Directed by The Brothers Strause
Starring Steven Pasquale, Reiko Aylesworth, John Ortiz, Johnny Lewis, Ariel Gade and Kristen Hager
If there is ever a film that would make one appreciate the glory that is Paul W.S. Anderson, you're looking at it. Aliens vs. Predator: Requiem, henceforth known in this review as AVPR, has already reached legendary status as one of the worst movies of the 21st century in the great Sight and Sound poll that exists only in my own mind. I also have no personal history to cull from when it comes to this flick, because I watched it only in preparation for this review. The experience gave me some severe flashbacks to the Leprechaun reviews that made my blog hit the pause button for almost a full calendar year.
The brain trust at 20th Century Fox turned away from Paul "Holy Shit" Anderson this time around, turning to a couple of brothers who had been running a visual effects company for something like a decade when they were given this assignment. Colin and Greg Strause have said in interviews that the instructions were simple - more violence and more creature effects, since those were the primary fan criticisms of the first movie. They succeeded on that account, but boy, did they ever do it in a smash-you-over-the-head way. The back-of-the-DVD "More guts! More gore!" promise is the proof of that. The movie was swept into theaters on Christmas day of 2007, which ranks it right up there with Gangs of New York in terms of all-time least appropriate yuletide films. It was a complete failure with critics, but as crappy as it was, it still pulled in the dough. $130 million on a $40 million production budget is hard to argue with. Damn that worldwide theatrical audience. With that, let's get on the truly epic story that you're about to see unfold.
I will give the flick this; it spends a decent amount of time building up its creature story. The main Predator from the last film is being Jetsoned back into space on a ship, only for a chestburster to emerge from its...chest. Truly Shakespearian writing right there. This is an area where one of the conventions of the Alien series actually comes out pretty cool, as we get a pretty nifty looking creature that the ever-accurate Wikipedia refers to as the "Predalien." And it's pretty badass. The xenomorphs take over the ship, which promptly crash lands in the small town of Gunnison, Colorado. That is our setup, ladies and gentlemen. The intro sequences also sound awesome on paper, with one big problem that I'll be getting to later on.
It's time for one of the up-and-coming midcarders in the Lick Ness Monster cliche book. Sport fans...it's time to meet the characters of AVPR. Boy, what a bunch this is. Your two main stars are Steven Pasquale and Reiko Aylesworth, and I was very familiar with the latter having been a big fan of 24. Pencil her into my unofficial "why didn't this person get a bigger shot?" rolodex, because she's both talented and hot enough to get the shot that, say, Carey Mulligan did. She plays Kelly O'Brien, just coming back to Gunnison after a long stint in the military to reconnect with her husband and young daughter. Pasquale is ex-con Dallas Howard who has a semi-redemptive story arc to him that unfortunately isn't played out, like, at all. On paper, these two are sympathetic and endearing, and it's a shame that the movie never slows down to develop them beyond that paper-thin establishment. The rest of the characters are your average 21st century horror movie vaguely hatable chucklefucks, complete with the totally original plot of some emo dweeb pining for a hot girl who has a douchebag boyfriend. Now, I don't mind this plot in, say, an actual teen comedy film. But in action or horror films, I DESPISE this story arc. It doesn't make the character any more heroic, it just makes them a whiny little bitch.
What ensues? Surely you don't need me to spell it out, but I will anyway. What you might NOT expect is this extended action sequence that takes place in the sewers underneath the town, with the lone-wolf Predator taking on a bunch of aliens. Yeah. Sewers. Remember how I said I had something to get to earlier? Well, here it goes: the DARKNESS. Almost all of the action sequences in this film are shot in pitch-black, with only things like flickering light bulbs and the flash from weapon fire lighting the scene. I didn't think it was possible to come up with something worse than the Michael Bay shakicam, but this is pushing it. It's a recurring theme that haunts the rest of the movie, as the aliens begin taking over the town and killing off all of the secondary characters. Time for another Lick Ness cliche: that previous sentence was something like 30 minutes of this movie. Over this series of reviews, it really has become apparent to me that the Alien movies and the things connected to them really were slasher flicks who wore hardened exoskeletons instead of masks, and that description certainly applies to this movie as well.
Amazingly, the movie's finale culls from not just one but two classic zombie movies for inspiration/ripoff material. By this point, the small group of remaining characters (if you want to keep score, it's Dallas, Kelly, her daughter, and emo dweeb guy) make their way to the town hospital in order to escape by helicopter. George Romero, your lawsuit is ready. It should surprise nobody reading this that they actually make it away, but during the course of this escape, the military launches a tactical nuke at the town. Maybe this was an homage of sorts to Dan O'Bannon, the creator of the xenomorphs in the first place who later directed the movie that used this trope (Return of the Living Dead)? Or maybe i'm overthinking it.
That should about fulfull my four-paragraph "story description" template. This is some bad movie, but it's bad in a way that's hard to explain if you're not watching it. It had the right idea to set its action someplace where audiences would be able to connect to it instead of, say, the goddamn continent of Antarctica. I think a bigger city would have worked better, but maybe the budget wouldn't allow it. Unfortunately, that world gets populated by a bunch of annoying kids that we beg the warring alien species to make their collective bitches. I actually think the script would have been better had it just focused on the Dallas and O'Brien characters. With more time to warm up to them, I think both Pasquale and Aylesworth would have had the acting chops to get us on their side. But that's just me trying to snipe in with my pesky constructive thoughts.
This is one of those rare movies where the execution is where it fails, and I put the checkmark right next to the Brothers Strause on that one. On the advice of a friend, I actually watched this movie with director commentary shortly after watching it, and it's very telling. These guys are special effects whores through and through, and this is very apparent as they pretty much do nothing but talk up visuals all throughout the track. I highly recommend that anyone reading this review give it a listen, because it's a pretty good lesson in "substance is more important than style." And it does lead to one extremely hilarious moment during one of the fight scenes as they talk up the "amazing creature effects" in this particular scene...that we can't even see, because said scene looks like it was lit with an itty bitty book light.
I was ready to give this flick a mere 1/2 * out of ****, but I'll bump it up to an even * just because I actually liked what little we got of Pasquale and Aylesworth in this movie. All of the other characters, and even the action, are something like that 1991 Clash of the Champions Van Hammer match that you skipped over as a kid.
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