"Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem" - movie review

SPOILER WARNING - This review contains spoilers. If you don't want to read spoilers, stop reading now.


I loved "Alien vs. Predator", so when I saw a one-sheet for the sequel, I was excited to see what they were going to do this time.

Generally, I liked the movie, and it was chock full of action, as you might expect. I didn't like it as much as AVP, though. AVP actually included a great story of why the two iconic aliens were clashing, but AVP-R had the thinnest string of story (the events of the second movie take place immediately after the events of the first movie), but otherwise, it was mostly just death and mayhem and escaping and screaming and blood and alien fluids. It reminded me a bit of "Jurassic Park 3" (which I enjoyed) in that respect.

There was another aspect of the movie that reminded me of "Jaws" - small town where nothing really happens, and this completely extraordinary thing occurs, and the sheriff takes a while to figure out that it's much more than he expected, and he's really ill-equipped to handle the situation. However, unlike Brody, who ends up rising to the occasion, the small-town sheriff in this case never realizes the extreme situation he has ended up in and perishes, big time, along with everyone else in town.

There was one story point that confused me. OK, so the predator dude sees what happened to the ship and that aliens were loose on it before it crash-landed on Earth. Given his chair and set-up, he seemed like someone in a place of power, but he just takes his armour and leaves to handle the situation. A whole bunch of aliens landing where they can seriously reproduce practically unstopped and only one predator goes to handle the situation? Ummm, you might want to bring along a few buddies. And then that blue liquid he was pouring on the corpses to get rid of the evidence. Hope you brought gallons of that.

One other story point that I found a problem with - when the lead guy is about to get eaten by an alien and he's waiting for the predator's gun to reload, and then it re-sets and he shoots the alien, who is blasted into bits - why doesn't the alien's body liquid fry the guy? An earlier scene showed one of the high school boys being completely burned from the acid dripping from the blasted alien, so we're reminded that the alien's bodily fluid is toxic.

I was excited when I saw the trailer and Reiko Aylesworth was in it. I loved her in "24", and she looked good in this. She didn't really end up having that much to do. I also recognized the little girl who played her daughter. She was the daughter of the sheriff and doctor on the now-defunct television show "Invasion". She didn't seem quite as traumatized as I would have expected considering she saw her father eaten by an alien right in front of her. I did sort of laugh at that scene - "See, there are no monsters outside." Ummm, yeah, dad, you're dinner now.

I thought the fight scenes between the aliens and the predator were good, but they seemed darker than I remember them being in the first movie. There were times I had a hard time distinguishing which ones were the aliens and which were the predator. They did continue the story point from the first movie where the predator basically ends up being the good guy. I guess since their race has been set up as hunters, there's at least a code there, whereas the aliens are pretty much just killing machines - no redeeming them.

I did really hate the ending of the film though. It makes zero sense, and it's entirely too obviously a set-up for a third film, but at least the set-up at the end of the first film made sense. This one was just bizarre. Oh, and there were some bits of dialogue that were just awful. You're not expecting Oscar-winning calibre writing in these kinds of films, but even relatively speaking, the dialogue was atrocious.

It was a fun popcorn movie, and if you've seen the first film, this is a fun addition, but while I'd definitely see the first movie again, I doubt I'd see this one again.