Allow me to be the first to warn you away from Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem.  It sucks.  Plain old sucks.   I know.  I am disappointed too.  So much potential.  So much to make up for after the first pile of garbage.  How do they take two of the coolest Sci-Fi properties, combine them, and come up with crap? It seems questions like this are asked too often.

The subtitle Requiem.  Why?  No clue.  There is nothing in the movie that helps the subtitle make any sense whatsoever.  Hence, I have determined that they meant it in the way you mean a blatantly raised middle finger.  Requiem for what?  For two kick ass franchises that have been shot, stuffed, and mounted on the wall of Hollywood.  Requiem for the dream you had of aliens and predators fighting each other amidst space marines and colonists.  Well, maybe that was my dream... but you gotta admit, it sounds cool. 

Instead we get a movie based around a slew of transparent, poorly fleshed out, stupid, and irrational human characters.  Half of which are escapees from a teen movie and the other half are extras from Walking Tall.  They all have complex relationships...like

troubled brothers who really love each other and a mom just home from war who doesn’t really know her young daughter anymore.  Yeah, it’s fucking touching and fucking slow enough to make you stop the DVD to check that you put right movie in.

Painful, painful back stories exist here and they serve no purpose except to clue you in on who will live and who will die.  The thing is – you’ll find yourself hoping they are all getting a face full of alien breath or a gut full or predator spear because they all suck to the point of being annoying.  Our brilliant scribe, Shane Salerno, revels in making these people so cliché that it makes you wonder why he’s adapting episodes of UC: Undercover for television.  Way to go, Shane.  You proved your worth and it’s about as much as the guy who wrote Gigli.  Not only are these characters worthless, there are multiple scenes that are way way

too long and full of bad dialogue.  So in case you didn’t catch it, the plot sucks. Ah, but what about the action, you ask?  There must be some good ass kicking to make up for all that shitty writing right?  Well, yes and no.  To the films credit there are some nice gory moments.  Heads get blown off, people get skewered, and they do a good job of earning the R rating, which is probably the biggest saving grace for the whole movie.  There are also some cool fight sequences between the two creatures.  At least I think they were cool.  It was kind of hard to tell because everything that was interesting happened at night in very poorly lit locations.

Now, I realize filming shadowy creatures fighting in the dark doesn’t sound like the best way to show the two title characters battling.  I bet you do too.  It just so happens that the second guilty party behind the scenes to blame for this crap-fest didn’t.  That

is the director, which in this case is a team.  The Brothers Strause, as they are billed, apparently like their action close and frantic.  So close and frantic in fact that you can’t tell what the hell is going on.  Maybe that’s why they chose to not light most of the film?  You’d expect finer work from a couple of guys whose previous directing credits include a few Nickleback music videos.  Yeah.  Or maybe you don’t.

So thanks to the trifecta of two crappy directors and one crappy writer we have one big crappy movie.  What pisses me off the most is this script seems like a no brainer.  Aliens and Predators in the same place, drop some people with guns in, chaos ensues.  Why not make it on a planet where predators hunt aliens and the humans are wanna-be terra farmers?  I have got fifty more ideas I just thought of right now for the plot that are way better than having it take place in

rural America.  Oh, and so did good old Shane Salami.  At the end of the movie we get a weird scene that implies humans are in space and there is way more going on than the film ever mentioned.  This turns into the ultimate fuck you from Aliens vs. Predator - Requiem.   As if to say “yeah, we had something way cooler in mind, but we gave you this and you’ll still come back for the next one.  Bend over fanboy!”

Yes indeed, requiem for Sci-Fi being taken seriously.  Requiem for any hopes for cool you held in this joint franchise.  And requiem for my pride because I will be back for the next one.  At least the cause is noble.  If I manage to save just one of you the waste of seeing this movie then it’s all worth it.  Until next time…

-Max out.