Male Lead and Popular Girl break into the school at night to go swimming, but doing awful flirty dialogue beforehand (“Why do you turn to look at me all the time in class?” “Erm… The clock is behind you.” Popular Girl strips. “Now are you looking at me, or the clock?”) gives Jock, Crabble and Goyle time to break in and bully Male Lead some more, as if they had sensed he was about to score with a girl, meaning he would not be a nerd anymore and they would have to find someone else to bully. Aliens arrive and ask if they can join in, and are turned down. A little known fact about the Xenomorphs is that they don’t take rejection well, and these ones react by eating Crabbe and Goyle while the others escape. The group take shelter in a gun shop, picking up Big Brother, Good Cop and Grieving Widow along the way, and are soon joined by the gun shop’s pothead owners, and Ripley 3.0 and Newt 2.0, who had escaped their own encounter with the Aliens when Newt 2.0 sees them outside with her binoculars (See, you knew those would be important, didn’t you?) and her dad tells her she was having a nightmare and there’s no such thing as monsters, just before an Alien’s Tempting Fate sensor goes off, prompting it to jump through the window and kill him as soon as he’s finished talking.

#Rekt, 360 noscope, wombo combo, round winning kill and so on.

More Aliens come to the shop, with the Predator in hot pursuit. The group lose the potheads, when they pull guns on the Predator, which works just as well as it did for the last person who tried it, and Jock, who gets pounced on by an Alien, but before he gets eaten, the Predator shoots the Alien and its acid blood goes all over Jock. Good Cop tells everyone that there is a military evacuation in the town square and they should go there, but Big Brother is suspicious and insists on going to the hospital, which has a helicopter because of reasons. Good Cop and Grieving Widow leave to go to the evacuation site (“The government wouldn’t lie to us, would they?” She says.)

In all seriousness, I know she’s a fictional character and all, but I envy her naivete and innocence, and I’d probably be happier if I was like her and not worrying about the state of the world. This is getting heavy now, so back to the funny.

The group go to the hospital, which proves to be a bad idea, as the Predalien has converted it into a hive with Aliens everywhere. Male Lead’s boss at the pizza delivery place, who joined the group in a trade for Good Cop and Grieving Widow, gets eaten almost immediately. Big Brother is impaled by the Predalien’s tail, which he is lucky enough to survive thanks to plot armour. Popular Girl freaks out and runs away… right into the path of the Predator’s buzz saw. The Predator drops its laser cannon, which the group take for themselves and use to fight off the Aliens as they reach the roof, where they’re lucky enough to find that there is a helicopter, and it hasn’t been taken by the hospital staff. After getting caught in the middle between the Predator and Predalien, the four survivors finally board the helicopter and escape, and find they made the right decision as the town is nuked (Good Cop’s dying thoughts included “I never was any good at heads or tails.” And “Oh shit, I was only three days away from leaving the force!”), but the resulting shockwave causes a crash landing.

The helicopter is intercepted by a tactical squad, who take the Predator’s cannon away, but leave the group otherwise unharmed, prompting Newt 2.0 and Ripley 3.0 to say “It’s over, it’s finally over” without triggering one final scare (the Tempting Fate sensor clearly needed recharging after Mr There’s No Such Thing As Monsters.) The squad give the cannon to their boss, Ms Yutani of Weyland-Yutani infamy, thus setting up Alien VS Predator 3, which probably isn’t going to happen, as if it was, we would have gotten it by now instead of Predator 3 and Prometheus, which supposedly apparently maybe possibly leads up to Alien.

First off, the film is really dark, in the sense that it’s very poorly lit. Most of the film takes place at night or in unlit places, meaning that it’s very difficult to make out what’s going on. It doesn’t help that the camera keeps moving about suddenly, enabling the viewer to only snatch quick glimpses of the monsters. The film takes a lot of delight from its brutal kills, so making them so hard to see is a serious oversight. It’s also worth noting that there are a lot of gruesome scenes where children are killed and pregnant women get Alien babies from the Predalien faceraping them, which feels tasteless and there purely for shock value. This film shows why children so rarely die in horror films: nobody really wants to see it.

Secondly, it’s hard to care about any of what happens, as the humans are uninteresting, clichéd stock characters. Because of this, it doesn’t feel as if there are any stakes for the characters to overcome, even though the need to escape the monsters has been in previous Alien films and worked there. Perhaps it’s because the tone is just too bleak and hopeless with the Aliens being able to overrun the whole town easily, thanks to the lifecycle being sped up and the Predalien being able to impregnate women with multiple aliens at once. The stock cast makes the film feel like a teen slasher movie, and not in a good way. The main draw of a slasher is arguably the creative kills, and unfortunately these ones are not. The Aliens seem like they should be a threat from all the killing they do, but they don’t feel like it as the Predator mows them down easily, and so do the human characters once they get a group. They’re apparently more competent than the military, who all get killed within minutes of their arrival, while an untrained civilian with a pistol can kill the Aliens. The plot armour feels blatant.

There are some interesting ideas here though. The Predator being just as much of a threat as the Aliens instead of teaming up with the humans after they’ve proved themselves fits because of the Predator’s role here as a destroyer of evidence, even if it does contribute to the bleakness. The film is also notable for being the first time the Predator homeworld has been in film, and for finally bringing the Aliens to Earth, a prospect which was teased all the way back in 1990 in a trailer for Alien 3. It’s a shame that these firsts couldn’t have been in a better film.

Rating: Nuke the Site From Orbit / 10. It's the only way to be sure.

Bonus: Apparently, there originally was going to be one final scare after Ripley 3.0 and Newt 2.0 said “It’s over, it’s finally over.” After the survivors hand over the Predator’s cannon, the soldier’s don’t lower their weapons. Just as it becomes clear why they took the cannon, the screen would cut to black as the sound of gunfire played. This scene would have fitted in better with the rest of the film tonally and thematically, as it was stated earlier the government intended to cover up the Aliens, so it makes sense that the survivors would be silenced. Wouldn’t want any eyewitness reports complicating the message! Maybe the filmmakers got squeamish at the prospect of Newt 2.0 being shot to ribbons, which is an odd place to draw the line when there’s already been a pregnant woman feeling her unborn babies eaten inside her after being orally raped, but whatevs.